Alexis Akira Toda

Alexis Akira Toda

Mathematical economist

Talks

less than 1 minute read

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Maybe it is not the best use of my time, but I created a “Talks” page, which lists past and future talks and presentations. After spending all afternoon tweaking the code, I came up with something satisfactory. For now, I included only talks in 2023 and 2024, but I might add past ones.

  • Updated 4/10: Now the talks go back to 2020. It’s time-consuming to dig through old emails and Google Calendar to find the exact dates and titles of the talks.

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Tracking spending

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In this post, I mentioned that Fidelity Full View provides account syncing for Fidelity customers. Dividing spending into categories, it also presents a pie chart of spending. The picture below is my own example; I erased the specific amounts and kept only the percentages. In general, to save money, it is best to focus on spending categories with large shares, which in my case are home, children, food, travel, etc.

Tracking cash flow

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In this post, I mentioned that I tracked every single penny of my spending from 2008 to 2022, but I stopped because there was little room left to improve my behavior, and the opportunity cost of keeping track of everything was too high. During this period, I tracked my income and expenditures by manually entering items in an app and using (now discontinued) Mint.com.

Capital One Quicksilver 0% intro APR (3)

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In my post, I mentioned that I have been happy with the Capital One Quicksilver Card because it offered 0% intro APR for 15 months (and the card has no annual fee and gives 1.5% cash back on all purchases).

I referred my wife to open an account, and we both received the referral bonus. But what has been truly great is the targeted deals through Capital One Shopping. We are now remodelling our two bathrooms that are over 20 years old. As my wife has been searching for fixtures, she has started receiving targeted deals from Home Depot, Lowe’s, Bed Bath & Beyond, etc., often offering 15% cash back. Furthermore, the timing of our remodelling coincided with Black Friday/Cyber Week sales (of course, intentionally), so we often get an additional 20% off from the merchants. Overall, I think we saved a few thousand dollars by optimizing credit card use.

I highly recommend the card to anybody. If you open an account by clicking this link, you will receive an extra sign-up bonus.