Blue is Me

Tag: bovada

  • updates on my life…

    Checking back in again on my monthly status report here.. not much has changed, SF is boring as usual. But there is no shortage of things I have to do.

    1) I can’t get a home equity loan due to not being a US permanent resident (strangely I was able to get a mortgage tho?) so I have to rely on making a deposit for my Canadian home using cash instead. I have about $30k CAD in my bank there already so I need roughly $100k CAD ($75k USD) more saved up to get enough deposit for a $600k home in Vancouver. That means I need to save up quite a bit well into next year.

    2) My company said I’m performing quite well enough to transition into full time, but while I think being a contractor means I lose out on PTO and stocks, I find the hassle of getting a visa very annoying. It took me 3(!) tries to get my visa last time when I crossed the border. such a hassle… not sure if its worth it.

    3) I have to get the insurance company to reimburse me for my rental car accident which I got while driving to the DMV to get my license renewed.. its another big hassle

    4) I have to get Walmart to reimburse me for the corporate credit card charges that I filed an expense report for back in January… Citibank keeps calling me, and yes its another hassle.

    5) Everytime I take time off work as a contractor it hurts me. But I’ve been having breathing problems recently and had to go see the doctor and again.. its a hassle

    6) I cancelled my chase rewards trip which I booked using points because I wanted to transfer the points somewhere else so that I could get a better deal on the trip – it cost me $100 to cancel and the rewards wont be refunded for 2 months. in the meantime I need to book a trip to Korea still so I had to pay that in cash since I’m not going to get the points back in time. So yes.. another hassle

    7) I realized that Comcast has been charging me $10 a month to use their modem(!) for 3 years I’ve had to pay that insane fee thats $120 a year. So I have to get a new modem and send theirs back and make sure they dont bill me anymore for that! another hassle

    8) I have to get my Google Pixel fixed because I dropped it and cracked the glass on the screen and it interferes with my camera – now you see refractions on the camera so thats another thing to do.

    9) I tried transferring some Bitcoin into Bovada to be able to bet on the NBA games that I wanted but it seems that my transfer made it through but they still haven’t deposited that money into my account yet. So thats something else I have to talk to them about to make sure they get my money on time so that I can bet. Another hassle.

    10) I have to transfer my webdomain over to a google domain so that I can host my website (this one) on my synology DS instead of using SiteGround so that I can save $100 a year on that.

    11) Of course I still have to find a Korean girlfriend to marry, and right now I have only 2 weeks of vacation to go back to Korea. If I can’t find a girl to bring back during that 2 weeks, I’ll have to see who I can find when I move to Vancouver. This is easily the hardest thing to achieve on this list.

    In other news.. Bitcoin / Ethereum are at all time highs and I have a little bit of each as hedges. I made back all the money I lost last year from gambling ($8k) with BTC/ETH so that seems great so far! Although I missed opportunities to make more. Stock market is also at all time high so I’m a little wary. I am bullish on TSLA, AMZN, NFLX, NVDA, BABA and FB though. But waiting for good time to get in. Trump’s ongoing antics have been crazy and I think its just a matter of time before he gets impeached. Its been 5 months in and he’s already had a ton of scandals. And finally.. I went on a little bit of a spending / selling spree, sold my Gretsch White Penguin and my old drone and bought my friends Macbook Pro (2016) and the new Phantom 4 Advanced. The camera lens is amazing! see below:

    Got the DJI Goggles and DJI Spark working too…

    and the Nintendo Switch as well… (was finally able to get my hands on it)

    Oh and watch me assemble my guitar in fast time its pretty cool

    and a lesson in guitar…

  • Trump wins the election! against all odds…

    I’m still reeling from shock of Trump winning the election. Up until Election night, I was 99% sure Hillary would win, because I believed all the polls, all the forecasts, all the betting websites and prediction websites, and boy were they all wrong.

    Let me assure you that 2016 is the year that taught me that underdogs always have a chance. First with Cleveland Cavaliers beating the Golden State Warriors (a 73 win team, the most in NBA history), and losing $2500 on the bet there. Then with Donald Trump beating Hillary Clinton (with all the backing of the mainstream media), and losing $5500 on the bet there. In total, I lost $8k this year from betting on the favorites. Had I bet on the underdog, well I would have been a lot richer now. Instead I’m quite poorer than before… but I learned my lesson this year.

    Its kind of a lesson we all should learn, really. When someone becomes too arrogant, and predicts an early victory, there’s always a chance they will be humbled. Certainly an $8000 dent in my wallet has been humbling to me. In the future, I will be more cautious of picking the favorite, because you never know anymore. In retrospect though, it makes sense.

    Lebron James is a transcendent player, and Golden State relied too much on 3 pointers. Live by the 3, die by the 3 is a common saying. In the playoffs, anything can happen, and it came down to literally the last 2 minutes of the series, when Kyrie Irving hit a clutch 3 and sealed away Golden State’s chances. It was really a 50/50 kind of outcome. Golden State should not have been favored. Just because they won 73 games in the regular season doesn’t predict how they will play in the playoffs. Past results don’t indicate future performance

    Similarly, in retrospect, it was easy to see why Trump won (even though Hillary won the popular vote). The polls only polled likely voters, and missed a lot voters who chose not to answer. This so called silent majority went and prevailed for Trump. Hillary was more hated than people thought. And they underestimated just how much people wanted change in America, myself included. People were so anti-establishment this year, especially in the Midwest where many people disliked Hillary ALOT. Pollsters falsely assumed that the same demographics that came out for Obama in 2012 would come out for Hillary but thats just not the case. Hillary doesn’t have the same charisma, and she has too much baggage/scandals/controversy to be the same as Obama. And Republicans have historically had more enthusiasm to vote than Democrats have. Obama was an exceptional candidate who mobilized people to vote, and Hillary just isn’t the same.

    So, it was deeply humbling for me to lose both these bets and be down $8000 in the hole (exactly the same amount I won betting on Obama in 2012, what goes around comes around I guess). As for the new President Trump, I do have a few worries about his inclination to repeal or replace NAFTA (thats the agreement that gives Canadians like me a special visa to work in the USA). Because of his anti-immigrant stance, and I am a US immigrant on a US work visa, it does affect me. I hope nothing too drastic will happen, but who knows? Trump is so far the only US president without any prior political or military experience, so no one really knows what will happen. I really do hope that he becomes a great president. I really don’t believe that he wants to start wars or be a dictator like people think. But at the end of the day, life will go on, and the sun will come up again, so we will see. Hey, At least weed in California is legal now!

    Edit: I just want to make clear that politically, I am neither a Democrat nor a Republican. Since 2009, I have been a registered Canadian Conservative voter, but in the US, Republicans are sometimes too crazy for me, though I believe in conservative policies. I have always believed in fiscal conservatism and reduced spending, with more individual liberties. Since I have lived in South Korea (a very conservative Asian country) for the past 2 years, I have become more socially conservative as well. I don’t specifically oppose gay marriage or abortion or illegal immigration, but I’m not in favor of those things either. In truth, I don’t really care about any of those things since it doesn’t really affect me. Korea has definitely made me believe in traditional gender roles a lot more than before though, and that has really caused to me oppose feminism these past 2 years. In that sense – Trump winning the election doesn’t really affect me that much – and I don’t really oppose any of his policies, which is why you won’t see me rioting in the streets like some other Californians.

    I made a video ranking US presidents out of sheer boredom..

  • Financial blunders – I never learn, do I?

    I put up a post earlier this year showing how much money I wasted last year, and this year is no different! Since then! I have made just as many financial blunders…

    So just to recap these were my biggest financial blunders last year (2015):
    -BitTorrent stock options: $4200 – while not a terrible blunder, I still don’t think BitTorrent will ever amount to anything, so this money is basically wasted. I got a stock certificate that probably won’t be worth anything. So $4k down the drain
    -Paid $215 for Kickstarter projects that never came to fruition. (iWinks Aurora + Home free)
    -Paid $3000 for cleaning up bed bugs in my apartment.
    -I missed or changed 4 different flights last year. One from San Francisco back to Korea because I forgot my apartment key and couldn’t wake my friend up to let me in. One from Vienna to Croatia because the Austrian Airlines’s convoluted process where they botched my seat up, forced me to waste 1.5hrs going back and forth to clear up my seating arrangement. This caused me to miss my flight. One from Istanbul back to San Francisco, where my iPad showed the wrong local time, being one hour late in Istanbul time for some reason (it was connected to Wifi, but this convinced me to ALWAYS use my iPhone, not my iPad). I was stuck an entire day in Istanbul airport because my iPad messed up. And lastly, when I changed my flight from Toronto back to Seoul to meet my then-girlfriend earlier, not knowing that it would indirectly lead to my break up with her (see my Jan post for detailed info there). The total cost of missing and changing all these flights is about $1500.
    -I shipped a TV to an ebay customer where it arrived broken, and I refunded the guy $500 the full cost out of my own pocket, when really I should have gotten UPS to refund it instead, since it was damaged by shipping, not by me.
    -paid $500 for impounded scooter that was leftover from 2014, and that one really wasn’t my fault, because I think that was legal parking, but anyways I tried to argue with the SFMTA for 5 months and couldn’t convince them to give my money back so I gave up.
    -paid $300 for useless SATA docking stations i never needed
    -paid $100 extra for special New Nintendo 3DS copy
    -paid $400 extra for my Asus gaming laptop because I made some extra customizations by Xotic PC, and needed it to be built and shipped express to my place in San Francisco so I could pick it up on time. Now you can find the same model on eBay for 40% of what I paid for it.
    -repeatedly buying and selling things on ebay and shipping them via UPS probably cost me thousands. I can’t even calculate how much.
    -paid $150 to ship some speakers to my parents. the shipping price alone was the price I paid for the speakers..
    -When I was in Budapest, got scammed $700

    This year so far (2016):
    -Lost $2500 on sports bets on Bovada. This is because I really expected the Golden State Warriors to beat the Cleveland Cavaliers in the Finals, and didn’t hedge my bet. Of course, I ended up losing the bet, and lost a lot of money on it.
    -Paid $150 extra to ship 2 video games (Dead or Alive Xtreme 3) to my friends place earlier from Japan so that I could get it on time to play it with him. Thats the extra money just for express shipping.
    -Missed 1 flight from San Francisco to Tokyo because I thought the ticket time showed PM but was actually AM. This one was a doozy – I had to pay $1100 for a new flight since it was last minute – and this was a one way flight too! I sold my scooter for about $1300 so basically I sold my scooter to pay for my flight to Japan. Yup… that was dumb.
    -Lost $5000 from betting on Hillary in the election. Honestly, I’m not that upset about this one, because every predictor on the internet thought Hillary would win. Just goes to show anything is possible I guess. Its a lot of money for sure, but I’m not the only one who lost a lot of money on this bet. Congrats to Trump supporters though, they must’ve made a lot.
    -Lost $500 from bitcoin transaction fees
    -lost $200 paying for a website I was supposed to develop for but never went anywhere
    -Paid $500 for a wireless phone bill because I was too lazy to get a new Korea sim card after my old phone broke, and I decided to use an international plan instead. Bad idea, for ONE month I was charged $500 for using up a lot of data and I immediately stopped the plan and got a Korea sim card instead. Lesson learned. NEVER use international phone/data plans, they are always way more costly than a local prepaid sim.
    -I shipped a laptop to an ebay customer where it arrived broken, and I refunded the guy $400 the full cost out of my own pocket, yet again because I didn’t purchase insurance. Another case of bad luck selling items. I originally bought the laptop for $900 last year, so it was a $1000 loss in total because I also gave him the $100 Kindle Fire free of charge as well.
    -Had to throw away the Creative T4W ($400) and Synology DS415play ($400) as they were not working anymore. Should have returned them with warranty.
    -still waiting on $800 of kickstarter projects (Dragonbox Pyra + Smach Z)
    -$300 on currency conversion fees because US dollar is so high. Not much I could do about this one though.

    So yeah, I never learn.. I wasted at least $8500 last year, and this year $12000 in lost money. That is ALOT of money I wasted or lost… Even going back to 2013 and 2014, $3000 wasted on stock option bets, $2000 wasted on parking tickets and impound fees from my scooter, etc Sometimes even though I try really hard to make the right financial decisions, sometimes these things always end up happening to me.

    Anyways, I hope Hillary wins next Tuesday, I might be able to make back some of my losses (albeit a small amount).

    Edit: She didn’t win. of course.