Kind-of-Lost

Amex Platinum Authorized User Benefits: Worth It?

People ask me this constantly: is it worth adding someone as an authorized user on an Amex Platinum? Usually they mean one of two very different things — will the authorized user get the lounges and the travel perks, or will it help that person’s credit. The Amex Platinum authorized user benefits that matter for travel are not the ones that matter for your credit score, and confusing the two is how people end up overpaying. I sell authorized user tradelines for a living, so I spend most of my time on the half of that question the points blogs skip — the credit half.

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Pickup and Delivery Route Optimization (Free Tool)

If you’ve ever tried to plan a pickup and delivery route by hand — grab a package here, drop it there, then double back across town for the next pickup — you’ve felt how fast it stops being a map problem and turns into a logic puzzle. Every delivery depends on a pickup happening first, every vehicle has a limit, and every stop has a window when it can actually happen. I spent two decades building optimization models for exactly this kind of problem, and I eventually turned one of them into a free tool anyone can use. Here’s what makes pickup and delivery routing genuinely hard, and how to stop solving it by guesswork.

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Barista FIRE vs Coast FIRE: Which Half-Exit Fits You?

I retired early, and I still work — which sounds like a contradiction until you learn the vocabulary. The FIRE movement splits the “quit your job before 65” idea into flavors, and the two that generate the most confusion are barista FIRE vs coast FIRE. Both are half-exits: you leave the career, but you don’t fully unplug from income or from math. The difference between them is what does the heavy lifting afterwards — your part-time paycheck, or compound growth you banked years earlier. Having lived on the far side of this decision for over a decade (boss-free, but rarely idle), here’s how I’d explain the two to a friend deciding which door to take.

Coast FIRE number by age: portfolio needed today to reach $1M at 65 with 7% growth

$20,000 Tradeline: What That Limit Actually Buys You

The biggest card I ever had in the tradeline business was a $40,000 Bank of America card — right up until BoA noticed what I was doing with it and closed it (a story I tell partly as a warning and partly because it still stings). So when people search for a $20,000 tradeline, I know exactly what they’re picturing: a big limit landing on their credit report and doing big things. Sometimes that’s exactly what happens. Sometimes they’re about to overpay for limit they don’t need. This post is the math and the shopping advice I’d give a friend.

$20,000 tradeline effect on credit utilization: 90% before, 9% after

RouteXL Alternatives: Free Multi-Stop Route Planners

I spent twenty-plus years building vehicle routing models for companies that paid serious money for them, so when I went looking at RouteXL alternatives recently, I wasn’t shopping — I was checking out the neighborhood. RouteXL is probably the best-known free multi-stop route planner on the internet, and for good reason: paste in your addresses, get them back in a sensible order, free up to 20 stops. But 20 stops is exactly where a lot of real delivery days start, and that’s where the free tier ends. This post is an honest tour of what’s out there — including the free VRP tool I built and run myself — and which one fits which kind of routing problem.