Kind-of-Lost

Chase Sapphire Reserve Authorized User Benefits

Chase Sapphire Reserve authorized user benefits come up a lot when someone wants to share their travel perks — or quietly hopes adding a family member will lift that person’s credit. Both are reasonable goals, but they pull in different directions, and the answer to “is it worth it” depends entirely on which one you’re chasing. I sell authorized user tradelines, so people bring me the credit version of this question all the time, and the honest answer is more interesting than the card’s marketing.

My Free Vehicle Routing Optimizer Just Got Smarter

I’ve been turning twenty years of Operations Research models out of dusty Excel files and onto the open web, one at a time. The vehicle routing one — the free vehicle routing optimizer that lives at routing.kindoflost.com — just got a round of upgrades that make it a lot less fussy to actually use. None of it changes the price (still free, still runs in your browser), but it removes most of the friction that used to make people bounce off it.

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