Investing General Discussion

Gravel said:

I'm old school. I use an excel spreadsheet.

We've changed to quarterly, but we basically just log into the accounts and check.

We did monthly from 2018 until we retired. Annually before that from the time we started aggressively saving for early retirement.

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I also use a spreadsheet to track all this stuff.

For me it automatically keeps track of stocks, crypto, metals holdings..(makes daily entries on a time tracking sheet) I have to manually update (usually 3 times a week) 401k values, cash on hand, property values. I've posted graphs and other things from it in this and some other threads.

Key numbers for me :

1. Total assets
2. Net Assets : Total minus debt (which at this point is just a small amount remaining on my mortgage)
3. "Tier 2" Assets : Net Assets minus value of primary residence (since I need somewhere to live)
4. "Tier 3" Assets : Tier 2 minus 401k/retirement accounts (i.e. assets I could more easily redeploy to another purpose if needed)

Example of where Tier 3 comes in.... It's at a level now where "Project Peaches" , which will be buying 20+ acres of land away from town, and building the "going there to live out our days" home on it, is going to happen and be covered wholly by liquidating/applying the Tier 3 assets. With my goal that afterwards Tier 3 will still be around the same size as the retirement funds.

Araysar said:

How far apart are DJI products from Skydio products in overall quality?

Is there a big gap in performance and quality?

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Yes. And price too. Somewhere between 80% and 90% of commercial drones in the US are DJI. The new-ish DJI dock is the future of the industry, imo. Or at least it was.

There's so many quality of life perks with DJI that I'm not even going to bother listing them off. Before the phantom 4 pro came out, around 2017 I think, I hated them. They still had a big market share, but they weren't good enough for what I was doing. Ever since then they've been knocking it out of the park. They basically democratized photogrammetry drones and were well on their way to doing it with lidar too. I have one DJI drone that's $12k, along with another $12k for the lidar sensor. With that drone, I'm winning contracts when competing against established firms using $2m in manned aircraft, and $750k in drone equipment in a few cases.

I charge anywhere between $2200 and $3500 per day when that drone is in use, and my clients are very happy with the prices and quality of what I make from it.

These are public clients. State agencies, county public works, city engineering, etc. I send them a proposal for $20k and they're happy as hell because the competing quote is $35k. And they know that they'll get quality work from either of us because they've used us both.

This is your tax dollars, fuckers. I'm still going to be doing the same work, but I'll be charging 4x as much to do it with shittier equipment that's much harder to use.

(Well....shittier cameras, drones and software. Any lidar sensor would be an upgrade, but it's nice to have a low cost option from DJI)



Skylogic was my favorite, but I can't find a recent one.

Call me when he announces the Tesla Final Solution 2