Sunday, July 19, 2015

Property Invesetment - Finding ROI

So I've been looking at buying a duplex or something and am trying to understand what is actually a good investment.  I put together a spreadsheet, here, that allows values to be plugged in and it will show the annual increase in value and %return on total investment in the property.

Plug in values in yellow and look at cells in green on the right for return.  Red shows my cost each month toward the mortgage.

It includes mortgage insurance automatically for down payments of less than %20 of the total value, and then stops them once the M.I. cutoff has been reached, configurable in yellow.  I'm not sure if I'm dong this right, but it looks good to me :p

Friday, July 10, 2015

Outlook 2011 Mac OSX Problems

Just some hints for others incase them run into similar issues.  I went on vacation last month and when I returned, Outlook would crash constantly.  Local IT support recommended that I rebuild my profile and, second, try removing my Exchange account and rebuilding the profile again.

This didn't do anything, and somewhere along the way, all of my local folders, the ones that show up under "on my computer", disappeared.  I was still seeing crashes and I had time machine backups, so I charged forward anyway.  I've heard reports of problems resulting from the 14.5.0 update.

What fixed the crashing for me was to completely reinstall Office 2011 (including Outlook).  Google around for the Office Uninstall Tool.  Microsoft provides one.  Reinstall worked fine, although the Update tool had a hard time and I had to grab updates from the Microsoft site to get Office and the Update Tool up to a recent version.

I was hoping I'd be able to try and use an earlier Outlook release, in case one of the updates that my system grabbed when I first got back from vacation had caused my issues, but it complained that my Profile was only compatible with current outlook releases, so I went ahead and updated to the most recent 14.5.2.

My "On my computer" folders were still missing!!!  I restored my profile from a few days ago using a time machine backup, and still nothing.  I started digging through settings to see if I could find a way to load them manually, and something happened that fixed it; it was one of two things:


  • I tried to do an export of all of my contacts, calendar, mail, to a .olm file, just in case, but ended up canceling it because it was too slow (I was trying to write to an SD card where I dump general data).  
  • It's possible that I accidentally clicked the check box in the Preferences -> General -> Folder list -> [ ] Hide On My Computer folders.  By this time I noticed this, I had been through settings once... this may be all that I needed to make these folders show in the first place, but who knows.  If I check it now, they disappear!  
There wasn't much good info coming up in Google about my problem with the local mail, so hopefully this helps someone!