Living with your parents- I’d totally do it and stay at home for a while. It’s a terrible commute but I assume you are young and that this will be a good step up in your career, probably helping you long term.

That commute is too far to do forever in my opinion, but at this point I think it likely makes sense given the limited info.

We have a smaller mortgage by hundreds of dollars a month, and larger income of over 10k/mo total- And it’s STILL way too tight and was probably a bad idea.

How many years are left on it? If that’s a relatively new 30 year, yes, people are right and you need to downsize.

It’s a credit card… the problem is the missed payments.

Not much to be done except explain to capital one that they messed up but it was an autopsy issue, not a credit worthiness one, and MAYBE they would take pity and make adjustments to their reported missed payments.

Oh certainly- but there are important components that would need to be purchased as they are needed for the laptop if you are upgrading- ram, storage, etc.

Old laptop motherboards certainly make more sense to use for small home servers than purpose built hardware though! This would theoretically make a strong reselling market for old framework components, and reduce demand for brand new hardware.

The bigger benefit is making them easily repairable. This HAS been done, older thinkpads stayed in service way way longer than most of their comparable laptops simply because they were so serviceable.

One thing the framework does right is their charger setup- you are likely to break and wear out the charging port on a modern laptop- and when that happens on a framework you simply swap out the module and keep going. This is a much bigger deal than replaceable / upgradable motherboards, but keeping it all compatible makes parts easier to source for those repairing, not upgrading. (I’ve seen plenty of laptops discarded for a bad charging port, making it repairable without even opening up the laptop is AMAZING. I no longer have a modern thinkpad because they went to a delicate usb-c directly soldered to the motherboard instead of the old wired in charging port that you could repair by unplugging the broken one)

It’s cheaper than buying two whole laptops… and the 11th gen original motherboard can theoretically still be used as a low power desktop or something.

Were these the hours you signed up for? A lawyer might be worth talking to if you signed up for a 9-5 but then forced into your insane hours.

Be sure THAT wasn’t a breach in their own contract.

A 401k loan is somewhat better than actually “raiding” it but if the market recovers while the loan is out that is obviously a terrible idea.

If OP could pay it back very quickly it wouldn’t automatically be a terrible idea especially if they can get a better interest rate that way.

This but it might be a good idea to leave at least one month in the emergency fund. 8.5% is bad, but not EXTREMELY bad.

Yes. Aside from this there is no reason you can’t just keep paying it off faster even with a refinance. Good loans will not have prepayment penalties.

If you can learn double data entry accounting (its really very simple once you see what it is doing) gnucash is amazing. I’ve been using it over a decade now.

It totally can if you are a giant…..

The project is ENTIRELY for being silly. Their criteria was that it needed to function as a laptop, with internal batteries and everything. Others have made larger “worlds largest laptops” but they weren’t internally powered, one massive one at a trade show even had a rear projection ROOM. (See hackadays recent article on this for that one) - this laptop is useless, the keyboard is even unusable big…. But it DOES all function so theoretically a giant could use it as a laptop.