It’s Back to School Day!

I hope you had the Labor Day weekend possible. As usual, we have to grade everything on a 2020 curve.

Today is the first day of school. Every parent should be singing along with the Staples commercial below:

Unfortunately, there are only a few parents able to celebrate. It is with a lot of guilt that I write that we are dropping them off at the school and leaving. Think of how strange that sentence is. I’ll save (most) of my comments on the United States “leadership” for other articles, but it didn’t have to be this way. It’s safe to say that America was terrible with its COVID response.

We have a few reasons to be more confident about sending kids to than most people. Our area of Rhode Island has done well in keeping COVID numbers low. The kids are at a private school with small class sizes and a sizeable campus for outside classes. The children will also be grouped in pods with limited interaction with other students. I think it works better with our 1st and 2nd graders who can have one main teacher for most subjects. Finally, my wife worked the local pandemic response and feels that it is safe. She’s not the risk-taker, I am.

This puts me in a bit of a unique position. For the first time in a very long time, I can focus more on work. Or at least I think I can. If this morning is any kind of indication of things to come, I’m going to be putting out endless fires like my cable modem being broken, or preparing dozens of documents for our condo sale.

Hopefully, these things will settle down and I will get back to some kind of normal writing schedule. I know the updates here have been sparse. I have a lot of ideas to write about. There are many interesting things going on with investing and personal finance in general with COVID. With the above condo sale I mentioned, I’ll write about doing a 1031 exchange.

While this is more of an informational update, I want to leave you with something interesting on the personal finance side.

The kids are getting laptops from the school this year. They are older Apple laptops (Model: A1465) that seem to available online refurbished for around $600. That’s perfect for what my young kids need in case there’s a switch back to distance learning. The school has an insurance policy that covers everything. It’s $100 to buy and $100 if you need to use it.

If the cost of a replacement is $600, I think we’ll risk it. However, I haven’t been able to get in contact with the school’s business manager to find out what the true cost would be. Sometimes schools have different programs and include bulk discounts or extra charges for free refurbishing.

I think it’s interesting that the school went forward with this insurance without informing people of the value of what they were really insuring. I’m also wondering if I’m the only one questioning it or if everyone else just wrote the check?

If the cost of a replacement is $600 would you buy the insurance? Let me know in the comments. (We’ll be buying a protective case and keyboard cover to give us minor scratch & dent protection.)