Monthly Archives: February 2017

Running a single Mocha test file in VS Code

Posted by on February 24, 2017 No comments

I’ve been doing a lot of Node development lately, after doing mostly Java the past 10 years. There are lots of comparisons between the two, and I’ve come away with a better understanding of where one is better than the other and what I wish I could take from each one.

One thing I miss about doing Java development is being able to right-click in a single test, run it, and be able to easily debug it. You can get close to this in Node-land, but it is nowhere near as simple or seamless. You can, however, get kind of close with VS Code (which I’m loving more and more every day) by creating a custom launch configuration that lets you debug a single mocha file.

1. Create a launch configuration that only runs the current file

This creates a launch configuration that passes the current file to the mocha command.

2. If you have a mocha.opts, you may need to override it

A lot of projects have a mocha.opts file that has something like this ‘–recursive test/.’

Command-line args should override options in mocha.opts, but it looks like the file specification part does not get overridden. So, what I did was create a dummy mocha-debug.opts that is empty, then point to it in the config:

3. You can now run and debug a single Mocha file.

Betterment substantially increases fees

Posted by on February 1, 2017 No comments

I recently became familiar with Betterment since my employer switched to them for our 401k provider. I started looking into the services they provided, and became really intrigued by their automated investing and tax-loss harvesting. I’ve usually stuck with Vanguard and their low fees, but with a wrap fee of .15% if you had over $100k invested with them, it was tempting to try Betterment, since in theory, at least, the tax-loss harvesting would more than pay for the additional fees.

Getting all of my investments to them took a fair amount of time and money (though they made the process as easy as possible), and I was excited when I got my emails this morning saying my last 2 big accounts had been received by them.

Less than half an hour later, I got another email titled, innocuously, “New Betterment service plans for 2017”. Reading through the email, they discussed their new options that would allow you to use the services of a CFP, which is odd, given their pitch about automated investing, but not a big deal. Then, tucked down 4 paragraphs is the real reason for the changes:

Each plan will cost a simple, flat rate. Starting June 1, your Digital plan will be 0.25% per year of your average balance.

For accounts with over $100,000 in them, this represents an increase of 67% (from .15% to .25%)! And Betterment tries to make it as low-key as possible that they are increasing fees on us by a huge amount and not offering anything in return. I am really disappointed, both in the increase in fees and in the way they announced it – I had a high opinion of the company before this.

At this point, it looks like WealthFront is a better option. Both do a lot of the same things and offer similar features at a fixed .25% fee, but WealthFront manages the first $10,000 for free and offers a Direct Indexing service that lets you avoid ETF fees, making the combined fee substantially less than Betterment.

Fees should be getting cheaper as companies like this get more assets under management, not going higher by almost 70%, and companies should be more forthright in the way they raise fees.