Personal blog on early retirement, selling tradelines, and analytics projects. I write about what I learn as I am learning it.
If you’ve tried to get a straight price out of Route4Me, you’ve probably hit a “contact sales” button instead of a number. That’s the most common complaint I hear, and it’s usually why people start searching for a route4me alternative in the first place. I’ve spent twenty-plus years building routing and scheduling optimization for a living, so I built a free one for the operator who just wants to run a route, not book a demo call first.
After I put the Roth conversion tool online, the question I kept getting wasn’t about conversions at all. It was simpler and scarier: “OK, but how much can I actually spend?” Almost every withdrawal rate calculator answers that by multiplying your savings by 4% and calling it a day. So I added a mode to my own optimizer that throws the flat percentage out and solves for the real number — the most you can spend every year while drawing every account down to zero by the end of the plan.
Continue reading “A Withdrawal Rate Calculator That Draws Down to Zero”Ask any delivery operation where its money actually goes and the honest answer is almost always the same: the last mile. Trucks leave the depot full and efficient, and then it all unravels at the end — one driver zig-zagging across a neighborhood, doubling back for a stop they rolled past twenty minutes earlier, idling outside an address that doesn’t open until noon. Last mile route optimization is the work of squeezing that final leg down to the least driving, the fewest miles, and the most stops actually served. I spent two decades building optimization models for exactly this kind of problem, and I eventually turned one of them into a free tool. Here’s why the last mile is so stubborn, and how a solver beats a map every single time.
Continue reading “Last Mile Route Optimization (Free Tool)”I’ve been turning twenty years of Operations Research models out of dusty Excel files and onto the open web, one at a time. The vehicle routing one — the free vehicle routing optimizer that lives at routing.kindoflost.com — just got a round of upgrades that make it a lot less fussy to actually use. None of it changes the price (still free, still runs in your browser), but it removes most of the friction that used to make people bounce off it.
If you’ve ever tried to plan a pickup and delivery route by hand — grab a package here, drop it there, then double back across town for the next pickup — you’ve felt how fast it stops being a map problem and turns into a logic puzzle. Every delivery depends on a pickup happening first, every vehicle has a limit, and every stop has a window when it can actually happen. I spent two decades building optimization models for exactly this kind of problem, and I eventually turned one of them into a free tool anyone can use. Here’s what makes pickup and delivery routing genuinely hard, and how to stop solving it by guesswork.
Continue reading “Pickup and Delivery Route Optimization (Free Tool)”
