The rates will update every 6 months on both ends, but depending on when you buy, your new 6-month rate may lag behind by 1-5 months after they’ve changed it on their end.
They’re only paying like 3.6% right now. I’ve been earning more interest in a high yield savings account lately and it doesn’t have all the withdrawal penalties.
Your image doesn’t include the cost of the premiums. My work offers similar types of plans except the HDHP is ‘free’ while the PPO has premiums totalling $5-6k per year. For us, it makes zero sense to use the PPO since it’s guaranteed to cost at least $5-6k whether we see a doctor or not. With the HDHP, the theoretical minimum cost for the year is $0 if we never go to the doctor but realistically we usually get close or hit our family deductible but it’s still cheaper than the PPO.
I just reread your OP and noticed you don’t currently have an SSD. You may consider swapping one in as the boot drive and running the rest of your current hardware (and possibly buying a new case for that “new PC” feeling) since they’re so cheap. This will, hands down, give you the biggest performance boost out of anything.
Realistically, the main benefit you’d get from buying all new hardware is better power efficiency as your current hardware is more than adequate for a media server, but it would possibly take years to ‘break even’ on operating costs depending on how much electricity costs where you live.
So for a media server, and for power management, I’d ditch the discrete GPU and buy an Intel Core processor 10th gen or newer. Intel Quicksync does well with transcoding media and doesn’t cost you any additional power draw.
Mobo: buy whatever is cheap and compatible with the processor you choose. The more SATA ports the better.
RAM: 16GB should be plenty
Case: depending on what type of form factor you want, you might check out the Node 302 or the Define R7 cases from Fractal Design. These are both designed to hold a ton of HDDs so you can build up a media collection over time and just add a drive or two as needed.
If you don’t plan on growing a collection and prefer to just delete stuff after watching, then you can ignore this and buy whatever case you like.
SSD: 256GB to 500GB is good but more doesn’t hurt.
It’s funny because living on the West Coast, we tell people the same thing to scare them away, but when you say it about the Midwest, I suspect you’re actually being truthful.
No question. We used a single hose one for years and it was way better than the window units in almost every sense (except for the above mentioned efficiency issue). Setup is simple, you can move/point it to a more desirable location, breakdown at the end of summer was simple, and ours was remote controlled (though this seems more common on window units too these days).
As it says, these are people forced into retirement. As a counter anecdote, both my parents had to retire early for health reasons even though they couldn’t really afford it and are now on disability plus they had to take withdrawals from Social Security early so they get a reduced payment.