The big advantage of putting your additional contributions into the 401(k) is that it reduces your taxable income. The big disadvantage is that the money is locked away for decades; that cash is no longer available to make big purchases like a car, honeymoon trip, etc. There are some exceptions, but be careful that you don’t get hit with penalties.
Personally, if I were in your situation, I would open a no-fee brokerage account and put you additional retirement money into an index fund that tracks the S&P 500 or NASDAQ. If you need the money before you turn 66 then it will be readily available.
If you pay the same effective tax rate now vs retirement, Roth and tax-deferred are equivalent. The benefit of Roth is that it gives you flexibility in retirement, so you can choose how much taxes you pay in retirement instead of whatever you happen to withdraw from your tax-deferred accounts.
So a Roth contribution isn’t an automatic slam-dunk, it really depends on OP’s tax bracket now vs retirement. If OP is in the 12% or lower tax bracket, I highly recommend a Roth contribution, but if they’re above it, I recommend taking the deduction. I’m a little below the top of the 12% bracket, so I actually convert my old pre-tax accounts to Roth up to the top of the 12% bracket since that’s a pretty good tax rate to lock in.
General retirement advice is to contribute 15% total to your retirement account. Since your employer adds 12%, you should contribute a minimum of 3%.
As for your coworkers advice, it may or may not be valid. Contributing to your 401k or a taxable account, both allow you to invest your money. The 401k comes along with tax advantages. Assuming you are making Traditional contributions, then you are saving taxes at the marginal tax bracket (potentially 22 or 24%). If you contribute enough to drop your MAGI to the 12% bracket, then the tax benefit is much less. You can still contribute to Roth, which means you can withdraw that money tax free in the future but you have to pay taxes on it now.
Another thing to consider is the fees in your 401k. Since you are limited to the options provided, sometimes fees are quite high. If you don’t have any options that cost less than 1%, you likely are better off investing your money elsewhere.
Finally, you get into the really personal part of personal finance. What are your goals? Do you have short/medium term goals that you would prefer to save this money for? For instance, if you want to save up for a down payment for a house in the future, putting that money in a 401k is a bad choice. Do you have a comfortable emergency fund to pay for unexpected expenses? Do you have high interest debt to pay off?
A good resource is this flowchart from r/personal finance: imgur.com/u0ocDRI
If you’re not particularly financially savvy, you should always put 10% into retirement in some sort of cheap index or target date fund.
Definitely do not fuck with individual stocks or god forbid, crypto, unless you are sure you know what you’re doing and prepared to lose 100% of your investment.
Also OP, what year was your house built? Assuming you’re in the US if it was built in the 70s or 80s that could be aluminum wire, which you absolutely should not connect to anything that is copper due to fire hazard. The aluminum and copper together cause corrosion which makes the wires not make good electrical contact and thus it heats up and causes a fire.
Please just replace the wire and don’t try to use it.
Edit: just saw your edit. Yeah, it was aluminum, glad you’re replacing it.
I just finished running the new wire. I really lucked out. My step dad has a 50’ fishing tape and a 10’ endoscope that I was able to borrow. I got a new 10/2 wire pushed through fine. I called whirlpool for the specifications and they said the dryer needs 30 amps and will work with 10/2 or 10/3 wire. I was gonna go for the 10/3 but both lowes and Home Depot were sold out so I went with the 10/2. Got a 25’ roll and it used most of it. Maybe a foot of slack
Awesome!! Glad to hear it. As long as the dryer doesn’t need the 4th wire for 120v separate from the 240v you should be fine. Hopefully whirlpool didn’t tell you the wrong thing. Kinda stinks for future upgradability though in case you wanted to get a dryer down the line that requires the 3rd conductor.
It does look bad and I plan to replace it regardless. I’m more so wondering if it needs replaced now. Wire is expensive and replacing this will be pretty extensive as I would need to tear out horse hair plaster to unstaple it from the studs. I’m not 100% on if it’s stapled or not but it’s tough to move and the other wires I replaced were stapled down so we had to tear open the plaster and run them that way. This would be going from 2nd story to basement through kitchen behind the sink so it’s not a quick job. If it needs replaced now I’m gonna need to cancel the whole weekend
I think old style wiring had bare neutral in those 240 wires. It is the path back and shares a ground connection in the panel. I don’t know the safery of insulated neutral vs non insulated, but I have seen panels with uninsulated neutrals. And The ground bar on modern equipment is also attached to neutral bar. I don’t have enough electeical theory knowledge to explain why / how it is that way though
The insulation protects the stuff outside the wire from catching fire. The wires get hot while carrying a load. Neutrals always carry a load once the hot is powered on. Grounds only carry when something goes wrong such as a power surge. They carry excess electricity the neutral can’t handle and usually significantly less so they don’t get as hot. There’s no reason not to insulate a ground, and it arguably is safer, but the amount safer is noticeably less considering the extra cost. For a ground to get hot enough to catch something on fire several other safety measures would need to fail. In that regard it’s not necessary.
Yeah I think in the old wire scenario the two live wires were insulated and bare neutral sandwiched in them with an outercasing could have been their compromise on insulating all of them. But if you use 240 the neutral is not used unless it is wired as a 3 phase circuit. But what i meant by not understanding electrically theory is why bare ground and neutral join at the panel. i.e. purpose of a ground wire if you already had something reaching ground via the neutral connection in the panel to the ground rod or piping.
Snaking wire without a guide for that distance is extremely tough. The normal way to swap out wire would be to tie the new wire to the end of the old and the pull the other end of the old. Since you can’t pull the old (it’s stapled and secured) you can’t pull the new through behind it.
I’m not an electrician, please consult with one if you’re unsure.
I think Shadow is right on both counts.
The wire is very old. Personally, I would rip it out, but that is a risk assessment you have to make.
A 240V circuit, in North America, gets there by having two hot wires one on each of the 120V circuts from the transformer in the street. So no neutral wire is needed to complete the circuit. If you want to think about electricity “flowing” it flows from one pole to the other (instead of to the neutral in a 120V circuit). The unshielded wire is your ground.
They are right. I was wrong. But the wire is getting replaced regardless. My step dad does a good bit of electrical work and said he doesn’t trust an aluminum ground on a 240v outlet
To your edit, it should be 2 hots and a neutral is my understanding. Hots deliver electric and neutrals complete the circuit back to the back. In newer wiring the 4th is the ground but a 240v 3 wire has no ground. However, if it is a neutral it should be sheathed and individually insulated.
That being said, I’m not an electrician and most of this is just what I’ve learned from replacing outlets and rerunning 120v wire in this house. If an electrician wants to tell me I’m wrong I’m all ears
The two hots give you 240 across them, but in North america an appliance may run 120 for standard control functions and 240 for heating functions, so in thise cases you need a neutral to provide a 120 pathway. you will see 240 stove appliance plugs have 4 prongs. 2 hot, 1 neutral and a ground. That wiring looks like a time before grounds were used.
If you’re in North America, which I assume you are based on the 120v wires, then your assumption about 240v power is a bit off. Both wires can be a hot (120v) wire, 180° out of phase from each other, so they add to 240v. In this case, a neutral wire isn’t necessary to carry the current back, the other hot wire does that. A neutral wire may be used, but then there would be 4 wires.
The ground wire and the neutral wire actually connect to each other in the panel, but it’s not safe to use a ground wire in place of a neutral, so definitely don’t wire it to the neutral on the outlet.
If you are unsure of what’s going on with this set of wires, you should really call an electrician to help. Wiring a standard 120v outlet is something a homeowner can do, but identifying an old 240v cable on a dubious circuit is definitely something a qualified electrician should do.
So, I have a problem with electricians. I’m running out of them lol. I’ve had 4 out already for other projects and I get quotes and in 2 cases even paid the first payment but no one actually shows up to do the work. So I have just been doing it myself.
That’s said, my step dad does a lot of electrical work so I do have a bit of help even if he’s not a full on electrician. He’s has tons of tools for this type of work and makes most identification pretty easy. He took a Quick Look at the picture and he said it needs replaced based on the fact that it has an aluminum ground so I am just going to run all new wire. At least I know now that it will be the right wire
Always! I’ve been doing a lot of work but I still don’t mess with safety. Obviously the main will be shut off and I won’t be doing the work while home alone in case something does happen. But since it is 1 breaker, 1 wire, and 1 outlet all being replaced it does seem to be a pretty straight forward replacement
Yeah, my first thought was to come into this thread and answer “I’ve identified it as the kind you replace”
Look at the wires in those pairs, they look like they’re falling apart from each other. Do you really want to risk an area in the wall where one of those wires being thin/having strands broken which is going to cause it to heat up inside your wall?
This has fire hazard written all over it. Just replace the wire and stop trying to take the easy way out. You’ll thank yourself later when you still have a house to go home to.
In case anyone stumbles across this, the problem was that the entity that manages .icu domains received an abuse report and suspended my domain.
This is strange because I only use the domain for personal experimentation and none of that is just for static websites. DNS records for mail are properly configured like all of my other domains.
I asked Namecheap what the reason was. They said none was provided and it may take some time to get a reply back upon requesting the info. I asked them to put in a request for the reason.
My guess is that I was just in a massive list of domains that someone started reporting. or maybe someone was trying to get my domain taken out so they could take it for themself.
Are you using services running on the OS, Docker or VMs?
With Docker you can set the Network and have some containers traffic egress on the vpn while others have no WAN or direct access. You can have a container join multiple networks to have the best of both worlds.
With VMs, you can set the network interface
With the OS, you might be able to set network interface for each service, but I don’t know how
Just on the main thread. I have media set to show on kbin so it's more like a reddit experience and I don't have to open images like you. Unfortunately that means video files load and autoplay. It would be better if video media was loaded as a thumbnail if they cant put a script on them to prevent it.
@ThatOneKirbyMain2568 we have to preemptively defederate with any corporation! The fediverse must always stay small and never improve other companies. The vision is for open technology that few can use, right? I'm just worried that if Flipboard helps make the fediverse more appealing by providing more content for our users, that they can pull a fast one and defederate from us later, and then all of our users will leave and go to Flipboard instead! The only way to prevent that from happening is to make sure they never hear about Flipboard in the first place. Please reference any arguments used for defederating from Meta if you need more "sky is falling" arguments to whip you into a frenzy of senseless fear.
I respect your choice to defederate. That's of course one of the first principles here.
Re: flipboard, we're completely rewriting out backend around activitypub. There is no turning back. We, as they say, have burned the ships. We will now live or die based on how we conduct ourselves in the fediverse.
@Mmccue I was being sarcastic, I think the fediverse is about improving how people use social media- not driving all existing social media extinct. The idea that people would be unhappy that enormous companies are adopting the fediverse, which inherently loosens their grip on their audience and relinquished some of their power- it seems insane. Pre-emptive defederation seems insane.
Ah. I see. Thanks for the clarification. I agree with you. The fact that this is happening at all is really quite amazing. The ultimate irony is that if Elon didn’t destroy Twitter we wouldn’t be seeing the rise of the social web right now.
I thought it's because the instance is missing, but I checked out your comment on fedia.io and it seems like everything is correct there.
Here on kbin.social it only displays @username without the instance afterwards, and the link itself isn't federated it seems. So kbin tries to resolve the name locally, fails, and just displays it in plaintext.
Glad Flipboard is expanding in the Fediverse, I've been following their various news accounts on Mastodon for a while now. It especially helps the fediverse feel more complete as a social media platform.
Sure, these don't really matter for Lemmy and Kbin, but they are a huge deal for microblogging platforms like mastodon or misskey.
I don't think these things matter man, unless they create a community on the threadiverse, most of us on kbin use threads, microbloggig is the minority and full-on microblogging people simply use mastodon.
I'd disagree that they don't matter at all. Even if you don't, there are plenty of people who use the microblog side of Kbin and care about what's in the microblog feed. Obviously, this doesn't concern people who only use threads, but that's not a reason to assert that we shouldn't care.
Sorry I did not mean it does not "matter at all", but I certainly think this is going to be a minority. Although this will be great for Mastodon users, Kbin's userbase is already small, young, growing but small, and the portion of users using microblogging of that is low.
Ah, I follow. Even so, I'd love to see Kbin grow as a platform for viewing, interacting with, and posting microblogs. I have gotten a ton of value out of the All Content view, and I think that more robust microblogging will make Kbin a much more attractive platform. Thus, I think it's important to consider the impact (for better or for worse) of big contributors like Flipboard and Threads, even if most of the people on Kbin rn aren't bothering with microblogs.
Yeah it might be an added "Bonus" for people in the long-term besides threads, I think Kbin is certainly starting to cater to the audience that are mainly here for threads but it's also "nice" to have microblogging to keep in touch with both.
I'm not at my computer, so please excuse any mobile issues. I'm in favor of the move, because it will help to simultaneously connect and decentralize communications across the platforms. Say what you will about Facebook (you're probably right), but if they're that bad, then it seems logical to me to connect to their federated service even more aggressively.
The more we push our content (and by extension the Fediverse content that kbin aggregates), the less impact their algorithm can have. The more we go out of the way to expose their content, the harder we make it them to curate/censor/suppress any voices. And if, when comparing two Fediverse instances or softwares, we find that what's been pushed to them is different, we the users can call it out to news organizations (or make it public ourselves).
And yes, I know I'm making the arguments for supporting private companies in adopting open-source. It's about being able to audit what companies we don't trust are doing.
In addition to that, I'm currently a Threads user. Anecdotally, there's a lot of wholesome content on there that I appreciate, and what limited advertising is there is nowhere near as obtrusive as Reddit or the main Facebook platform.
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