I think they meant more like they wouldn't have been able to afford the same house 4 years later, due to appreciation of the house, the increase in property taxes on that appreciation, and higher mortgage rates to boot. That or they had a variable APR loan.
The former case happened to us and is how my coworkers and I sometimes discuss the housing market - house values increase so fast where we are, buying a month later would have gotten us an appreciably worse home. A month later, worse again. Prices were increasing 25+% YoY. If we hadn't locked in when we did (Dec 2020) I'm not sure we would have found a place. The mortgage rates seem to not matter because so many of the buyers scooping up houses are older families with lots of money buying investment properties, or whole ass corporations (often foreign corporations) willing to pay 20% over asking, in cash, and waive inspection, to lock out any other prospective buyers.
Insurance is about 50% more than when we bought the house and taxes are maybe 10% higher due to rate increases and the increasing value. We would barely be able to afford half the house we're in if we bought today.
I always see advice about which software to use and there’s always the advice that FreeTaxUSA is the best bang for your buck and does everything you need for when your taxes are “simple.” I’ve used and thought it was great for years. But as my career has grown and no longer filed as a single I’ve begun to question when...
The only reason we switched from doing our own to paying a CPA is when my wife started operating her own business. This was more to have someone to ask questions about making sure she covers all of her tax obligations who can answer authoritatively and back us up if anything comes back to us in the future (since she is sole prop. and going it alone). We paid $200 the first year, and considering turbotax would have been about that much, getting our taxes filed for us was practically just a bonus. She charges a little more now, but it's still worth it IMO just to not have to deal with doing the actual paperwork and having someone who will help us out if anything does come back to us. I would say anyone who just has W2 income and maybe some stock sales doesn't have a complicated enough situation to warrant a CPA, and should just use FreeTaxUSA (and hopefully over the next couple years, the auto filing program with the government will eliminate the need for that, too).
For four decades, patient savers able to grit their teeth through bubbles, crashes and geopolitical upheaval won the money game. But the formula of building a nest egg by rebalancing a standard mix of stocks and bonds isn’t going to work nearly as well as it has.
Thoughts? I have to admit I've been nervous about this for a while now, with "once in a generation" events happening on a seemingly yearly basis, I started saving for retirement in 2019 and it seems like things have essentially traded sideways since then - my accounts are barely worth more than the money I've put in to them. The article is quite gloomy.
Everyone always quotes the growth of the S&P500, but isn't pretty much no one 100% invested for their entire retirement in the S&P500? My 401k is in a target date 2055 and my Roth is split between FXAIX (S&P500, 55%), FSPSX (international, 20%), FSMAX (extended market, 15%), FXNAX (bonds, 10%). It's a little conservative but not that conservative.
Fidelity says my Roth 1Y returns are 10.8% compared to S&P 500's 10.3%. It says my 1Y returns on my target date 2055 are 18.0%. Neither of those numbers can be accurate so it's hard to know what to read in to them. If I try to calculate my returns in a very simple way (take current value, subtract contributions from the last 12 months, which can be easily looked up, call that number X, then find the growth rate that takes the account value I had as Nov. 1st last year and compound that at different rates until it produces X as of now - this gives an upper bound on returns, since the returns of the various money deposited throughout the year at random times is treated as not growing at all), I get 1%. And that's 1% before inflation.
I know the S&P500 is 10% YoY over really long time scales, and I also know that number is like +/-15% year to year. But it feels like my fund picks are pretty normal yet they're not worth any more than what I put in to them since I started saving. Because of that, I'd have to have a 30+% savings rate in order to catch up to the "X salary by Y age" rule because the assumptions over the growth rate of the accounts are wildly off in the years since I started investing.
I’m almost 40 and according to the wisdom found everywhere on the internet, I don’t have enough saved for retirement. Which worries me because I’ve been saving for as long as I’ve had a proper job with access to a retirement vehicle. But also because the internet wisdom doesn’t make sense or sound feasible....
The people I know who've given up on housing affordability unfortunately are not shifting in to retirement. They're so hopeless they blow their money on hobbies because they don't foresee any possible path to homeownership or retirement and value a few bucks here and there on discretionary spending more.
I am surprised the age would be so young. My dad retired at 67 but went right back to work a year later, still working now (71). Health insurance do be expensive. I wonder how this statistic would capture someone like him. My mother was working until she died at 60, but would have likely been in a similar situation, trying to keep working as long as possible, certainly was not looking at retirement within a year or two.
My wife's parents are younger (late 50s) but in the same boat, there is no path to retirement for them and they plan to just keep working. The only people I know who managed to retire by any conventional definition are or were Silent Generation.
As we round the corner into autumn in the northern hemisphere, the air is a little crisper, the days are shorter, and the leaves are changing… and looking for some new inks to try out. Do you have favorite inks for the season?
Diamine Autumn Oak, Montblanc Corn Poppy Red, Montblanc Golden Yellow. I'm not sure which if any of these are still being made though, probably not the yellow.
Home prices weakened month to month, according to Black Knight. While still gaining, which they usually do at this time of year, the gains fell below their 25-year average. This after significantly outdoing their historical averages from February through June. It’s a signal that a slowdown in prices may be underway again....
If prices were coming down commensurate with rates increasing you could make a lateral change and buy the same amount of house for the same amount of money, but raising rates has only slightly reduced the rate house prices are increasing, rather than bring them down. It's insane. Every month is the new worst time in modern US history to buy a house. It sucks for property owners too because taxes based on fair market value are rising crazy fast as well.
I think your math is assuming FFLDX is 100% domestic stock, but according to the Fidelity research page it's ~55% domestic stock, ~35% foreign stock, ~10% bonds so it actually very closely mirrors my Roth distribution (totally accidentally however... I actually hadn't looked at it before today, I just knew the returns were only about half of the S&P500 over any given period of time).
I don't make enough to max 401k + Roth but if I ever get there I'll have to remember the foreign vs. domestic note. From reading this thread I think I definitely need to phase out contributing to bonds for a while.
I’m a long time PocketSmith user currently switching to Quicken. PocketSmith is a decent product but has some glaring issues that don’t seem to be on their radar and I feel like my finances have honestly become too complex for PocketSmith’s simplistic philosophy....
Might be silly but I honestly just use Excel. I could do with some more features or automatic calculations for certain things but I like to just be able to tinker with data.
Would absolutely have been impossible for us without money from my mother's trust (deceased) and my father. Even living cheaply, with a very good deal on an apartment that we luckily locked in as COVID started and rent increases were put on moratorium, the appreciation of properties was so aggressive that saving $1300 a month meant we were actually losing ground on hitting a 20% down-payment on half decent starter homes. We desperately need the housing bubble to burst, but it's not even """really""" a bubble.
I’m talking about types of accounts, automatic transfers, etc. Feel free to mention specifics, but I’m more interested in higher level information like does your paycheck go to savings or checking, do you use automatic transfers, do you use a traditional bank account or something different, etc....
We are effectively single income so I will ignore my wife's accounts.
I have:
CU checking
CU savings
HYSA (SoFi) emergency fund
Fidelity brokerage
Fidelity Roth IRA
Fidelity 401k
Credit cards:
USAA (general purpose)
Chase Amazon Prime (Amazon)
Apple Card (devices and occasionally tap to pay)
CU checking is where mortgage and bills are paid from. It is also where the money goes out of to pay credit cards down. Correspondingly CU checking gets the lion's share of direct deposit. HYSA gets a fraction, but I will top it off at the end of the month to get on target with our savings goal ($1000/mo towards HYSA as long as nothing is being spent). CU Savings are pretty much empty these days, APY is so low it is irrelevant. For whatever reason that's where the connection to Fidelity lives so I can contribute to the Roth IRA, but that is the only use anymore now that our cars are paid off.
I don't make enough to max my 401k so the brokerage is just used for when RSUs and ESPP shares deposit. Then I sell them, put some in retirement and transfer some to CU for cash.
Roth contribution is manual each month. Bill pays are manual (except for a couple on autopay on CCs, if they don't charge card fees). Mortgage is automatic from checking. I track the target emergency savings separately in a spreadsheet which also includes budget & other info.
What makes the Fidelity cash management account & its associated debit card so good?
This is the only path I see - real estate needs to not be a guaranteed profit generator. It's been viewed this way for decades. Rents are allowed to increase indefinitely, which inflates property values, which raises taxes, which raises mortgages, which raises rents, because real estate is said to be zero risk maximum reward investment. So it's better to hold an empty unit until someone comes along willing to pay the price you're asking than let it go for less.
The only way I see around this is a really aggressive cap on rent. Like, once a rent is established, it can never be raised, for any reason, ever again (unless the property were radically transformed, like a large single family plot in to a townhouse development, condos, etc.). The home value can still do whatever, but it no longer has the catalyzing agent of perpetually exploding rents to drive it up.
I spent a few weeks reading as much about rent control as I could, where it had been tried and analyzing how they failed. The legislation has never been remotely extensive enough - only touching a handful of (usually very old) structures in a single neighborhood, county, or city. Of course if there is a cluster of rent controlled units you will depress building where the properties might not generate as much profit vs. guaranteed to generate profit forever. But if it applies everywhere at once, you don't have this problem. Landlords evicted tenants to get around the caps, because the only mechanism to increase rent beyond the cap was to cycle tenants out. So the real problem here is landlords taking it out on their tenants, rather than let the properties simply not be a guaranteed infinite profit generator. Finally people in rent controlled units tend to stay in rent controlled units, limiting mobility. This seems to be cited as a weakness but I never came across an adequate explanation as to why. You have to make landlording simply not worth it to bring the number of people who want to own homes in to balance.
New developments would be able to charge whatever rent they wanted, if they wanted to rent them. So if you are absolutely determined to own and rent out properties, you have to keep building them if you want to keep setting new market rates.
An interesting note though is once rents are largely stagnant (except for some special exceptions I would make where owning single units is unusual, like apartment complexes own by single property management firms who handle communal landscaping, clubhouse, etc.), those properties will actually remain competitive for longer... in an environment where average rents go up 10% a year, of course not increasing rent will make it unprofitable very quickly and you might as well sell... but when average rents go up 1% a year, it will actually stay profitable for a lot longer even if you can't increase rent. So I don't foresee an instant flood of the housing market.
I also see benefit to pairing this kind of legislation with one that bars or otherwise limits corporations, especially foreign corporations, from owning and renting single family properties, but that's a separate issue I haven't studied as extensively.
The reason houses are not affordable is not because the mortgage is more expensive than the rent for an equivalent unit. In fact the opposite is almost universally true. The problem is you can't rent cheaply enough, to set aside enough of your income, to accumulate a down-payment for a reasonable property at a pace that is faster than the appreciation of those properties.
Take our situation just a couple years ago - we had a good deal on an old 2br apartment, paying a little under half our income to rent+utilities. I was saving about $1200~1300 a month towards just the house down-payment. Very respectable, I thought. But house prices were going up nearly 20% YoY. On a $400k house, which was very much on the cheaper end of what was available, that means the down-payment required is increasing at around $1500 a month. Literally every month I'm losing buying power. For perspective, when I looked recently the absolute minimum price I saw on Zillow for a unit in our area that wasn't just an empty plot of land was $285k.
Raising taxes doesn't work because the landlords will literally always just pass it on, plus profit margin, to the tenants. As long as there's another tenant looking in the area, they will always fill the unit. People will just get in to a lease that's 40, 50, 60% of their income because it's all there is.
The problem is allowing there to be old vs. new contracts, not the control itself. There wouldn't be a black market for contracts if the price of rent for a unit was permanent, public information, and tied to the property. Even if it's sold, renovated, whatever - if the rent can literally never go up, sooner or later it's going to make financial sense to sell it. It might not be today, it might not be next week, but someday, the goal is to force as much of the property ownership in to the hands of people who want to be property owners and live in the properties.
It would have no effect on people who own and live in their home (except on the value of the property, if it causes a mass flood of properties on the market... which I doubt. The properties are still valuable just by virtue of being a place to live, they don't need the rent generating component to be valuable).
One thing to note is on Reddit you're used to looking at lots of disparate granular communities e.g. /r/finance, /r/FIRE, /r/personalfinance, /r/povertyfinance, /r/wallstreetbets, /r/stocks, meme subs like /r/pfjerk... While this community is small, we can be all of those things. You start general and then as the niche groups find the content they want to see or is most relevant to them is getting drowned out, they can splinter off. This is why most of what I've been posting is more in line with the historical content on /r/stocks rather than /r/personalfinance. There is some cross-talk, but /r/personalfinance is mostly questions about individual financial situations as well as a repository of FAQs. We don't have a wiki, so the latter is essentially impossible unless we just make huge posts and pin them (which is still worth considering), and with only a couple hundred members the former is not a viable content model.
The advanced retail sales report showed a seasonally adjusted increase of 0.7% for the month, better than the 0.4% Dow Jones estimate. Excluding autos, sales rose a robust 1%, also against a 0.4% forecast. Both readings were the best monthly gains since January....
One thing I haven't seen anyone discuss in the context of the current economic climate is that while we had near-0% effective rates from 2008 to 2022, we had sub-1% APRs on auto loans, sub-3% APRs on mortgages, and 0% APR payment plans through manufacturers and POS systems became common. Google, Apple, Amazon, Shopify, more, all implemented 0% APR payment options for devices and even general purchases for 6~12 month terms. I was looking at laptops just last week and notice Apple is still allowing 1 year 0% APR plans for them. The iPhone upgrade program doesn't seem to have gone anywhere. It seems to me this is probably still a pretty big driver of inflated consumer spending - it's objectively a better deal to not spend the money up front when the fed rate is 5.5%, money market funds are paying 5.4%, HYSAs are paying 5.1%, and inflation is 4%. Of course you should spend the money a year from now when it's grown more and worth less.
It has been rough watching our friends become steadily more financially literate and start seriously looking at the housing market for the first time, run the math and realize there is basically no path ever to homeownership for them. 3 of the 4 couples in our friends group own houses, we’re all 29~35ish, all dual income, no kids. We’re not even in an especially high COL area.
It was only possible for us because my mother died quite young and since she was divorced from my father, her assets were liquidated and a trust was made for my brothers and me. That covered about 40% of the downpayment I needed, the rest was half what we were able to save on my our and half contributions from my father.
2nd couple, don’t come from money, got a good deal on a very-old-and-in-rough-shape house in a not-so-desirable area. They’ve done some work but there’s only so much you can do when both people work all the time.
3rd couple easily make the most of all of us combined. Their townhouse is very nice but I’m fairly certain they had some family money to help them too.
4th couple both work decent jobs ($20~25/hr, occasional overtime) but with no family support and rent being as high as it is, there isn’t any kind of time horizon where they can put enough money away to make a 20% downpayment on even the cheapest apartment in the city.
There really isn’t any other way anymore… I don’t think Gen X and boomers fully appreciate just how different this is from when they were in their 20s & 30s. My parents were buying their second house by the time they were my age, in a nice part of a very desirable Southern CA city.
We typically spend between $800~1400 between two people on all food in a given month. Granted that's high, but considering that includes everything from grocery trips, meaning paper products, cat food, alcohol... one thing that was interesting for me looking at the data is our ratio of spend on eating out doesn't strongly correlate to the total we spend for the month. For instance:
Month:
May
June
July
August (proj.)
Groceries:
$640
$500
$860
$820
Eating Out:
$250
$400
$570
$120
Total Spend:
$890
$900
$1430
$930
Ratio (eating out/total):
28%
44%
40%
13%
July was a super high outlier overall, but it was driven by our grocery spending more than our eating out spending. Major contributing factors were meeting friends more often than usual (four weekends of providing alcohol) and a Costco run. Our eating out generally constitutes lots of runs to e.g. Subway, Chipotle. I get a $6 coffee ~once a month, my wife doesn't drink coffee. We very rarely go down to sit-down restaurants and have a $50-100 meal, basically only for birthdays or anniversaries. That also hit in July (anniversary).
Part of what's going on is I think rapidly fluctuating food prices and the fact that for the last ~year groceries had been so much more expensive than normal and a lot of "fast food" at least hadn't appeared to update their prices at a comparable rate. So we might be spending $10 to make a meal for two at home or $20 to eat out together. So eating out ~twice a week vs. ~once a week barely registers on a typical monthly food spend.
Vehicles under $15k are 1.6% of the market, and their share of the market has dropped over 90% since 2019. The old advice that you can get a beater and drive it in to the ground for $5k hasn't been true for years but it still seems pervasive in personal finance spaces.
They do specifically list out the fraction of the market each price bracket constitutes though. This feels more specifically targeted at the kinds of PF advice that would say to look for a "decent condition low miles" beater for $5k. This shows that segment of the market literally does not exist anymore. The equivalent cars are now $15k+ which has VASTLY outstripped inflation from when I first started seeing that rhetoric (2010 or so).
This was exactly the calculus I was doing with my wife in 2017~2018. Her car was a fourth-hand 2003 Hyundai Elantra which had been run in to the ground before she ever even got it (but to be fair, it was both free and better than what she was driving before). I was looking at used car prices and thinking, is it really worth it to save less than $5k when I get a car that's 5 years newer with 50,000 fewer miles and all of its warranty in-tact? The PF advice I was seeing at that time was maddening, and mirrored a lot of what you're saying - "cars lose half their value off the lot, buy a used civic for $5k and drive the wheels off" - but that had already not existed for years. And then the pandemic supercharged used car prices and they just sort of never came back down. And then rates went up and they still won't come down.
We ended up buying a brand new 2019 Impreza in an undesirable color for $19k, financed with nothing down and 0.9%. Now it's paid off, I feel like in retrospect it was very much the right call.
For sure a 10-year-old used car in 2023 is massively safer than a 10-year-old used car in 2003. I don't know if that can possibly explain how that 10yo used car in 2003 was $1000 (5% of 20ish k MSRP) and an equivalent 10yo used car in 2023 is $20k (75% of 30ish k MSRP - 20k inflation adjusted from 1993 to 2013). Of course these numbers are vibes based approximations and anecdotal, but it's kind of my impression.
I would think the safety argument is already generally accounted for by inflation - Euro NCAP, NHTSA, etc. has been going pretty strong since the 90s. I don't know if I buy that backup cameras and blind spot monitoring becoming standard in the late 2010s suddenly made cars retain all their value, because new cars got those features but the MSRPs of those cars was basically just increasing at ~the rate of inflation. Also while these cars are getting safer, they're getting much more expensive to maintain, which you would expect to drive down used car prices. It's strange for sure. The pandemic can't bear the entire blame either though, since it was a trend that started before it. 2020 just supercharged it.
Yup. My wife and I both own Subarus, we get "please let us buy your car!" letters from local dealerships on a monthly basis and have been since we bought hers in 2018.
I bought a Wingsung 699 recently from AliExpress because I wanted to try out a vacuum filler. Ink leaks from around the nib whenever I cap it, leading to ink getting on the grip. When I write, blobs of ink sometimes burp out onto the page. Is this typical for this brand? I have another no name Wingsung (I think it’s actually a...
Quality of knock-off brands like Jinhao and Wing Sung is going to be pretty universally shit. You can usually buy a handful and one will be at least decent though.
One thing you could check - any moisture present in the cap can tend to draw more moisture out of the pen. You could dry rinsing and then thoroughly drying (Q-tip, compressed air, whatever) the inside of the cap, dab the section and nib to make sure it's fully clean, let it dry for a bit (you can shield the nib from air with a cloth to keep it from fully drying out) and then try writing with it and capping it again to see if it sorts itself. If not it might just be way too wet and dumping ink in the cap, or you're knocking the pen around too much causing ink to leak from the feed. This is all of course assuming it's otherwise properly tuned.
Do you mean the sidebar? Or a wiki? Lemmy has no native support for wikis currently. Some communities are getting around this by independently hosting editable documents and linking to them, treating them like wikis, but I'm hopeful that lemmy/kbin will implement wikis before too long. It's a pretty important part of the content model.
These are photos from when I first took delivery of my Nakaya, an aka tamenuri (red urushi lacquer) Neo-Standard, from back in 2016. The nib was an SF with added flex cuts, and though it ran dry fairly quick, when it was primed it wrote in an almost brush-like manner. It was very unique, but difficult to use every day, which is...
The big, beautiful nib of the Montblanc 149 is what first captured my interest in fountain pens. Many years later, and many pens tried, I have a handful I really just love writing with and I still think the nib designs are some of the most beautiful....
Thanks for the response. Any particular retailer you would recommend buying from? Is buying from Amazon JP fairly straightforward from the States or do you need a VPN or something? I'm not at all opposed to buying abroad, I've bought several of my more expensive pens from La Couronne du Comte (R.I.P.) and Appelboom since they used to include VAT in their MSRPs and remove it if you shipped to the States (and often with free, very fast shipping thanks to DHL! Just had to wait weeks or months for stock sometimes). Sadly this doesn't seem to be the case anymore.
I'm used to all manner of gold and titanium nibs so not too worried about man-handling the nib.
No I don't have either Visconti anymore. I initially got the Bronze Age in EF, second-hand, and unfortunately the vacuum piston got snagged while cleaning one time and totalled the nib. I bought a BB unit to replace it, and that wrote TERRIBLY. I had bought the Dark Age brand new in the meantime (with an F nib) that also wrote terribly. I sent that one for work, but by the time it came back I realized I hated so many things about the pens (the capping mechanism can become mushy for seemingly no reason, with no way to ever clean it out or recover it, you never know how much ink you have, filling is an absolute pain unless you pay extra for the special inkwell, and if you use it you soak ink in to the section which will slowly leech out on to your fingers indefinitely, no matter how much you clean it, thanks to the weird way the porous material interacts with temperature and moisture) that I traded them both. The Dark Age at least wrote well by that point, but I had to sell the other as known needing work. Yes you should unfortunately budget to send a Visconti to a nibmeister if you decide to buy one (and probably buy a tipping size large to make sure it arrives with enough material to work with - Italian sizing is incredibly unreliable). The QC really bothered me but the more new pens I bought the more I realized essentially all of them have terrible QC out of the box.
Both Nakayas I've had ran dry after a page or two unless the feed is under pressure. I have had to send half my (new) Montblancs to have nibs replaced, reground, or flow issues solved. The brands I've had the best luck with (bought at least two and had no issues) are Lamy, Pelikan, and TWSBI.
The only pens I still have are:
Conid (currently being modified to take a vintage 1970s 146 nib)
Both Lamy 2000s (one B, one F)
Montblanc 145 (M), 146P (BB, modified), 1960s 149 (EF, flexy, unknown if modified, undisputed king of fountain pens for me), Heritage 1912 (B CI, modified), Slimline (XXF, modified)
Nakaya Decapod (EF, flexy, has issues, don't care enough to fix, but gorgeous)
Pelikan M200 (F), M800 (M)
TWSBI 580 (EF)
Waterman Phileas Blue (M CI, modified but didn't need it, just to add character - my first fountain pen and one of my last gifts from my late mother)
Since the 21K is what Sailor is known for, I don't think I will bother if not for a 21K nib. It sounds like the pricing in the USA is indeed unreasonable and this has been well documented for a while - the prices I see buying from e.g. Japan make much more sense for a mid-range production C/C pen with gold nib.
Unfortunately prices at Cult Pens and TPC look pretty much identical to USA prices... of course the model I gravitated towards (1911 L Trinity) just so happens to be a USA exclusive also. Ugh.
EDIT: Looks like the Sailor Profit Black Master is basically the same pen and $200 from Amazon Japan. I can live with that. Thanks.
Well, mark one for Amazon JP, the pen got here super quick. It's gorgeous. Mark one against Sailor though, they include a single proprietary cartridge and no converter in the box with a $200+ pen?!
[Thread, post or comment was deleted by the author]
If it's what I'm thinking of, there is a fairly high minimum required account balance ($5k) or else you get nothing. So you can trade off between e.g. SoFi at 4.4% but no minimum vs. CIT at 4.9% with $5k min. If you don't risk needing the money inside the timeline of the CD, CIT's better. There are referrals for SoFi just for opening accounts though, so that could swing it the other way depending how much you're putting in.
/r/personalfinance was one of my more frequented subreddits and I find it pretty valuable. I figure I should try to help get the ball rolling over in the Fediverse and it seems like this is the most active substitute so far....
I would definitely not have ever been able to purchase a home (and pay off student loans) if not for money left to me when my mother died. Even with that, I'm still technically behind on retirement and I don't think we live an especially extravagant lifestyle. We barely spend anything on hobbies, we own our cars outright, insurance is cheap. We have friends our age who are trying to navigate home shopping without any help from their families and it's just impossible. And we don't live in an especially HCOL area.
I’d love to see some ideas or suggestions for a better banner image for this community, something that shows a bit more spirit and interest. This current image is one that I found on Unsplash....
Home prices have outpaced inflation by 2.4 times ( lemmygrad.ml )
cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/4307103...
What are "complicated" taxes that require a professional? (USA)
I always see advice about which software to use and there’s always the advice that FreeTaxUSA is the best bang for your buck and does everything you need for when your taxes are “simple.” I’ve used and thought it was great for years. But as my career has grown and no longer filed as a single I’ve begun to question when...
Your ‘Set It and Forget It’ 401(k) Made You Rich. No More. — WSJ ( apple.news )
For four decades, patient savers able to grit their teeth through bubbles, crashes and geopolitical upheaval won the money game. But the formula of building a nest egg by rebalancing a standard mix of stocks and bonds isn’t going to work nearly as well as it has.
On Retirement Savings
I’m almost 40 and according to the wisdom found everywhere on the internet, I don’t have enough saved for retirement. Which worries me because I’ve been saving for as long as I’ve had a proper job with access to a retirement vehicle. But also because the internet wisdom doesn’t make sense or sound feasible....
Retirement plan derailed: Will you be among the 40% forced to stop working earlier than expected? ( www.marketwatch.com )
The average retirement age in the U.S. is 61, according to a 2022 Gallup survey. But the target age for retirement is 66.
Favorite autumn inks?
As we round the corner into autumn in the northern hemisphere, the air is a little crisper, the days are shorter, and the leaves are changing… and looking for some new inks to try out. Do you have favorite inks for the season?
Home prices may be on the verge of cooling off ( www.nbcnews.com )
Home prices weakened month to month, according to Black Knight. While still gaining, which they usually do at this time of year, the gains fell below their 25-year average. This after significantly outdoing their historical averages from February through June. It’s a signal that a slowdown in prices may be underway again....
What is the makeup of your retirement accounts? ( kbin.social )
What are you invested in? Target date funds, ETFs, individual stocks? Do you think of your portfolio as aggressive, neutral, or conservative?...
Personal Accounting Software
I’m a long time PocketSmith user currently switching to Quicken. PocketSmith is a decent product but has some glaring issues that don’t seem to be on their radar and I feel like my finances have honestly become too complex for PocketSmith’s simplistic philosophy....
Welcome to the ‘nepo’ housing market: 40% of homebuyers under 30 get family money to cover their down payment ( archive.ph )
Definitely a trend I see around me (Europe, 30 years old)....
What does your cash flow process look like?
I’m talking about types of accounts, automatic transfers, etc. Feel free to mention specifics, but I’m more interested in higher level information like does your paycheck go to savings or checking, do you use automatic transfers, do you use a traditional bank account or something different, etc....
Do you think we will ever have affordable housing again in our lifetime?
cross-posted from: lemmy.world/post/3560407...
Anyone interested in moderating this community?
Hello everyone,...
[AskFinance] Which type of content would you like to see?
Hello everyone,...
Retail sales increased 0.7% in July, better than expected as consumer spending is holding up ( www.cnbc.com )
The advanced retail sales report showed a seasonally adjusted increase of 0.7% for the month, better than the 0.4% Dow Jones estimate. Excluding autos, sales rose a robust 1%, also against a 0.4% forecast. Both readings were the best monthly gains since January....
[Weekly finance thread] 14 of August
Feel free to share, ask questions or advice on any financial matter.
[AskFinance] How often do you eat out, and does that impact your finances?
Asking the question as it seems to be a recurrent issue among finance-aware people....
What pen & ink are you using today? ( kbin.social )
Today is Montblanc Heritage 1912 with Aurora Black, taking notes at work. What about you?
It's Almost Impossible To Find A Decent Used Car Under $20,000 ( jalopnik.com )
Vehicles under $15k are 1.6% of the market, and their share of the market has dropped over 90% since 2019. The old advice that you can get a beater and drive it in to the ground for $5k hasn't been true for years but it still seems pervasive in personal finance spaces.
Wingsung 699 leaking ( sh.itjust.works )
I bought a Wingsung 699 recently from AliExpress because I wanted to try out a vacuum filler. Ink leaks from around the nib whenever I cap it, leading to ink getting on the grip. When I write, blobs of ink sometimes burp out onto the page. Is this typical for this brand? I have another no name Wingsung (I think it’s actually a...
Need about page updated?
About is not up to date, for pf, need age brackets and all the other wikis...
My first Nakaya ( imgur.com )
These are photos from when I first took delivery of my Nakaya, an aka tamenuri (red urushi lacquer) Neo-Standard, from back in 2016. The nib was an SF with added flex cuts, and though it ran dry fairly quick, when it was primed it wrote in an almost brush-like manner. It was very unique, but difficult to use every day, which is...
Some of my favorite nibs ( imgur.com )
The big, beautiful nib of the Montblanc 149 is what first captured my interest in fountain pens. Many years later, and many pens tried, I have a handful I really just love writing with and I still think the nib designs are some of the most beautiful....
GDP grew at a 2.4% pace in the second quarter, topping expectations despite recession calls ( www.cnbc.com )
Gross domestic product was expected to increase at a 2% annualized pace in the second quarter....
Fed approves hike that takes interest rates to highest level in more than 22 years ( www.cnbc.com )
The quarter percentage point increase will bring the fed funds rate to a target range of 5.25%-5.5%....
Where to start with Sailor? ( kbin.social )
I've tried lots of pens over the years. The ones I can remember:...
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How are you doing relative to the 1x by 30 / 2x by 35 / 3x by 40 salary rule for retirement savings? ( kbin.social )
/r/personalfinance was one of my more frequented subreddits and I find it pretty valuable. I figure I should try to help get the ball rolling over in the Fediverse and it seems like this is the most active substitute so far....
[Meta] Now taking submissions for a new banner image
I’d love to see some ideas or suggestions for a better banner image for this community, something that shows a bit more spirit and interest. This current image is one that I found on Unsplash....