I'm in an extremely fortunate position where my Mom, upon learning about current mortgage rates and why I haven't bought a house yet, wants to essentially be my bank to buy a house. As in, she wants to fund the house, put it in my name, and I pay her a reasonable down payment and pay a "mortgage" to her at 2-3%. So what would be...
Regulations on this will differ by state. The best move would be to find a local real estate lawyer. They wil instruct you on how to file all the proper paperwork with the local government, and also advise you on things you haven't thought about, like how to structure your wills to make sure everyone is protected in the event something unfortunate happens to either of you.
Also don't use this private transaction as an excuse to save money to skip any steps. Go get the title search and inspection done. You don't want any surprises. If the inspection finds a fundamental problem, you might still go through with the purchase, but at least you'll know up front what you're in for.
The US government is telling everybody that inflation is 3.4% per year. That is not correct. Try 14.2% and that's about right. Source : gold/usd 1 year simple moving average.
My Internet provider just installed a 2,5/1Gbps Internet connection and I've asked the guys to run a couple of their fiber to connect my router (HP Prodesk with OPNsense) to my server....
There definitely are optics available for single mode. The problem is that the wavelength will need to match what you are being sent from your provider. So we can't really answer your question, you will have to ask them.
1310nm is quite common but we can't assume your link is 1310nm.
Most states tax you according to where you live, not where you work. Several exceptions exist, though. One notable exception is New York State, which will tax you if your employer is based there, even if you don’t live there, unless it can be demonstrated that the employer needs you to live outside the state to do your job. (Google “NY convenience of the employer” for more info on that.)
I would talk with your HR department. It’s possible that they determined you are responsible for taxes in both states, and misfiled the paperwork.
I’ve read that if you have the money up front, investing it as a lump sum on January 1st will produce higher returns more often that investing on a monthly/weekly basis. Is there more to consider in 2024 with our current high interest rates?
The theory is not based on interest rates, but rather tax loss harvesting. People have a better idea of what their tax liability might be at the end of the year, and it’s possible they might want to reduce their Capital Gains tax bill by selling positions that are negative to lock in a loss, offsetting some other gain. That means more selling in December, so it would make sense to buy as close to Jan 1 as possible, when the extra selling stops.
But it’s just another way to time the market, and timing the market is a bad strategy for the average investor. Just keep investing on your set schedule, and you will find that you still do OK, with much less drama.
Making any investment yearly at the same time is attempting to time the market, it’s a bet that the market will be lowest at that point vs the rest of the year. Otherwise, why pick Jan 1? Why not pick July 4? If the price is lower on Jul 4, you end up with more shares, as well as a small increase due to 6 months of interest.
When you DCA, you basically admit that you don’t know how prices are going to move, and you are spreading out your risk. Yes, DCA over 12 months may leave you with slightly less than if you put it all in on Jan 1, assuming the price was the lowest on Jan 1. But if you have monthly investments that whole time, it’s likely that at least one or two of those might have been bought at a lower price than Jan, and it may turn out DCA could result in more shares of whatever you are buying.
The “time in the market” adage applies over years, not months. On a scale of 10 years+, it doesn’t really matter whether you bought in Jan or July.
48 years old, currently have no investments. My net worth is my car and the clothes on my back, and I don’t ever want to be in this situation again....
That is sort of true, but incredibly misleading. I’ve been poking around crypto for quite a while now. The concept of cryptocurrencies are going to stick around, they’re just code and large numbers, after all. But there’s no reason at all to think they will continue to hold their value. Particularly since governments are starting to understand that they will never be able to regulate crypto entirely, but can heavily regulate the on and off ramps.
And while there are a few key cryptos that have proven they have enough ongoing demand to stick around, those have already gone through their initial “to the moon” phases and are not likely to turn people into crypto millionaires anymore.
So crypto these days is like a lotto ticket, except the payout potential for all the “blue chip” cryptos is no longer that great compared to the downside of the entire sector tanking. That leaves the new coins to bet on, but too many of them are ERC-20 tokens (or their counterparts on the Ethereum clones) that are way too easy to make (and rugpull).
So it’s not enough that you think Crypto as a whole is here to stay, you need to look at the thing you are buying. OG BTC and Ethereum are relatively “safe” bets in the space, but it’s still an open question whether they are more likely to see a 10x gain or 10x loss in the next four years. Buying the Hot ERC-20 token of the day is even riskier.
If you do have 20% of your net assets in crypto, I advise you to DCA some out. That’s what I did. Of course, it went up afterwards, and if I had held, I would have more on paper right now. But I have the unique ability to say I’ve already taken 10x out over what I put in, and I have a bunch left. If BTC has another 10x left, I retire early. But if it all evaporates, I can still eat.
N00bs who are interested in crypto now should stick with BTC or ETH, on reputable exchanges that openly state they keep customer assets in reserve, with full KYC vetting, and a little at a time. Crypto exchanges’ trading fees are normally super low, and there isn’t really a lot size limit. You can often buy $50 worth of ETH at the same percentage in fees as $5000. They also often expose their whole order book and let you place limit orders, so it can be a good place to learn to trade without much in your account before taking a larger amount to the stock market yourself.
If you’re really unsure, it might be worth your peace of mind to find a fee-only financial advisor and pay them a few hundred dollars for a consultation.
Where can you go to find one of these, and make sure they have the proper credentials?
Yes, it is, because the general public views crypto as a single thing, while there is a big difference between BTC and ETH, on their own chains, with their own network effect backing them, and a token which literally anyone can start on their own and manipulate its market to make it look like a good investment before dumping.
So the general public shouldn’t really be getting into this without understanding these risks. It’s not just a matter of “these are more risky”, it’s that there is a huge difference in risk that the casual investor who is uninformed about Crypto can’t spot.
Most often, people end up trailing their index fund returns and giving up with a cheap lesson.
Or, even worse, doing much better than their index fund after a Crypto surge, but thinking “I’ll just wait a little bit longer”, and then watching it all crash. So you were better at one point, until you weren’t.
Remember, kids, you haven’t made any money until you sell.
The problem isn’t necessarily flipping houses, if the ones doing the flipping really are improving the property and are able to refurbish old properties to be more appealing. If they put in the work, they deserve to make money off of that - but they only make their money if they sell.
The problem is corporations who buy up housing stock, with no immediate plans to resell. They view houses like a commodity, and if they constrain supply in certain areas they can artificially create profit. This profit, though, comes at the expense of everyone who is looking for a home at the time.
I think the solution is for localities to step in and crank up property taxes for residential units that are not either occupied or actively on the market. Once a company keeps a property off the market for a year, make it much more painful for them to hold it for another year.
As the title mentions, the company I work at is offering free shares when buying back some of the company’s shares, as well as a discount, depending on the amount of shares purchased....
It makes a huge difference how big the company is, and how easy it is to sell shares. (I am also making the fundamental assumption the company is public, if it is not then there is no guarantee at all you can ever sell the shares). If your company is traded on a major exchange, and there are lots of shares traded per day, the it is likely you will be able to sell them when you need to at a competitive price (subject to any restrictions they place on you as an employee to sell).
Large publically traded companies in the US call this an “Employee Stock Purchase Plan” and if this is offered as part of an ESPP, then the company is likely large enough to count.
Then, there is a separate matter of whether the company is a good investment at all. And even if it is, you may not want to invest in your employer at all, because your salary is already tied into their performance, and you may not want to tie your investment strategy in to the same company. However, there is nothing preventing you from selling ESPP shares as soon as your company lets you do it after purchase, and if you do that you can get an immediate guaranteed return, with very little risk. You will have to pay taxes on your profit, but not the money you put in to buy shares.
It makes your taxes a little more complicated, but not overly so, and you may clear enough to pay an accountant to do your taxes anyway.
You would be evaluating the company just like any other individual stock, which means looking at its revenue, profit, debt, cash on hand, and other financial metrics. As well as its business model, and whether that business has any growth potential. But at the end of the day, the price is driven purely by how much other people want the stock in rhe market. I don’t mean to discourage you from Learning about it if it interests you, but there are a ton of financial planners and analysts who make this their career, and are still wrong often.
If I were in your shoes, I would put in as much as you think you can afford over the term of the ESPP buy-in, and then simply plan to sell them all once as soon as you can. They will take all that money, and buy shares with it at the discounted price, and then when they hit your account, they will be “worth” the current price. The price you sell them at will differ a small amount from the price they were issued at, because the market will have moved in that time. The difference between the discounted price and the current price will show up on your W2 as income, and you will have to pay tax on that, which may eat into your refund little bit. But not only is that difference free money for you (after taxes), but you get back all of what you paid in, making it a form of forced saving. And it may be enough of a bundle of cash that if you still wanted to invest you could then buy an index fund which will still go up and down with the market but has less risk if any individual company underperforms.
Edit: just realized you said you were in the EU, I think all the ESPP rules are similar, but possibly in Metric instead. :)
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....
I have my entire paycheck hit my checking, without parceling out some money here and other money there. I avoid auto-pay (and electronic statements for anything that might vary), and instead pay all bills from my bank’s payment portal.
Paper copies of bills go into an in-box, which I process every week or two. I look at all the bills before paying them. There is also a physical piece of paper in the in-box, which is a printout of a spreadsheet I made with all of my monthly and yearly bills. When I pay a bill, I check off the box. Not very hi tech, but it gets the job done.
If I see “extra” money building up in checking, I check the paper, and if it is not needed in the next few months, I shuffle it off to a HYSA. Periodically, I move money from the HYSA to an investment account, which is shoving money into index funds on a set schedule.
Yeah, there’s a lot of manual stuff going on, and if I have a busy month I only get to the bills and not the other stuff. But I feel in better control of all of it, and less likely that I will miss a fraudulent thing happening.
One thing I would add about due dates is that since they tend to fall on the same day of the month, they will sometimes fall on weekends or holidays. In the bad old days, it was up to you to make sure the payment got there on the last business day before the holidays. If you were unfortunate enough to have a due date on a Monday holiday, it would have had to get there the Friday beforehand.
When the CFPB was formed, it was able to institute a rule that said that when the due date fell on a day when the bank wasn’t open for processing payments (or a mail holiday), then the payment would still be considered on time if it came in by 5 PM of the next business day.
Still, you do not want to rely on banks getting regulations right, so if you send payments to them, be aware of getting the payment to them at a time they are open, before the due date.
If you set up an auto-pay on the credit card bank’s website, they will generally consider the payment on time, even if it’s scheduled for the weekend. But if you do that, please make sure you look at your statement monthly. If someone makes a fraudulent charge, you only get so long to contest it, and “my bill was on auto pay so I didn’t look at the statement” is not a valid excuse.
American here. Not only do I use credit cards for all of my purchases (and pay them off every month, so no debt builds up), but I am finding it increasingly hard to use cash on a daily basis. I used to prefer cash, especially on trips, as a way to control spending when needing to stick to a budget. But now so many places here have stopped taking cash altogether, or shuffle cash purchases off to a separate process which takes longer. I still carry cash, but find I rarely use it,
But all the different types of electronic payments now are confusing. I recall getting stuck at an airport once, and sitting near a place that had food for a few hours. They took cash, credit, and Google Pay, but not Apple Pay. I was amazed by the number of people who end up walking away when they realized that, and who didn’t have an alternate way to pay.
A community like this will get people coming for answers to basic questions like “How do credit cards work” and “should I get a loan or a lease on my car”. Having a wiki provides a set place we can point to that has consistent answers to those basic questions, so they’re not answered differently every time they’re asked.
I think what’s important is to have content that helps people become financially literate, no matter where they are starting from. In the US at least, high schools are in the midst of curriculum battles over social issues, so that the basic concepts of financial literacy rarely get covered.
So, some people here might need help figuring out the optimal investment balance in their after-tax portfolios, while others may need help making a basic budget and figuring out how to pay down their student loans. We need to make room for all of those.
If we have the capability to start a Wiki, it should have some basic topics there that most people encounter at one point or another. How loans work, how insurance works, what’s the process to buy a car or a house, how to budget to pay off high interest debt. A lot of this advice is region-specific.
Just cleaned out mt garage, closet, and attic. No clue why I kept every single box of anything electronic/tech based in the last ten years. I just tossed boxes for phones I haven’t had in years, old CPU and heat sync boxes, boxes for 100mbps nics, old modems I don’t have anymore. I’ve never needed any of these and have...
It’s because when you first buy the thing, you don’t want to get rid of the box right away, in case you need to RMA it. So it gets put in the pile along with the rest of the boxes. Then you’re in the same place for years and the pile gets bigger.
I do a decent job with culling the boxes, and even toss obsolete tech now and then, but I have been hoarding hard drives for 30 years. It seems more trouble to securely dispose of them than to just let them pile up. I even still have IDE drives and am not quite sure whether I have an adaptor that can read them. But I can’t throw them out, because I don’t know if I have sensitive info on them.
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.
That’s basically a lease. Although it might not be a bad idea to lease an EV. It’s basically a battery with wheels. The battery will die someday, and when it does you may be better off getting a newer car with newer tech vs. replacing the battery in your older one.
Best way to buy a house for another person? [USA]
I'm in an extremely fortunate position where my Mom, upon learning about current mortgage rates and why I haven't bought a house yet, wants to essentially be my bank to buy a house. As in, she wants to fund the house, put it in my name, and I pay her a reasonable down payment and pay a "mortgage" to her at 2-3%. So what would be...
Inflation is higher than they would like you to believe.
The US government is telling everybody that inflation is 3.4% per year. That is not correct. Try 14.2% and that's about right. Source : gold/usd 1 year simple moving average.
Single mode fiber cable: which SFP module?
My Internet provider just installed a 2,5/1Gbps Internet connection and I've asked the guys to run a couple of their fiber to connect my router (HP Prodesk with OPNsense) to my server....
If I'm legal resident of a state with no state income tax, but work a W-4 job in a different state that has a very high state income tax...
… is it normal/legal for the state I work in to withhold state income tax from my paychecks?
IRA lump sum? USA
I’ve read that if you have the money up front, investing it as a lump sum on January 1st will produce higher returns more often that investing on a monthly/weekly basis. Is there more to consider in 2024 with our current high interest rates?
Can you offer investment advice? I'm debt-free, about to start earning $2k more per month than I need to survive. Please offer any suggestions for optimal investment method(s).
48 years old, currently have no investments. My net worth is my car and the clothes on my back, and I don’t ever want to be in this situation again....
Salary Needed To Buy a Home In The US ( reddthat.com )
Homes "unaffordable" in 99% of nation for average American ( www.cbsnews.com )
[EU] Buying company shares at my job - worth it?
As the title mentions, the company I work at is offering free shares when buying back some of the company’s shares, as well as a discount, depending on the amount of shares purchased....
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....
How credit cards work, and how to use them properly
Intro...
Do you use a credit card? Why or why not?
I know this might just reflect financial culture differences across countries, but let’s give it a try...
[AskFinance] Where should we create our wiki?
Hello everyone,...
[AskFinance] Which type of content would you like to see?
Hello everyone,...
You Don't Need to Keep Every Electronic Box!
Just cleaned out mt garage, closet, and attic. No clue why I kept every single box of anything electronic/tech based in the last ten years. I just tossed boxes for phones I haven’t had in years, old CPU and heat sync boxes, boxes for 100mbps nics, old modems I don’t have anymore. I’ve never needed any of these and have...
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.