can someone explain leverage to me as practised by those RE bullshitters finfluencers. I feel their whole spiel is just bullshit but I don't know enough to be sure about it....
You can't use house #1 as the collateral for both the mortgage on house #1 and house #2, because the bank is smart enough to know that you don't actually own house #1. If house #1 has appreciated significantly from the purchase price, or you have paid off a good chunk of the mortgage, you may have enough equity to take a loan (eg home equity line of credit / HELOC) on that equity to get down-payment money for a second house. That's generally a slow process, unless you happen to own property in a market bubble.
If it makes you feel any better, I’ve always expected around 1/3 of income to taxes. 7.65% OASDI, 5-10% state, 15-20% fed… Maybe even more if you have a municipal income tax. Tack on some pre-tax ‘benefits,’ like healthcare, life insurance, and parking, and it’s amazing how much of a paycheck can be gone before you even get to rent.
A 2024 Maverick has a wheelbase of 120" and curb weight of 3600 pounds. In 1991, Ford’s compact pickup, the Ranger, had a wheelbase of just 108" and curb weight of 2800 pounds. “Small” trucks have gained a foot and half a ton. The Ranger itself is now a 5000 pound behemoth that outweighs the 1990 F-150 by 1000 pounds.
Looking for a brokerage with functional, individual API access to, at least, account positions, balances, and equity/fund/bond prices. Used to be happy with TDA, but they got bought by Scwab, whose API has been “pending” for six months.
As long as it’s actually a TDA account, the API will work. They’re transitioning all those accounts to Schwab, though. Once they transition your account, you no longer have TDA account, so no TDA credentials to authenticate with the API.
I’ve registered on Schwab’s developer site, which as listed ‘individual trader api’ as ‘coming by the end of 2023’ as long as I’ve been aware. They do have a slew of active professional APIs, but those are contract-dependent and not fit for (my) purpose.
I got forcibly migrated a couple months ago, and also expected them just to migrate TDA’s API to their own system, but I’m losing faith in their ‘end of 2023’ promise. I haven’t been able to get any more detail on their timeline/progress, although the developer portal is responsive. It’s frustrating. There’s nothing magical about Schwab’s website, fees, trading, or account services, so if I can manage my frustration and restore my data access by migrating, I’m open.
The options my own search has turned up are Alpaca and Interactive Brokers. Alpaca seems pretty sketchy; still in the ‘startup’ phase. IBKR seems legit, but isn’t one I’d heard of before. I was hoping someone on social media might have had great experience somewhere and be ready to share. Or even that some brokerage might be watching for the opportunity to advertise, even on a community with barely 100 monthly users.
Sure, but you can’t practically hoard beans against the collapse of society, and you have to live in society until it collapses.
In the meantime, the stock market represents human activity - as long as there are more people doing more things with the tools and technology built by previous generations, stock market is going to trend up.
Most people take a simple view of cash: they have a checking account for spending and a savings account for savings, and if they get fancy, they’ll have a CD for longer term savings goals. Power users will change to an online bank with better returns, and that’s about as far as it goes. That certainly works, but we can do a...
I think of my checking account as a buffer - direct deposit goes in, bill pay goes out, any amount beyond this month’s bills goes to/from brokerage. My particular account has a minimum balance and the actual balance hovers right around there. Any interest lost/earned on that balance over a year isn’t enough to worry about, and no payee/payer ever sees the magic numbers to access my real savings.
The key is not to have cash just sitting around, regardless where. If you don’t have immediate need, get it into investments. Modern mutual funds or ETFs are liquid enough to serve as emergency fund - unless your ‘emergency fund’ is something you dip into every other month. While interest rates are so high, it may not feel pointless to keep cash, but even those high rates are only 1-2% above inflation (and have only risen above inflation recently). Get your money back into the economy; don’t pay a banker to do it for you.
So, definitely coming from a position of privilege, but I think of a 6 month efund sitting at 2% (historical) MMA or having a couple of 10-20% years. If you’re looking at an efund that’s 105% of what you put in vs 150%, then that crash is a much smaller concern. Especially because the actual nadir of values (at least in the last 30 years) has been quite short lived. Why I distinguish between emergencies and events that happen once or twice a year: personal emergencies are kind of likely to coincide with stock market dips/crashes, but there’s a lot of growth potential in the meantime. I have taxable and tax-sheltered investments, and don’t distinguish a specific efund.
Risk tolerance is definitely a thing, though. I was 98% equities, 2% cash for 20 years, and only started getting some junk bonds when the yields got above 7%.
These US healthcare systems are effectively scams. Yes in theory they can save you money, however in theory there is no difference between theory and practice, while in practice there is.
I think the real use case for FSAs is people who have regular or predictable health care costs. If you know that, every month, you need $500 for insulin, or every year you have two $200 dentist visits that aren’t covered by insurance, then paying those expenses with pre-tax money can be a big savings - saves federal tax, payroll tax, and state tax. If you’re a young, healthy person whose biggest health expense is hangover advil, then FSA is not for you.
The vlogger’s problem is he was putting money into the FSA “just in case,” and got screwed because he didn’t have need. I’m sure there are tons of HR departments out there that do a terrible job of explaining the use-it-or-lose-it nature of FSAs, so it’s valuable to have the rant out there, but they are good accounts for the people that benefit.
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....
Index funds because none of us (including the professionals who study them all day long) know enough about individual companies and the future of the economy to pick winners consistently. Investing in “everything” averages out the winners and losers and gives you the natural growth of human activity.
Tax protected accounts because you’ll make withdrawals at a time when your income is (presumably) lower, and deferring income to that time means deferring taxes to the lower tax bracket. In the US, tax protected accounts have special purposes: education, healthcare, retirement.
At 48, education is probably only relevant if you want to pay for kids’ college, and that’s what [www.irs.gov/taxtopics/tc313](529 plans) are for.
You are definitely coming to the point in life where, regardless of your general health, you will begin to incur healthcare costs. In the US, that’s an incredibly complex topic, but one aspect to be aware is [www.healthcare.gov/…/health-savings-account-hsa/](Health Savings Account). You have to be on ‘high deductible’ insurance to qualify for these, so probably not empoyer-sponsored insurance, but if you’re self-insuring through the marketplace, many of the lowest-premium plans qualify. HSA will let you save around $4000/year tax-deductible and tax-free, with the restriction that it can only be used for healthcare costs (not insurance premiums) until age 65, at which point the money becomes available for any purpose, still tax-free.
Retirement is probably you main long-term concern. If your employer offers a 401(k), you can put up to $22k in that every year. If your income is $42k, you pay $3200 in OASDI and around $1500 in Federal income tax. Putting $20k in a 401(k) will reduce your declarable income to $22k, your OASDI tax to $1700 and Federal tax to $0, effectively giving you an extra $3000/year to spend/save. 401(k) money is fully taxable when withdrawn, but if you have to withdraw $18k/year (1500/month) after retirement, that is still below the Federal tax threshold (depending on your social security benefits).
For sure, if your employer offers any kind of match to your 401(k) contributions, contribute at least enough to get all of that match. It’s literally free money.
Non-employer retirement accounts are IRAs, either Traditional (tax deductible contributions, tax deferred withdrawals) or Roth (taxable contributions, tax free withdrawals), with $6500/year contribution limits. Roth makes retirement planning very easy, because however much you have saved is what you can spend, but they also mean paying taxes on that money today. In your case, at a marginal tax rate of (7.65+12) = 19.65%, that means $1280/year, where, as with the 401(k), it looks like your after-retirement tax rate will be around 0%, anyway. For most people who qualify, traditional IRA is the lower cost solution, even though it increases the after-retirement tax cost.
Finally, I’m not a pro, this is all just information I’ve picked up. 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. Think of it like therapy for your financial mental health. They’ll give you completely boiler-plate advice, but they know all this stuff inside and out, and should be able to set you on a good path in just one meeting. Don’t sign up for an annual contract.
Definitely true, although I think this is more of a concern when you hire one on an ongoing basis to manage your accounts. That management leads to conflict of interest between commissions the advisor might earn on particular investments and maximizing return for the client. Fee-only (is supposed to) mean the advisor doesn’t accept commissions, and should minimize the conflict of interest practically, rather than legally.
Google is probably your best bet, honestly, but it’s not as easy as I implied. www.napfa.org is a good place to start. I tried to find one willing to do a one-off consult when I retired. Figured “fee only” would have a business model like lawyers, but most of them seem to be built around annual contracts with fees based on assets (1+%), which generally means that their target market is people with at least seven figures liquid wealth. At least in my MCOL urban market. There may some good options, or courses, for normal humans associated with a local university or community college.
Astonishingly, to me, a lot of the financial planners I contacted were fully subscribed and not accepting new clients. There are a lot of people out there ready to spend $10,000+/year for the reassurance of a quarterly meeting with a CFP who’s almost certainly not getting them $10k/year in tax savings or investment return. Definitely not improving tax savings by that much in the second year over the first year.
I mean, I’m a numbers guy, so I’m totally comfortable with exponential growth, uncertain returns, and tax models, even if I don’t know all the legal loopholes. To me, the CFP is most useful for knowing those loopholes. I know enough people who are intimidated by calculating the tip at a restaurant to understand the value a financial planner subscription brings, but the fees for apparent effort absolutely blow my mind. Even famously low-fee Vanguard offers a personal advisor service, for 0.3% of assets, which is basically a human to plug your numbers into their robo-advisor.
They’re structured to pay barely more than inflation - 0.0-0.5% more through most of this century - which means that even the 5.27% rate on todays bonds will fall when inflation goes back to its 2% target. They’re about the safest investment you can make, but you’re not going to increase your purchasing power.
Excess money may not buy happiness, but lack of money causes a lot of unhappiness.
The study you’re referring to was basically that. There has been some follow-up, including www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2016976118 that suggests any plateau, if one exists, is more like $400-500k. The latter study used continuous sampling via go.trackyourhappiness.org, where the former did retrospective, daily, binary sampling, so they’re not exactly comparable. i.e.: if you ask someone 6 times a day to rate their happiness 1-10 right then, you’re going to get different results than if you ask them whether yesterday was a good day.
There’s a whole weird thing people do where they can be quite satisfied with their life at any particular moment, but dissatisfied when asked about their life overall. I suspect that the $75k plateau is more of the latter, where the lack of plateau is more of the former.
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.
Can’t read this specific article, but I’ll point out that the “4% rule” and similar strategies mostly come from historical analysis of only the US stock market and US treasuries. The 4% rule really only works in the US, Canada, and Australia - developed nations that weren’t destroyed by WWI and WWII. The rest of the world has had “once in a generation” catastrophes every 20-ish years, which is just about once every generation. And not little micro-catastrophes like Covid or 2008 that recover after a couple years.
If you’ve only been saving since 2019, that is approximately no time at all. They may tell you that, on average, the stock market returns 8-10%/year, which might make you think that some of your savings should be up 40%, but that’s not how it works. (US) stock market averaged 8% after inflation, 10% including inflation, through the 20th century, but its actual, annual return is more like 10±12%. You need a lot of years to average out that much variability.
The financial industry makes its money on fear. On people scared to make their own decisions, so turn to a professional; or people scared of the future so they do desperate, emotion-driven trades. The financial media are there to propagate that fear. Add to that going into an election year with a Democratic President, and you’re going to see mountains of negative economic sentiment and outlook.
FXIAX has been pretty much flat for the last couple years. Your 2019-2020 contributions should have nice gains, but they’re a relatively small part of your total contributions. FSPSX & FSMAX are pretty flat going back to 2019, with significant declines from 2021. FXNAX has been hit hard by the interest rate hikes. You’ve had a slow couple of years, without enough accumulation to outweigh them.
That’s just the way it goes sometimes. If you look at your returns after a +20% year, it’s going to feel great; if you look after a -5% year, it’s going to feel bad. Retirement progress, in my experience, having lived the dot-bomb, 9/11, the Great Recession, and Covid, does not feel slow-and-steady; it feels like treading water and then rather suddenly having a credible chance. You put money in slow-and-steady, so that it’s invested during those infrequent and unpredictable +20% years. The first year you rack up gains greater than your salary is amazing.
Yeah, but you’re thinking about when the company picks people to fire. Forcing people back to the office decreases worker satisfaction across the board, and workers will respond individually. I’d argue that those highest paid will be most willing to suffer the inconvenience of commuting, regardless of their talent, so the “make working here annoying” plan will tend to retain higher paid employees while losing lower paid people through attrition. Likewise, workers are more likely to tolerate the annoyances if they don’t have any other options. Good people can more easily job-hop, so this strategy is also likely to retain the lower-performing employees while the top performers go elsewhere, not considering pay rate. Total labor costs will decline, because there’s fewer people working, but it’s not an efficient selection process.
Long story short: pissing on your employees results in a smaller, lower quality workforce.
Yeah, I think I phrased that badly. I just meant that people can be paid to tolerate annoyances. More likely to happen in reverse, like if I’m going to have to do this unpleasant thing, then you’re going to have to pay me extra, but the principle’s the same.
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....
I think that talking about the “salary” you want in retirement is misleading. When you’re working, you have a top-line salary that’s really easy to access and pin your concepts of lifestyle to, but actually has very little to do with your lifestyle. Example: if you’ve got $100k salary, you’re probably paying something like $30k between federal, state, and SS taxes. If you’re maxing your retirement contributions, there goes another $20k, and you’re only taking home $50k.
If you’re saving 50% of a $100k top-line, including that 401k contribution, then you’re probably living on something more like $30k after taxes, and it’s a lot easier to save enough to pay yourself $30k than $100k. If you’re living on $30k/year withdrawals from savings, you’re not going to pay taxes. You’re not going to need to save $50k/year. You only need to replace that $30k, and 25*$30k is just $750k.
The 25x rule includes $0 social security. Reasonable for FIRE people, who may aim not to work enough to qualify for SS, but if you will, then you can calculate the savings equivalent to your estimated income. eg, if they say you’ll probably qualify for $1500/month = $18k/year, that’s equivalent to 18k*25 = $450k savings.
Income is the wrong focus for retirement, and I’d be suspicious of any benchmarks that talk about replacing income. Spending is the number you need to pay attention to, because you’re not going to be paying as much in taxes, and you’re not going to be saving for retirement after you retire. Those tend to take a pretty big bite out of your nominal working-life income, and the difference can make retirement seem like an even bigger hurdle than it actually is.
There definitely are ways that spending can increase after retirement to take up money previously used for taxes and savings. The key thing is to focus on the spending side. You have to know how much you’re actually spending, today, before you can sensibly add new expectations. Then you can sensibly plan for how to meet those expenses. You’ve hit on probably the two most popular categories - healthcare and travel.
In the US, healthcare is a huge unknown anti-lottery, but the ACA has been a great boon for early retirees. Early retirees generally have very little declarable income - spending from taxable savings, so only the gains or dividends are taxable - and the ACA tax credit effectively caps your premiums at a sliding percentage of that income. The nominal premium may be $600/month, but you’ll only pay $80 at $30k income (which might allow you $60k spending). Biden changed the formula for Covid to be even more generous, but I believe that’s temporary. Obviously still have to pay care costs, but ACA plans have annual out-of-pocket caps, currently in the $6-12k range, so you (theoretically) won’t face total disaster if you need a $250k liver transplant. You still have the lottery system of whether you have significant costs or not, but having a limit on your losses helps. Definitely learn how the ACA and Health Savings Accounts work if you’re planning to retire early.
EOL care is a big part of that unknown. There is insurance for long-term care that can, if nothing else, convert the unpredictable anti-lottery to a predictable expense. It’s also worth noting that when you need to transition to assisted living, you no longer need your primary residence, so it’s fair to plan to sell the house to pay for the nursing home.
If you plan on passing the house on, then maybe the kids can earn that house by helping with care. My parents planned on passing their house on to the kids, but none of us want it. Us kids needed help when our parents were 50 - college, starting households, etc - but by the time they retired, let alone approach end-of-life, we’re now 40s, 50s, established in careers, and starting to think of our own retirements and legacies. By the time my parents (probably) pass, their kids will mostly be retired and their grandkids well on the way of their own lives. Passing at 85 is very different for the surviving generations than passing at 65.
For me, using the future value of the costs exacerbates my fear. I prefer to work in inflation-adjusted numbers and reduce expected investment returns by inflation. Mathematically, it’s the same - add 2%/year to all your costs or subtract 2%/year from all your savings - and I have a much better intuitive feel for today’s costs & spending. SS income gets an annual inflation-rate increase.
I keep almost all of my ‘emergency savings’ in index funds. Its value may fluctuate more than cash savings, but the higher return more than compensates. Unless, maybe, you face events that force you to tap it yearly or more, in which case I wouldn’t really consider it savings, so much as budgeting. I’ll generally have around a month-and-a-half worth of spending in cash, but that’s mostly because it’s going to get spent this month.
I think a significant part of recommending to keep cash savings falls to the legacy of financial markets. There used to be significant costs associated with transactions - I don’t mean $7 E-trade commissions, I mean $50+0.10/share - that meant it was really expensive if you needed to get $1000 out of the stock market for car repairs. There used to be significant lags: you’d call your broker, order the transaction, then have to wait several days for the proceeds to be delivered, a few more days for the check to arrive in the mail, then a few more days for the check to clear your bank; now, you order the trade online and they’ll have funds in your bank within 2 days at no cost. If you had an expense come up that needed paid today, then money locked away in the market was useless. Today, you put that expense on your credit card - which only became common in the 1970s - don’t need the actual cash for weeks, and can easily get investment funds that fast.
Example: I’ve been putting money into medical savings (USA) for a few years, which all goes into a S&P 500 index. That’s “down” about 10% from 2021, but I have around 40% net gains in the account. It turns out I have significant medical expense coming up, and it’s going to be a lot easier to deal with because of those gains. For scale, I’m expecting this thing to cost something like 3-4 month’s total spending and the healthcare savings is around 9 months.
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....
If you’re purchasing shares at a discount that you can immediately sell at full price, that is effectively free money.
Whether you want to hold those shares over a longer term is more complicated. 1) do you think the company is going to be more successful than its competitors? 2) do you think the industry as a whole is healthy and growing? 3) are you comfortable having savings and job dependent on the same organization? (i.e.: if the company has a big loss, you may lose your job and the value of your stock/savings will go down at the same time)
If you’re not comfortable answering the first two questions, then you may want to consider buying the discounted shares, selling them immediately, and putting the proceeds into some kind of diversified index fund. Index funds are popular because they diversify around the losses (and successes) of individual companies and individual industries, and bank on the general phenomenon of long-term economic growth. i.e.: population increase and new products.
ESPPs are a great way for the company to get employees to care about share price and get emotionally invested in the success of the company. They’re a great way for companies to provide additional compensation to employees (and the executives who put the plans in place) without having to call it salary, which often has tax benefits for both the company and the employee.
It is said that ACs are counterproductive in fight against global warming, in that while they may make the local environment temporarily livable, the greenhouse gases produced while making the electricity needed to operate them heat up the rest of the Earth by much more than the relief from the AC itself. By how much exactly is...
I won’t comment on the final accuracy, but I will note that this is an extremely roundabout path to your final answer, and some of the intermediate steps are…weird. Most notably, the speculation that every man, woman, and child on the planet might run a 1 kW appliance 24/7/365. This is 7e13 kWh or 70k TWh, about 3x current global energy use (not just electicity) before accounting for efficiency. The equation you cite for radiative forcing, specifically its ln(new/old) term is very non-linear, so you should get a much lower marginal effect from 70k TWh than from 1 kWh.
A simpler approach is to calculate the CO2 required for your 1 kWh AC, i.e.: 1kWh * 3600 kJ/kWh / 0.6 efficiency / 890 kJ/mol = 6.7 mol CO2. Current atmospheric CO2 is 75 Pmol. From that, I get radiative forcing of ln((7.4e16 + 6.7)/7.4e16)/ln(2)3.7 * 4pi*(6.4e6^2). Numpy won’t tell me what ln(74000000000000006.7/74000000000000000). It will tell me the forcing from 10 kWh is ~2.5W, or the same 0.25W/kWh you got. I guess ln is not that nonlinear in the 1+1e-16 to 1+1e-4 range, after all.
0.25W/kWh seems improbably high. 1 kWh is about 0.1 W running 24/365. At 60% efficiency, that’s burning 0.2W of natural gas and implies that the radiative forcing from CO2 is much greater than the energy to produce the CO2 in the first place. I get that the energy source for heating is different from the energy source for electricity, but it feels wrong, even without the 1000 year persistence. I don’t know where the radiative forcing equation came from nor its constraints, so I’m suspicious of its application in this context. There’s a lot of obscenely large numbers interacting with obscenely small numbers, and I don’t know enough to say whether those numbers are accurate enough for the results to be reasonable. Then there’s the question of converting the energy input to temperature change.
Numpy won’t tell me what ln(74000000000000006.7/74000000000000000). Ran into exactly this problem for individual calculation
Trouble is that 74000000000000006.7/74000000000000000 ~ 1.000 000 000 000 000 1 and double-float precision is 0.000 000 000 000 000 2. Needs a 96 or 128 bit float. The whole topic of estimating one’s personal contribution to global phenomena is loaded with computer precision risks, which is part of what makes me skeptical of the final result, without looking far more closely than my interest motivates. Like calculating the sea level rise from spitting in the ocean - I believe it happens, but I’m not sure I believe any numerical result.
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....
Estimate bills for the month & transfer the rest to mutual funds
Expenses all paid by credit card, so I’m always ‘budgeting’ for the previous month and there’s no guesswork. Emergency expenses larger than a paycheck might require selling some mutual funds, but in 20 years that never happened.
Now I’m not working, budgeting is basically the same, except that interest and dividends appear at random intervals in brokerage, are no longer automatically reinvested, but transferred to checking to cover bills, usually around the same time as the paycheck used to appear.
I don’t automate anything, because I want to notice if a bill is larger than expected and address whatever caused that to happen.
And trading partial shares. Don’t need to have $150 to get a whole share of GOOG or AAPL; instead of putting $20 in a 0.5% savings account, it can go into an actual investment.
Baby boomers anticipate that 47% of pre-retirement earnings will be replaced by Social Security, according to results of an annual survey from the Nationwide Retirement Institute. But the reality for someone making what the Social Security Administration considers the average wage in recent years, about $60,000, is more like...
Almost all of GOP’s “reforms” for social security start with people 50 or 45 years old at their inception. It’s a lot easier to get current reitrees to reduce benefits for future retirees if you assure them that their own benefits are safe. But I agree that SS/MC will still be around, even if the purchasing power of benefits erodes substantially. It’s easier, and more conservative, to plan without SS, though, and retirement is so important that it makes sense to have safety factors at every step.
Taxing property doesn’t really work, because landlords just pass those taxes on to their tenants. Even if you make a big differential between owner-occupied and rental property (and homestead exemptions are already common), there’s a huge base of people who are either short-term residents or lack down payment, and will rent regardless of how much of the landlord’s taxes they have to pay. You can make specific neighborhoods or communities unappealing to landlords, but that just makes them move across the street.
One of the things that makes rental property attractive is the massive leverage available to speculators. You can easily get 5:1 leverage on a property - i.e., you get the profits on a million dollar investment for just $200k cash. Interest on the loan is low, because it’s backed the the property, and that interest is tax deductible, and there’s many ways to disguise profits or offset them with management expenses. Maybe there’s things you can do in the income tax code to discourage property rental, but it’s not going to be taxing the property directly.
The crash of 2008 is just 15 years ago. You could hardly give away properties in my neighborhood - there were multiple sales for less than the cost of my car. Those exact conditions may not recur, but speculators always, always overextend. The 15 years of continuous gains we’ve experienced since 2008 are historically unprecedented, so one might even guess that we’re due for a major correction. Maybe it won’t be for another 10 years, but there will definitely be a major housing crash “in our lifetime.” Unless, maybe, you’re already 80 years old.
If you want to disincentivize landlords through tax, it’ll be through income tax to directly reduce their profit. Take away the tax deduction for mortgage interest. Take away depreciation. It’s easy for most landlords to book taxable losses every year while generating positive cash flow.
Rent is always more than mortgage+insurance+taxes on equivalent property. The landlord has all the same expenses (and more) as a homeowner, passes them on to tenants, then adds expected vacancy and his profit on top.
I used to pack a lunch - nothing fancy, just a couple of sandwiches, & maybe fruit - then cook dinner, all for around $100/week. Started treating myself to bought lunches. Again nothing fancy, mostly fast-casual type places where you order at the counter & they bring your food to the table. Water not soda. Restaurant lunches are cheaper than restaurant dinners, but they’re also way more calories than my packed lunches, and I found I wasn’t in the mood for big dinners anymore. In the end, I was still spending around $100/week, eating out 5 days/week, and just having a snack in the evening.
Also consider a toaster oven. They come in sizes up to 12" or so, definitely big enough for 9x11 pans, and the small chamber means they heat up super fast. I have a gas range, but I keep an induction hotplate on top of one burner and a toaster oven, with convection, in the next room for smaller jobs. Keeps the CO2 and the heat down in the summer.
Hi, Personal Finance. I’m a relative novice to investing, but have thrown some money into the market pretty regularly since last year. Before that, I had really only put money in on a handful of occasions, whenever I had money I felt would be better invested than spent. My portfolio is just around $30k, and I’m investing...
When I was younger, I did more individual stocks and many different funds/etfs. Felt great when one did well, and I still hold some that have 10x gains. Some of those 10x gains were a decade ago, and have been pretty flat since then, but they’re still 10-baggers. I, too, tended not to put more into those big gainers, partly because they now seem expensive, partly because investing more would reduce my total percentage gains. When I was young and your portfolio was small, those individual wins had a big impact on the portfolio and it felt important to get the best possible immediate performance.
Over the years, though, the differences between funds average out. Gains over a year or two become a small fraction of the gains over a decade. I can see that some of my winners are only winners because I happened to buy them during a recession, like anything bought during the Covid panic. It’s become easier to dismiss the effect of stock/fund picking, and I’ve consolidated most of those funds into the stereotypical broad market indexes. Focussed ETFs, like LIT or QCLN, are safe from incompetence or fraud in individual company leadership, but the next administration can kill whole sectors with a change in tax or regulatory policy.
Please explain leverage to me
can someone explain leverage to me as practised by those RE bullshitters finfluencers. I feel their whole spiel is just bullshit but I don't know enough to be sure about it....
USA: New hourly job filling out a W-4, single person, no dependents, what's the lowest deduction we can choose?
Goal: the least amount of withholdings possible
Americans can no longer afford their cars ( www.newsweek.com )
'We have no rights.' Frustrated with California wage laws, Moonstone Bistro in Redding cuts lunch service ( krcrtv.com )
[US] Brokerage with decent API?
Looking for a brokerage with functional, individual API access to, at least, account positions, balances, and equity/fund/bond prices. Used to be happy with TDA, but they got bought by Scwab, whose API has been “pending” for six months.
Buy and hold works - Meet the 'unluckiest' stock market investor of modern times ( www.marketwatch.com )
Here’s an archived version of the page....
[US] Consider a brokerage account for your main bank
Most people take a simple view of cash: they have a checking account for spending and a savings account for savings, and if they get fancy, they’ll have a CD for longer term savings goals. Power users will change to an online bank with better returns, and that’s about as far as it goes. That certainly works, but we can do a...
Matt Breunig on HSA ＆ FSA: The Welfare System Stole $2k From Me ( www.youtube.com )
These US healthcare systems are effectively scams. Yes in theory they can save you money, however in theory there is no difference between theory and practice, while in practice there is.
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....
I'm not asking to be rich. ( lemmy.world )
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.
The reason CEOs want workers to Return To Office is because they want you to quit ( www.fastcompany.com )
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....
[EU] How many months savings do you consider enough?
As the title says I am trying to see where people stand on this. Obviously this is all personal preference. But that is what I am after....
[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....
In terms of kWh per kWh, by how much does greenhouse CO2 from running an air-conditioner heat up the rest of the Earth?
It is said that ACs are counterproductive in fight against global warming, in that while they may make the local environment temporarily livable, the greenhouse gases produced while making the electricity needed to operate them heat up the rest of the Earth by much more than the relief from the AC itself. By how much exactly is...
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....
Gen Z’s FOMO is driving them to trade more than any other generation ( archive.ph )
Baby Boomers Are Overestimating Future Social Security Income ( www.bloomberg.com )
Baby boomers anticipate that 47% of pre-retirement earnings will be replaced by Social Security, according to results of an annual survey from the Nationwide Retirement Institute. But the reality for someone making what the Social Security Administration considers the average wage in recent years, about $60,000, is more like...
Do you think we will ever have affordable housing again in our lifetime?
cross-posted from: lemmy.world/post/3560407...
[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....
Requesting investing advice for when stocks/ETFs are doing well
Hi, Personal Finance. I’m a relative novice to investing, but have thrown some money into the market pretty regularly since last year. Before that, I had really only put money in on a handful of occasions, whenever I had money I felt would be better invested than spent. My portfolio is just around $30k, and I’m investing...