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downout posted:This is probably only tangentially related to long term investing, but has anyone used Prosper or any other P2P lender? I'm curious if it's worth trying a small amount in one of those. The returns I see anecdotally reported are all over the place. There's an archived P2P lending thread, if that's any use to you. I haven't put any money in myself (though I remember looking into it way back when) but every time I've looked into them it seemed like more trouble than it was worth, and that there were better places to put my money, especially considering the liquidity problems and default rates. I remember people kept pointing out that all it takes is for one loan to go into default to eat up an awful lot of your notional return, so if you do go in, do some risk management by getting minimum-size slices of as many as you can (and this is going to reduce your returns, if you're doing it right). e: There's a really good one-post writeup in the Bad With Money thread and that should tell you a lot. Cassius Belli fucked around with this message at 16:45 on May 16, 2024 |
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May 16, 2024 16:35
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gently caress that's a lot of money to owe at 20% It might be a good idea to post a full budget. A balance transfer is an OK idea provided you can maintain discipline and continue to pay off the balance. I would consider that before trying to do a 401(k) loan. I would cut aggressively and stop contributing to other savings (assuming you have an adequate emergency fund) - you can always make up those 529 contributions or whatever once you pay off the CC debt, but 401(k) match money is time based and once you miss it, you miss it. The faster you can pay off the debt the better you will be.
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May 16, 2024 16:37
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:gently caress that's a lot of money to owe at 20% I appreciate the help and all but I'm not quite feeling up to posting a full budget and getting big into the weeds with everyone right now, maybe in the future if I screw this up (I've been pretty good lately but who knows). Will definitely take the rest of the advice though, thanks.
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May 16, 2024 16:46
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Cassius Belli posted:There's an archived P2P lending thread, if that's any use to you. I haven't put any money in myself (though I remember looking into it way back when) but every time I've looked into them it seemed like more trouble than it was worth, and that there were better places to put my money, especially considering the liquidity problems and default rates. I remember people kept pointing out that all it takes is for one loan to go into default to eat up an awful lot of your notional return, so if you do go in, do some risk management by getting minimum-size slices of as many as you can (and this is going to reduce your returns, if you're doing it right). Yeah its not worth it. Returns are meh, and it is an absolute tax nightmare to have a bunch of tiny loans. I got a tax form this year for investments made in 2016 - when loans default it often takes many years to get a recovery or charge off, so you are getting taxable events 53 cents at a time years after the loan should have been closed. If you want "fixed income, but more risky", a high yield corporate bond fund would be a *lot* better. Or, just increase your equity allocation.
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May 16, 2024 17:20
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Shame Boy posted:I appreciate the help and all but I'm not quite feeling up to posting a full budget and getting big into the weeds with everyone right now, maybe in the future if I screw this up (I've been pretty good lately but who knows). Will definitely take the rest of the advice though, thanks. Yeah no worries, good luck and give us an update in a few months! Looks like things are on the right track for you at least.
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May 16, 2024 17:22
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:Yeah no worries, good luck and give us an update in a few months! Looks like things are on the right track for you at least. Thanks, will do 
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May 16, 2024 17:30
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Cassius Belli posted:There's an archived P2P lending thread, if that's any use to you. I haven't put any money in myself (though I remember looking into it way back when) but every time I've looked into them it seemed like more trouble than it was worth, and that there were better places to put my money, especially considering the liquidity problems and default rates. I remember people kept pointing out that all it takes is for one loan to go into default to eat up an awful lot of your notional return, so if you do go in, do some risk management by getting minimum-size slices of as many as you can (and this is going to reduce your returns, if you're doing it right). Good find, I'll check those out. I've been doing some more reading on other sources, and, ya, there are quite a few drawbacks I wasn't aware of.
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May 16, 2024 19:22
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Shame Boy posted:Ah that's some important information I did not know, thanks. I'm a bit late to the discussion, but just make sure that the (I'm assuming) 0% APR intro period on the new card applies to balance transfers and not just purchases. Also they often have something like a separate 3-5% fee for balance transfers, at least based on the spate of 0% APR balance transfer offers I've been receiving recently. Still way better than the 20%, but just something to keep in mind.
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May 17, 2024 23:39
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i'm not sure if this is the right place to post this, but it could go long term or short term, i guess. my wife and i currently have an approx. 14k USD nest egg of savings that was in my hometown us bank which has been bought out. given that that we live in europe and never touch the money, i've been thinking about parking it somewhere else with better rates, since the new bank has terrible ones and even worse customer service. so, right now, i'm thinking about parking most of the money in short term treasury bills (since they have great rates and are super safe) or cds, leaving a few thousand in a money market account, which i periodically add to. is there a better option? liquidity isn't strictly a necessity, since we both live in europe and have other saving/retirement accounts and some investments in the portfolio, but the short term rates are so good on the treasury bills that i was thinking of just buying a bunch of 30-day t-bills and then rolling the whole thing over with the interest into another batch of t-bills every month until the rates start to fall. is that a dumb idea?
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May 18, 2024 12:16
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NoiseAnnoys posted:i'm not sure if this is the right place to post this, but it could go long term or short term, i guess. my wife and i currently have an approx. 14k USD nest egg of savings that was in my hometown us bank which has been bought out. given that that we live in europe and never touch the money, i've been thinking about parking it somewhere else with better rates, since the new bank has terrible ones and even worse customer service. I mean if you don’t need the money why not just VTI and chill?
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May 18, 2024 15:50
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NoiseAnnoys posted:i'm not sure if this is the right place to post this, but it could go long term or short term, i guess. my wife and i currently have an approx. 14k USD nest egg of savings that was in my hometown us bank which has been bought out. given that that we live in europe and never touch the money, i've been thinking about parking it somewhere else with better rates, since the new bank has terrible ones and even worse customer service. I think the real question is "when will you need/want the money". If the answer is in a few years then yeah tbills make sense. SGOV makes this pretty easy. If the answer is 10+ years then something like VTI would be pretty attractive to me. At the moment SGOV is beating inflation. This won't last forever. At some point SGOV will loose out to longer duration bond funds like BND. Its already lost compared to VTI over the past three years. Antillie fucked around with this message at 16:13 on May 18, 2024 |
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May 18, 2024 16:10
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Awkward Davies posted:I mean if you don’t need the money why not just VTI and chill? Antillie posted:I think the real question is "when will you need/want the money". If the answer is in a few years then yeah tbills make sense. SGOV makes this pretty easy. If the answer is 10+ years then something like VTI would be pretty attractive to me. At the moment SGOV is beating inflation. This won't last forever. At some point SGOV will loose out to longer duration bond funds like BND. Its already lost compared to VTI over the past three years. very good points here. mostly i hadn't really thought about mutual funds for some reason. originally we had thought about using that money for possible relocation back to the us or house downpayment, but the housing market is pretty hosed in prague and our careers have kept us here. i'm going to be back in the states in a few months dealing with it, so i'll talk to a vanguard rep and a few other possible brokers to see what our options are. we'd like to keep some liquidity available for short term needs so t-bills are still pretty attractive for that, but yeah, long term VTI or similar makes sense.
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May 18, 2024 20:37
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Are you looking for liquidity or low risk? VTI for example isn't meaningfully less liquid than a T-Bill (unless the US equities market melts down spectacularly and catastrophically), but it is riskier, meaning that you might be in a position to liquidate at a loss.
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May 18, 2024 22:59
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:Are you looking for liquidity or low risk? VTI for example isn't meaningfully less liquid than a T-Bill (unless the US equities market melts down spectacularly and catastrophically), but it is riskier, meaning that you might be in a position to liquidate at a loss. low risk for now, since i don't really want to monitor the investment and being 6 hours ahead of us time is hell on trying to get things done back in the states. that's why one month t-bills were kind of appealing. buy 'em, park the money there for a month, at the end of the month check to see what the rates are and then decide again.
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May 19, 2024 11:30
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to anyone itt that has a marcus account: You should start working on getting all of your money out now when time is on your side. i was supposed to be closing on a house today and am not able to because the agents there are straight up incompetent. my escrow broker called me yesterday saying she's been doing this for ten years and has never dealt with a bank this incompetent by a long stretch. we've now been through five iterations of:
i'm at my wits end and have gotten to the point where i've told them i'm not hanging up until we can see that the wire is going out and it's confirmed and they've hung up on me if you care about having access to your cash when you need it then get your money out of marcus ASAP
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May 23, 2024 15:02
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oh the above didn't include:
i'm serious when i say this has been the worst experience i've ever had with a financial institution
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May 23, 2024 15:05
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are you running a wire transfers to escrow direct out of a savings account because I don't really think I would try to do that with my Marcus account edit: obviously that is very frustrating and bad, but I don't think that there's really much of a "while you still can" going on here KYOON GRIFFEY JR fucked around with this message at 15:20 on May 23, 2024 |
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May 23, 2024 15:17
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Yup. Basically I wanted to be sure the money was in escrow in time so I gave them a call to discuss my options. Option 1 was transferring the money back to my Schwab checking account and getting it to the escrow from there vs. them wiring it directly to the escrow. They told me it'd be fine and they'd be able to get the wire out in a few hours It wasn't fine edit: Honestly after the first time they hosed up I still had plenty of time and should have called it off and gone with the original plan. The fact they even messed that up the first time in the way they did was a huge red flag and I should have bailed immediately
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May 23, 2024 15:21
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NoiseAnnoys posted:low risk for now, since i don't really want to monitor the investment and being 6 hours ahead of us time is hell on trying to get things done back in the states. that's why one month t-bills were kind of appealing. buy 'em, park the money there for a month, at the end of the month check to see what the rates are and then decide again. it just seems like an odd set of priorities given that you don't seem to be intending to use the money any time soon, unless i misinterpreted your posts
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May 23, 2024 15:21
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PIZZA.BAT posted:Yup. Basically I wanted to be sure the money was in escrow in time so I gave them a call to discuss my options. Option 1 was transferring the money back to my Schwab checking account and getting it to the escrow from there vs. them wiring it directly to the escrow. They told me it'd be fine and they'd be able to get the wire out in a few hours that sucks that they lied to you and then hosed up!
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May 23, 2024 15:23
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That sounds lovely, no self service? I wired my down payment from my Capital One savings account directly to the title company from the CO website and it confirmed within minutes at the recipient. Only annoying part was the wire fee but what’s $30 in the scheme of home buying
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May 23, 2024 15:44
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Googling around it looks like Marcus has gained a reputation for screwing up wire transfers to brokerage accounts.
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May 23, 2024 15:47
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:it just seems like an odd set of priorities given that you don't seem to be intending to use the money any time soon, unless i misinterpreted your posts i'm not sure what you mean? the appeal of the t-bills would be the interest rates (generally around 5% for the 1 to 3 month t-bills) and the security of the investment. so, the thinking is, i buy t-bills for a month or three months, collect the interest and then re-invest the whole return. earning a guaranteed $500 for a month of nothing is way better in my mind than keeping the $10 000 in a savings account that is doing nothing with a bank that has horrible customer service. mutual funds and indexes are nice, but i still have to do research on which ones to go with and then there's also the risk involved. the idea with the t-bills is just keep parking the money there and collecting the interest until the rates fall.
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May 23, 2024 18:09
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:are you running a wire transfers to escrow direct out of a savings account because I don't really think I would try to do that with my Marcus account Both times I have wired to escrow from my Ally savings account I set it up online. They called to confirm. It was there 30 min later.
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May 23, 2024 18:22
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NoiseAnnoys posted:so, the thinking is, i buy t-bills for a month or three months, collect the interest and then re-invest the whole return. earning a guaranteed $500 for a month of nothing is way better in my mind than keeping the $10 000 in a savings account that is doing nothing with a bank that has horrible customer service. You may have just mistyped this above, but just to be sure, the $500 on $10k is for a year, not a month.
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May 23, 2024 18:30
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NoiseAnnoys posted:i'm not sure what you mean? the appeal of the t-bills would be the interest rates (generally around 5% for the 1 to 3 month t-bills) and the security of the investment. so, the thinking is, i buy t-bills for a month or three months, collect the interest and then re-invest the whole return. earning a guaranteed $500 for a month of nothing is way better in my mind than keeping the $10 000 in a savings account that is doing nothing with a bank that has horrible customer service. mutual funds and indexes are nice, but i still have to do research on which ones to go with and then there's also the risk involved. the idea with the t-bills is just keep parking the money there and collecting the interest until the rates fall. I think the point is that if you don’t need this money, and you have a long time for it to appreciate then it is a better candidate for being invested in a broad market fund. The research involved in finding the broad market fund is minimal. Go to any investing forum and you will get largely the same answers. VTI is up 25% over the last year. So with your $10k you would either have $500 from bonds, or $2500 from VTI. With inflation at 3.4% for the year, which one would you pick? Obviously investing in stocks does carry risk. But over the long term stocks go up, historically. With a longer time horizon you have the ability to weather the short term fluctuations.
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May 23, 2024 18:43
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Agronox posted:You may have just mistyped this above, but just to be sure, the $500 on $10k is for a year, not a month. Yeah if I could get zero risk 60% annual returns in a 3-4% inflation environment I’d be  so hard
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May 23, 2024 19:54
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:Yeah if I could get zero risk 60% annual returns in a 3-4% inflation environment I’d be Can I get that by investing in stonks rather than stocks
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May 23, 2024 21:01
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Jabarto posted:Can I get that by investing in stonks rather than stocks Exactly
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May 23, 2024 22:02
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Jabarto posted:Can I get that by investing in stonks rather than stocks Only if you have diamond hands.
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May 24, 2024 02:29
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Duckman2008 posted:Only if you have diamond hands. 
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May 24, 2024 02:41
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Well it took three days but it finally came through 
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May 24, 2024 04:27
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Agronox posted:You may have just mistyped this above, but just to be sure, the $500 on $10k is for a year, not a month. I was phone posting but I was thinking about 30-day t-bills, mostly but point taken.
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May 24, 2024 11:35
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Just to confirm that you are tracking - the annualized yield on the 30 day bill is about 5% which means the monthly yield is approximately 0.42%. This whole discussion makes a lot more sense to me if you went in thinking the monthly yield on a 30 day bill was 5%. It’s not.
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May 24, 2024 12:32
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PIZZA.BAT posted:Well it took three days but it finally came through Glad it all came through, I can’t imagine how stressed I would have been
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May 24, 2024 14:43
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The Marcus where-is-my-money story arc spooks me on online HYSAs in general. I'm not a huge fan of the idea that there are hidden landmines in HYSA transactions that can put your funds into an unspecified period of limbo. It seems like a lot of the stories I'm seeing online are based on a few specific failure-modes, either (1) sending money from the HYSA to an account it didn't originate from, or (2) wiring the money literally anywhere. And I can understand that this should raise the bank's level of scrutiny of the transaction, but they don't appear to have a clear path for dealing with it and it leaves people in customer service hell. And there's no way to know if there are more landmines. I'm considering moving my HYSA funds to a money market at my local bank, which obviously comes with lower yields but at least I can go to a physical branch to resolve any problems.
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May 24, 2024 16:04
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Marcus is a shitshow because it wasn’t making enough money for Goldman Sachs so GS is basically shutting down or divesting that entire group. I have no worries about the thread’s old fave HYSA, Ally.
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May 24, 2024 16:26
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Serious_Cyclone posted:at least I can go to a physical branch to resolve any problems. I think you are wildly overestimating the competence of retail bank employees.
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May 24, 2024 16:29
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pmchem posted:Marcus is a shitshow because it wasn’t making enough money for Goldman Sachs so GS is basically shutting down or divesting that entire group. I have no worries about the thread’s old fave HYSA, Ally. This is good to know. I have a Marcus account, and I pulled about 60% of my money from it yesterday after I read the thread. It completed fine, so I'm going to pull the rest on Tuesday to avoid weekend + holiday and figure out where I'm going to put it. I know GS had already given up on the Marcus investing stuff, and I was wondering if the savings account system was suffering as well.
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May 24, 2024 16:31
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drk posted:I think you are wildly overestimating the competence of retail bank employees. Granted, but when the comparison is relying on the competence of minimum-bid customer service phone bank workers it seems like a step up.
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May 24, 2024 16:33
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