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legsarerequired posted:I made a post on my Facebook profile asking people for advice on how to pick a financial adviser. I like my current adviser, and my friend who worked for a bank said that she's asking the right questions, but I decided it couldn't hurt to ask around and compare. Protip: A lot of the advice you'll receive from financial advisors and retirement planners will include a stiff dose of fearmongering to scare you into giving them money to invest (which earns them commissions and fees.) Obviously more savings and less spending are both good things and I don't want to deter you from building a stronger financial future, but you really probably do not need to be in panic mode. You've mentioned that you're putting away $110 per paycheck + $68 employer match--if that's a twice per month paycheck that's honestly about enough to put you there, if you're planning on working to a full retirement age of 67. This is a minimum, granted, and anything you save above that is going to make your retirement more secure against future benefit cuts, employment setbacks, unexpectedly high inflation, etc. I absolutely would be trying to put a couple hundred more bucks away each month but you don't need to be self-flagellating over your lack of savings.
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Nov 6, 2014 17:20
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GoGoGadgetChris posted:20%/$100,000. So a $400,000 mortgage would have a monthly payment of about $2,025. Which is just over 30% of the pretax income. So including taxes/insurance/utilities, it would probably hit at least 40% of my post-tax income. Aight gently caress it! That sounds like an absurdly lenient mortgage rate but you'd still be better served taking advantage of that generous rate on something $150k or so lower.
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Nov 10, 2014 20:20
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GoGoGadgetChris posted:Crunching it out on my HP12c shows a 30 year term, 4.5% loan, and $400,000 balance as $2,026.74. I figured 4.5% was a conservative estimate if anything! Your actual payment is going to include property taxes and insurance, which will likely jack it up about 25%. It is probably technically possible for you to afford that house if you manage the rest of your finances well but it's not remotely good with money.
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Nov 10, 2014 20:57
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Jastiger posted:This is good discussion, but I'm confused on one thing with the buy vs rent thing. What area are you people in that renting is SIGNIFICANTLY cheaper than buying? Most placed for comparable space here has a rent close to or even more than what a house payment would cost after you factor in insurance, taxes, etc. I'm just trying to wrap my head around how it's better to pay the same or more in rent for less space, security, and yes, even equity. In addition to what others have said, good luck finding "comparable spaces" for sale. Where I live we the prices are about the same and we could do the exact same thing as you--if we wanted to live in a 50-year-old house badly needing updates and maintenance ($$$). All the more recent inventory consists of $300k+ McMansions that would run closer to $1500 a month with taxes and insurance. Alternately, by not hoarding so much poo poo that we need to spend $1000+ a month to house it all, we can keep renting our largish 1br for $650 a month. The only "comparable spaces" would be decrepit tiny houses in the worst parts of town. That's part of the edge in renting--you're not comparing renting X square feet to buying X square feet, because in a lot of markets buying a house almost by definition means buying more space than most people will reasonably need.
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Nov 11, 2014 16:35
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Nerds are precisely the kind of people who rent in order to maximize their investment savings. People looking for get rich quick schemes (such as stock picking) are generally pretty happy to live well above their means, because in a few years they'll be rich anyhow!!!
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Nov 12, 2014 16:40
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Saros posted:"High school was SO drat STRESSFUL I had "to take a semester off school and just enjoy being a student." Now my parents wont pay for everything. Eh, I dunno. His parents are pressuring him to go to a 4 year university on 100% student loans for status reasons, if he wants to work and save for a year I'd say he's being pretty good with money (if he's out to MAXIMIZE HIS EARNINGS he would probably be better off sucking up the debt if it means getting on a high earning career track a year faster, but I can't really blame him for not wanting to take on the extra risk--not everyone has the aptitude and temperament for a high-flying career, or else they wouldn't pay so much.) If his parents weren't intent on milking their barely-adult child for as much as they could (good with money, bad with life) he'd have a pretty solid plan. Really the ideal would be to charge him all his "expenses", thereby giving him valuable budgeting experience that will give him an advantage in life over his college-bound peers, but save the money and use it for school expenses when he goes off to get his education.
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Nov 13, 2014 16:09
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Rurutia posted:I think you guys missed my last sentence or I just wasn't clear enough. I'm saying it's a fair move if they're planning on paying off his loans in the end. They should probably tell that to their kid instead of saying they're penalizing him for not immediately taking out debts so that he can live like the other kids in his class (whose parents are paying for school upfront.)
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Nov 13, 2014 18:21
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Rurutia posted:He's not taking a year off to save up for school, he's taking a year off because he wants to 'just be a student while he can' which means apparently not being a student and just living off of his parents. He's mad because his parents decided that instead of letting him just live off of them, they expect him to pay rent. I don't know what he means by "just enjoying being a student" either, seeing that he's not being a student in any sense, but he is 1) working and 2) committed to saving most of his earnings towards school. So regardless of his intentions, he is in fact saving up for school during his time off, which he (in all likelihood rightfully) regards as being a better idea than taking out loans to pay for the kind of education his peers are getting paid for by their parents. Which his parents also want him to get, but not enough to provide any help beyond a very minor subsidy for his living expenses ($200 rent sounds like a sweet deal until you consider that for $300 combined rent+utilities [Idaho] he could probably get a room in a house with much better roomates.) It's true that he may be posting a very skewed picture--maybe his parents help him out with money all the time and he is just whiny. Some people are just completely lovely to their adult children, though. I knew a girl that got cut off completely the instant she went off to college because her dad's new wife didn't like her--as in, she had to crash with friends for Thanksgiving and Christmas because she was not welcome back home.
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Nov 13, 2014 20:35
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Dik Hz posted:Why do people hate on Iowa so much? It's beautiful, the people are nice, and there's great fishing and outdoors activities. Low cost of living, low unemployment. Y'all a bunch of haters. Cost of living and unemployment are both reflections of how much people want to live someplace. Compare Iowa to the Pacific Northwest, which is high on both counts (and also on weed): it puts Iowa to shame with its natural beauty and available outdoor activities, and the people are even nicer if anything.
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Nov 24, 2014 00:33
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Blackjack2000 posted:I know it's not always the case, but it just seems like the greedier you are the more vulnerable you are to scams. It's like when these people are presented with opportunity to make money, the fact that it would come at the cost of some poor sucker turns on this greed instinct that blinds them to evidence that they are the sucker. Yup, hence the number of scams that revolve around convincing the mark that they're taking advantage of the scammer. Someone in a tight spot needs to sell a prized possession, but wouldn't you know it, they're willing to sell it to you for a pittance in order to get fast cash. Or oh look, this shabby pool/card player is offering to bet big money they can beat you even though you've been wiping the floor with them all night.
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Nov 26, 2014 15:47
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HonorableTB posted:The response I got when I questioned the wisdom of that is "So I'm just supposed to be stuck hating my job every day just so I can make enough money? Why can't I make enough money and also love my job like you do?" and then she got very angry at the injustice of it all. Seems like the ideal solution would be for her to get a software dev gig for a couple years until she burns out. The higher earning potential could very well add up to a couple hundred grand extra in savings over a few years, which would make it a hell of a lot easier to follow her dreams.
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Dec 3, 2014 23:03
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Haifisch posted:Considering that there are people who shop there specifically because of how Costco treats their employees, it's just advertising costs of a sort. It's not just advertising, they save shitloads on hiring costs by not having to constantly replace disposable grunts. I suspect they spend a lot less time and money fighting off class action employee lawsuits, too.
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Dec 5, 2014 20:30
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tentish klown posted:On the other hand, if you're in a major city like New York or London, extortionate rents and rapidly inflating house prices mean that you're screwed if you don't buy. In the last 7 years my brothers 2-bed flat has gone from being worth £400k to about £700k, and we collect about £25k/year rent from it. "Prices have gone up uP UP for the past 7 years, you're a sucker if you don't buy now!" - Timeless financial advice that never hurt anybody Also, £25k/year rent on a £700k flat? Sounds like a pretty good argument for renting! EDIT: Not saying that there's never a reason to buy, but these attitudes get a lot of people in trouble.
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Dec 9, 2014 19:44
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Laterbase posted:70% of take home on the minimum payment? That's absolutely terrifying. Just to clarify my stance I would never recommend buying if the minimum payment was going to be even 40% of take home pay. Mine is 20% (it's a tiny house). Stretching financially to get the biggest house you can afford is way too dangerous in my mind given how much the market can change. This is probably the key difference. In a lot of places it's hard to find modestly-sized houses that aren't shitheaps because people stopped building them decades ago. When people are putting up 2000 sqft 4br houses as "low end starter homes" renting an apartment looks a lot more attractive. Buying might often be cheaper in the long haul for comparably sized spaces but when it practically locks you into paying for more space than you actually need it becomes bad with money.
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Dec 9, 2014 21:36
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Dr. Eldarion posted:This is typically due to the fact that it's completely legal to copy the basic design of something, so every generic-maker and their mom can make a knockoff. Once you add logos, though, they can't copy those or it's trademark infringement. Unless you manage to get a trademark on a basic design element. Louboutin 
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Dec 15, 2014 17:13
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Lord Tywin posted:This article is quite funny http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20140523-the-downside-of-living-debt-free "If you can borrow money at 2% and be guaranteed a 5% return, you should take on as much debt as you can to invest. Like in real estate. Investing in real estate gives you guaranteed cashflow return of 5%, so borrow money to invest in real estate." 
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Dec 16, 2014 20:26
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Cultural Imperial posted:People have short memories so I urge you guys to meander over to google finance and take a look at how much Citicorp, Goldman Sachs, Chevron, BP, Google, Apple, Cisco etc. were trading at in January 2009 and how much they have increased since then. That sure is a random bunch of names you tossed out that have no underlying investing principle connecting them, which includes several that have lost value over the past 6 years and only a few that beat the S&P index. I do think the guy's idea of overweighting oil and/or oil-oriented securities is probably fairly reasonable, but then in the next sentence he laments missing out on the gold bubble, which suggests he is using the "I want to buy a thing I heard on the news" strategy rather than relying on any informed analysis of the global oil industry and markets.
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Dec 17, 2014 17:53
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DJCobol posted:Anyone that doesn't just ride a horse everywhere is bad with money. A horse don't care about octane levels! Horses are basically quadrupedal boats in terms of how bad with money they are. I knew a guy who pissed away a $200k inheritance over the course of less than a decade raising horses.
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Dec 18, 2014 20:12
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pig slut lisa posted:It's like when a family of four buys a 3,500 square foot house because they
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Dec 19, 2014 16:01
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Cultural Imperial posted:What the gently caress is up with those fees Paying 1% upfront is a small price to pay, your worthless fiat money will lose five times as much value in a month thanks to the fed's runaway money printing. Bitcoin is the future of money, stop paying fees to your bank and start paying it to
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Jan 14, 2015 20:29
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NancyPants posted:Some people do legitimately have several thousand dollars for such things. Bad with money, that's several thousand dollars that could have gone into building more truck equity
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Jan 25, 2015 16:48
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EugeneJ posted:Isn't your sister automatically sentenced to death if she divorces her husband, per Islam faith Off-topic, but no, that's only like false/unproven allegations of rape or adultery or something. Maybe if she marries a non-Muslim. But divorce was ok'd by Islam right from the start. EDIT: failure for your husband to provide for you is a (I)slam dunk case for divorce under Sharia law too
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Jan 30, 2015 23:05
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Haifisch posted:Premade food that needs to be stored cold? This is what kills me, because even if buying ingredients to make things from scratch is too daunting, frozen meals are still a fraction of what they'd cost if you were eating out. For the cost of an order of McNuggets and a small order of french fries you can get a giant bag of frozen nuggets and french fries. An entire frozen lasagna might cost a third to a half of an individual serving at a restaurant.
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Feb 10, 2015 19:01
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Taco Box posted:I'm confused. Why is there a tax hit if you don't have health care? I should think if you can't afford health care, you can't really swing tax bills either. Who thought that was a good idea? Or am I missing something? He can afford it, but doesn't feel like paying it. He wants to cheap out and get a bare bones plan but post-ACA those don't really exist anymore since they were generally terrible beyond belief and insurance plans have to meet certain minimum standards now. 5 years ago I was shopping for insurance on my own and wound up with something fairly similar to the plan he's bitching about now (i.e. the minimum acceptable under ACA.) I had the option to buy a crappier plan with half the monthly premium, but the coverage was so phenomenally lovely that it would only ever be worth it if I never, ever have to go to the hospital, which is a pretty lovely bet to make and probably pretty terrible with money. EDIT: Post-ACA I'm paying more for a higher deductible plan than what I had before, but that's because my insurance premiums are no longer being subsidized by suckers like the OP being quoted. (Also, he complains about getting no benefits until $6000 of out-of-pocket costs but that's only true because he's a giant baby who won't go to the doctor; ACA compliant plans have to provide first dollar coverage for basic preventative care including a couple doctor visits a year.) the holy poopacy fucked around with this message at 22:42 on Feb 11, 2015 |
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Feb 11, 2015 22:40
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The Nards Pan posted:If the whole thing goes belly up and our currency is worth nothing and we're living in Mad Max times - I don't think I'm going to give a poo poo about gold and can't imagine I'd barter any of my food or skills for metal I can't eat. Audiophiles will rule the wastelands and gold for plating audio cable will be the most precious of currencies
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Feb 12, 2015 17:29
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Jeffrey of YOSPOS posted:You've never teased out a personality characteristic that would make someone difficult to work with? Are you a pure technical interviewer or something? There is almost certainly someone interviewing someone trying to learn about their personality if you aren't, doubly so at a small company where an ego problem could be disastrous and they can afford to spend more time per candidate. Again, this is the most important thing to do in an interview (ie the interview process that a company does not an individual interview) so it's weird if no one screens for personality at all. There's a difference between small companies put together by people who know what they're doing and small companies that some dude just grew organically. There are plenty of the latter and they don't necessarily know poo poo about hiring.
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Feb 18, 2015 16:02
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Barry posted:I kind of wonder if extravagant first dates are one of those red pill type things. You pay for expensive poo poo and they accept and then they "owe" you something. Very much so, one of their major talking points is that it's so unfair that men "have" to spend $50-$100+ just to get a shot with a woman they've only just met.
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Feb 25, 2015 20:24
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xie posted:Sorry for resurrecting last page's but LL Bean doesn't really sell any purses (also they're $100+ for the few they do), but my girlfriend needs a new one. She tried to cheap out and buy one from Wilson's on sale but the dye literally rubbed off and now she has a hobo purse. My fiance swears by these things, which are durable as all gently caress and have a unique look that you may or may not find appealing.
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Feb 25, 2015 20:28
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It should not be shocking that a lender wants to know what you plan to do with their money and that lying about it in order to obtain money via false pretenses is a crime.
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Mar 2, 2015 20:06
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Krispy Kareem posted:Heh, when I worked at AT&T they stopped the free coffee and replaced it with pay-by-the-cup vending machines, which they then pulled out because people kept stealing the paper cups. And you couldn't brew your own in the break room. This was on a floor with 24/7 staffing and programmers. I'm still a bit amazed that a company that size tried to turn employee coffee into a profit center. AT&T knows they're not in a growth business, so their profits are driven by cost efficiency.
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Mar 16, 2015 18:46
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Spermy Smurf posted:I don't think your sister will ever talk to your dad again. Thereby saving him Christmas and birthday expenses. Good with money!
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Mar 24, 2015 20:49
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Celador posted:I've noticed that a lot of followers of Dave Ramsey prioritize tithing over everything else in their budget, even during emergencies or when in debt. Yet another reason why anyone I meet that takes Dave's advice as gospel can immediately be written off as Bad With Money. I work with 3 of these people. I've never paid enough attention to Ramsey to hear about this, so I just looked into it  Holy hell, the doublespeak he and his followers spew is maddening.  "Tithe and the Lord will take care of you! Don't worry about making ends meet, do your part and He will protect you!" "Help I'm in crushing debt and still paying five figures a year to the church" "That's your responsibility, God isn't going to bail you out. But tithe anyhow!"
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Apr 29, 2015 20:13
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MrKatharsis posted:Dave Ramsey usually says that if you can't get out of debt on 90% of your income, you won't be doing it on 100% either. He pushes people to really dig deep, like 50% of take-home deep, to get out of debt. In the time I listened to him, he mentioned tithing positively but certainly never demands that anyone do it. Sure he doesn't "demand" it, but he talks out of both sides of his mouth an awful lot. Dave Ramsey posted:Q: Is it acceptable to pause tithing in tough financial times? Dave Ramsey posted:No, I wouldn’t stop my tithe. I wouldn’t reduce it. It’s a tenth. I tithed all the way into bankruptcy court and all the way out. These are a loving Father’s instructions for His kids. Dave Ramsey posted:When does it occur? As I’ve studied it in Scripture, it’s real clear that it’s off the top as it says in Proverbs. That’s before anything else occurs. Having said all of that, there’s enough toxicity in Christianity and misinformation, so let’s back up from that. God loves you whether you give money to the church or not. He doesn’t love you more if you give. We’re not going to get into performance-based legalism. We’re just doing this because we love God and that’s what He’s telling His kid to do. I’m going to follow that. Which all sounds reasonable, but judging by the comments I see from his followers it's pretty clear the spirit in which the message is given and received (not that it's really unclear what his stance is.)
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Apr 29, 2015 20:40
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Dessert Rose posted:Maybe the tattoos and piercings aren't a big deal, but I can't imagine posting pictures of large quantities of illegal drugs (and hash oil is still illegal everywhere afaik, and an ounce is a loving lot) to public internet sites is good with anything, let alone finding a job. Only in the sense that all active marijuana products are illegal federally. Colorado legalized it along with everything else. Also, even if she's in Colorado she probably paid double to triple that $500 guess (a loving lot is an understatement.)
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May 6, 2015 19:31
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TLG James posted:He was making 100k a year, had roommate, on a 1.5k a month place... Where the gently caress was the rest of his money going? He said he was an independent contractor, so if the story isn't fabricated whole cloth I'm guessing he made 100k in a year--singular--and being a Captain of Industry he had to immediately invest it in real estate and car equity, unlike those shiftless poors who get a windfall and blow it all on fancy houses and cars they can't afford.
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May 25, 2015 18:59
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oxsnard posted:This idiot: That idiot posted:What if I literally can't afford my payment because I live in a city that literally eats money, but I don't believe having my paycheck seized will help the situation? This schmuck paid $100k to learn how to write sentences like this one.
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Jun 16, 2015 15:56
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BloodBag posted:The real question here is if they bought their depressed dog a busy bee. Bad with money, you can buy a bear in a bee costume for much less.
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Jun 17, 2015 03:55
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I'm just laughing at the idea that reading finance textbooks (agony!) is a key step in developing good personal finance skills. Most people who lead financially sound lives have probably never cracked open a textbook on the subject, and plenty of people with degrees in it are terrible at managing their own finances.
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Jun 18, 2015 17:37
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Desuwa posted:Yes I know, I was almost going to mention the subprime mortgage shenanigans. The "problem" (well, besides the outright dishonesty and bad practices) with those is that they weren't truly independent. If the economy turns bad then many people are likely to default at once. Even assuming the 25% failure rate is somehow honest and correct, you can have three years of 0 failures followed by 100% failures in the 4th year and still average out to 25%. If they're independent events this would be astronomically unlikely, but nothing is truly independent since the economy as a whole is a pretty big unifier. Reminds me of what happened when Prudential decided to make a foray into real estate insurance a couple of decades ago. Some clever suit realized that the badly fragmented home insurance market was ripe for a big player to swoop in and corner the market, so Prudential used their considerable money and clout to quickly accumulate a leading market share in some regions. Then Hurricane Andrew hit, and Prudential found out the reason why all the major players in property insurance maintained such a seemingly small presence. There's a key difference between property insurance and Prudential's core life insurance business--life insurance claims are single, independent events whereas homeowner claims are often widespread events. Because they held such a high concentration of homeowner policies for the areas that got hit they were slammed with claims and wound up having to cough up something like 10% of the company to bail out the property insurance unit.
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Jun 25, 2015 19:31
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BEHOLD: MY CAPE posted:That's so bizarre, I can't really understand how the incremental cost of raising a third child would force them to sell their loving house Not only the house! They would have to give up their  timeshareIn all likelihood we are only seeing the tip of the bad with money iceberg.
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Jun 26, 2015 00:04
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