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ntd posted:And when you explain marginal rates, they think you are retarded and tell you stories about how they/their friends got screwed by making more money. And I work at a University, where almost everyone has a degree, many have a master's... There are a few edge cases where you can, in fact, be screwed by making more money, and if you're working in a university I wouldn't be surprised if someone (or someone's parents) has/have been. Usually they involve the cutoffs for large tax deductions or credits, and a lot of those have to do with tuition. Right around $52,000 and $80,000 there are a couple booby-traps where making an extra $1 can cost you, depending on your exact tax situation, and there's one at $80,000 where that buck that can cost you $1000 or more. e: I'm slightly wrong here! The buck can cost you $500+state taxes, not $1000+state taxes. Thanks to Admiral101 for the correction. I doubt it's very common, though, and I think anyone who got hit would specify that it was a weird case. e: beaten by Volmarias. Didn't even thing about the other aid programs. Cassius Belli fucked around with this message at 00:26 on Jul 14, 2013 |
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Jul 13, 2013 13:34
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Admiral101 posted:Tuition credits don't work like that. They phase out over the course of thousands of dollars of income. Virtually every income tax benefit works like this. The credits are phased out in small increments, yes, but the tuition deduction, a really heavy hitter in the "crap, made too much money" tax sweepstakes, has a hard cutoff. It's weird that way, and like I said, it's a fairly unusual edge case. You'd have to be in the position of not qualifying for the credits but (otherwise) qualifying for the deduction. The credit phase-outs are much more minor, but you can find some situations where the intersection between IRA tax deductions and tuition credits means paying (slightly) more money in taxes than your raise/bonus is technically worth. It'd be less than $100 difference, and I think usually less than $20. State taxes do compound the problem, yes. OctaviusBeaver posted:In those situations you can pretty much always just sock another few $$$s into your 401k to avoid it though, right? Yes, provided that you can see it coming. Cassius Belli fucked around with this message at 21:31 on Jul 13, 2013 |
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Jul 13, 2013 21:14
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Admiral101 posted:It does have a phase out, just not as gentle of one. The the phaseout goes from 4,000 deduction->$2,000 deduction-> -0- deduction. It definitely doesn't cost the taxpayer "$1,000 or more". At its worst, it'd be roughly $500. Situations where the tax cost is material virtually don't exist. e: You're right, I misread the page. Still, tripping into that $500 fall can be pretty nasty if you're not expecting it, and state income tax could be another $100+ depending on your state taxes and how they account for it (looks like the high end would be $186 in California). Cassius Belli fucked around with this message at 22:54 on Jul 13, 2013 |
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Jul 13, 2013 22:44
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I was just talking tonight with a friend about Mason, a guy who is proof that good financial skills are not inherited by default. Mason's father passed away in the late 90s, and he was in his early 30s when his mother followed in 2005. She left her only child a small but fairly nice (and fully-paid-off) house and about $125,000 in various savings and investments. Mason was close to his mother, and he took her death hard. He had an understanding employer, and they gave him a month's leave (some paid, some unpaid) to settle her affairs. He wasn't feeling up to returning at the end of that, so they let him extend it with his vacation time. By the time he ran out of that, he had decided to take a year off to figure out what direction he wanted for his life, so he handed in his resignation. He had, after all, a paid-off house and plenty of money. It turns out that he mostly wanted to spend his life playing Warhammer. He spent the year painting little metal army guys and staging pretend battles with them. Some of his friends tried to get him working again, but his skills (Helpdesk support and entry-level IT) were mediocre at best, and his year's absence counted against him. He did get a job eventually, but quit after a month because it was "messing up his work-life balance" (read: they actually expected him to include work in that balance). His car died in early 2007. It had been coming for a while. He'd sold his mother's car rather than trade up into it, so he bought a new one, somewhere in that Camry/Altima price class. His friends reminded him that his inheritance was not nearly enough for a guy in his (now mid-) 30s to retire, even with a paid-off house to live in, and he said he'd start looking for a job by the end of the year... but then the recession hit. Even highly-qualified people with continuous work histories were out of luck. Mason shrugged - what was he going to do? - and decided to wait it out. He did at least start selling some of his Warhammer figures and custom-painting them for other players, but he wasn't really good enough to command top-tier prices, and he sent most of his profits right back to Games Workshop. It slowed the bleeding a little, at least. By 2010 Mason's money was starting to run thin. He got a roommate. I think at this point his cash flow wouldn't have been too bad, except for the Warhammer. He was convinced he could get better prices for his paint-ups if people knew him, so he hit up every tournament he could. The last I'd heard from him was in 2012, when he admitted he needed a day job to at least prop up his dream of being a pro Warhammer painter. With more time out of the industry than in and his tech skills rusty, though, even his friends couldn't convince anyone to give him a serious interview. The gossip mill says he re-mortgaged the house, so he started from a really good shot at permanent financial stability and wound up starting his 40s as a man with a lost decade, no employable skills worth mentioning, and a savings account doing a long, slow spiral around the drain.
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Feb 12, 2014 07:16
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LorneReams posted:I was about to say, he seemed actually pretty finacially with it...he made a small nest egg last a decade. Expenses are a lot lower when you don't have rent or a mortgage - but yeah, Mason's not really "terrible with money" so much as he is "bad at life trajectory". People closer to him than I am tell me that it's basically a combination of grief, bad luck, and the inertia of not having to work for so long. 2006 might have been too early for him, but he was at least entertaining the idea of getting back to work near the end of 2007. He couldn't possibly have timed it worse, though, and he gave up after a month or two. By the time he started looking in earnest it was too late for him. He could probably take a little training and get an entry level position somewhere, but... 
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Feb 12, 2014 18:31
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RommelMcDonald posted:Also that $1,200.00 would probably get them a three bedroom apartment, with money left to spare, if they swallowed their pride and moved further away from Tampa. $1200 could get you a decent three-bedroom apartment even inside Tampa proper. You wouldn't be in South Tampa, but that sounds about right if you're north of Sligh, maybe out near Temple Terrace. A quick Craigslist search showed a few reputable-looking places in the $1000-$1100 range, even. It wouldn't be on the "10th hole of an exclusive golf course" but those are the breaks. What it won't get you is anything close to this, though, which is about what they're living in. If they're willing to put up with the terms and they really must live in that kind of home, they're not getting an awful deal. E: They're bad with money in a "lifestyle exceeds earning power, burning cash as fast as it comes in" kind of way, but they're in no way paying full market rent on that house. They're being "compensated" for their trouble, in a way. Cassius Belli fucked around with this message at 23:27 on Jul 11, 2014 |
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Jul 11, 2014 23:14
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HelloIAmYourHeart posted:My favorite quote from the wife is "I am the financial grue of the family." That's probably correct.
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Jul 12, 2014 01:55
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otter space posted:My only lasting memory of Disney World is seeing 10 and 11 year olds being pushed around in strollers. Have you gone lately? Last time I went, the Rascal Scooter Army and its weekend auxiliary were out in force, too.
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Jul 12, 2014 20:49
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pathetic little tramp posted:I have a rare disease that will likely (65% chanceish?) kill me by 40, yet I keep maxing out my 401(k) and continue to rent. I'm pretty bad with money. necrobobsledder posted:I generally have no reason to live to retirement age (no kids, no desire, nothing I want in itself costs money to get / achieve) so I think of my retirement funds as a life emergency fund should something happen before I want to Alt-F4 out of life. But investing is a bit of a hobby for me anyway, so no real harm either. Have either of you considered making a will like Charles Vance Millar's and making the world a sillier place upon your departure? I know I have some eccentric bequests written into mine, just in case I should die with more money than I need to fulfill my posthumous obligations.
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Jul 22, 2014 03:42
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Jastiger posted:I agree with this guy, but with sour grapes on top. When someone blows my entire student loan debt on something like a wedding photographer or whatever, its 'bad with money' because giving that money to me personally (and really, people like me) would result in much better financial health for a lot more people than dumping money on duplicate wedding photos. Eh. For people who aren't spending money they don't have, the most likely alternative to "spend arbitrarily large amount of cash on wedding stuff" isn't "give the money to Jastiger"; it's "keep it and get richer still" (or possibly "down payment on a house"). The venue has staff to pay, the photographer has overhead, the florist and caterer and everyone down the line have bills and kids to put through school and so on. As long as they're not causing massive negative externalities, I am 100% for rich people indulging their crazy extravagant desires, because that puts money in the hands of people who have to work for a living. Charity would be great, it's true, but that second reception will result in much better financial health for a lot more people than the couple pocketing the money and keeping it in a stock account somewhere.
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Sep 21, 2014 13:46
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Centripetal Horse posted:Does anyone remember the Baptist Fund collapse? I can't find any details on Google. It may have had another "official" name, but I recall it always being called the Baptist Fund. I think you're remembering the Baptist Foundation of Arizona. Cassius Belli fucked around with this message at 06:48 on Jan 22, 2015 |
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Jan 22, 2015 06:46
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Not a Children posted:This is why I think it's a troll. The perfect storm of arrogance and self-deception that is just too terrible to be real. You haven't been reading the Bitcoin thread, have you?
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Feb 3, 2015 17:19
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Loving Disney can be very good with money if you do it right. If I ever have kids, I'll be happy to take them to Disneyland once in a while. At this rate, the company will have paid for it, and then some.
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Feb 4, 2015 23:46
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http://www.shnugi.com/retirement-account-value-percentile-calculator/?min_age=18&max_age=32&retqliq=0 posted:A retirement account value of 0.00 for ages 18 to 32 ranks at: 63.1% You can have the BFC-approved $1000 starter Vanguard account and be ahead of almost 69% of people under 32. You have to be 37 before the $1000 puts you in the lower half. The future's going to be some cyberpunk dystopia, isn't it?
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Feb 11, 2015 03:21
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Dessert Rose posted:What makes you think it isn't one now? Metal polish isn't sold in the cosmetics aisle yet. That's about it, come to think about it.
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Feb 11, 2015 19:31
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Cast_No_Shadow posted:Best with money is living in a state with low/no income and property tax right on the border of a state with no sales tax. If such a place exists. Vancouver, WA.
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Mar 20, 2015 18:36
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The Mandingo posted:He should probably cut ties now and divorce her before it's too late! Getting divorced can be pretty bad with money. Over the last few months, I've watched a friend and his wife annihilate ten years of savings untangling a 6-year marriage. 401ks are getting liquidated and everything. In attorney fees alone, $75,000 is in the rearview mirror and $85,000 looks likely before they're done.
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Apr 2, 2015 18:59
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Nail Rat posted:Why the gently caress would you spend this much on attorney fees? Is someone really getting a deal that's that much better for them that it's worth it? Not in practical terms, but there are a lot of perception issues getting in the way on both sides, so both sides have felt like they were being screwed at one point or another. In hindsight it would have been cheaper for both if either person were willing to make early concessions, but $15,000-20,000 only looks small when you sit it next to $75,000. Not a Children posted:Sometimes the point is just to gently caress the other person's life up. Mutually assured destruction on a 2-person scale. It seems to be about 50-50 between this and "child custody". Her original demand included 95% custody and a change of primary residence outside the state (he would get their daughter for two to three weeks in summer), and he wasn't prepared to be that far removed from his kid's life.
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Apr 2, 2015 22:49
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Cultural Imperial posted:Yes. But only in Vancouver and Toronto. The economy in Vancouver is people literally buying and selling houses to each other. Like a human centipede of real estate transactions. There is also, I understand, a massive cash infusion from rich Chinese mainlanders trying to find ways to stash wealth overseas, especially ways that will improve their chances of being able to take refuge there if the government starts another Cultural Revolution or something.
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May 14, 2015 21:55
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Rudager posted:Except the part where "double the minimum payments" is only $70/month, dude must have got a 20 year term on the loan or something. He's on the reverse perpetual annuity plan.
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May 19, 2015 22:17
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savesthedayrocks posted:50 cent pays more for grooming himself than I pay to mortgage my house. That's a trip. And, in turn, Michael Jackson spent more to groom little boys than 50 Cent pays to mortgage his house.
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Aug 5, 2015 17:15
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Radbot posted:"Go for broke" meaning what, exactly? Just going to the doctor for fun? As an example, a friend of mine was up for some "important but not urgent" ACL surgery (i.e. "you don't have to do this now, but you'll have to do it eventually, and if you wait too long it will be very bad") which would have set him back about $13,000. After his wife and daughter both had issues pushing them past their maximum family out-of-pocket, his doctor coordinated with the hospital to make it to happen before the end of the year.
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Nov 3, 2015 21:01
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Radbot posted:So a person who needed an "important" surgery got helped, and CDHPs want to make sure this doesn't happen? I'm not seeing the "go for broke" here. I don't think there's so much a problem with the "patient getting treatment" itself (though the insurance company probably disagrees), but the way it forces people to allocate their care gets really messed up. My friend had been putting that surgery off for years because of the large out-of-pocket it would have entailed otherwise. At the same time, hospitals get a lot of pressure on their resources towards the end of the year as people start hitting their caps or wanting to use their FSAs, and sometimes getting on that schedule just isn't viable; you get stuck either paying out the nose the next year or waiting for disaster to strike again.
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Nov 5, 2015 03:12
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Pompous Rhombus posted:I dug into his post history. Did he have a kid recently?
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Feb 7, 2016 12:29
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overdesigned posted:That was a fantastic story and I really enjoyed it and I wish I had kept a link/copy of it. No Reddit link handy, but Haifisch shared it here.
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Mar 18, 2016 00:29
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On a much bigger and more entertaining scale than cable-chat, a guy at my office has been trying to get someone to take over the lease on his one-year-old BMW M5. BMW usually means BWM, the bigger the more so, and my coworkers have been trying to figure out how he got into this situation. 1 - The payments on this thing are a little north of $1200/month. 2 - The car starts around $95,000 - probably about as much as he makes in a year, plus or minus a month, maybe two on the outside. We figure he's pretty much screwed, since: 1 - He's asking the new leasee to cover the $500 lease-transfer fee that BMW charges, since he's "giving up his down payment". 2 - The $1200/month price is exactly the same as you can get by walking into a BWM dealership today - in fact you can get more miles/year than he got. 3 - His down payment was only $2000. For only about five weeks' extra payments anyone interested in his offer could get one brand new, with choice of paint/trim/etc.
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Apr 27, 2016 23:20
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Centripetal Horse posted:If I were to maintain my current lifestyle, I could pay that dude's $1,200 car payment, but the very idea bums me the gently caress out. Having four, or five, or six years of putting a big, monthly chunk of money into an asset that is worth less every time I write the check, sounds miserable and stressful. I cannot see spending $1,200 per month on anything that doesn't have a roof, wings, or a pussy. I mean, it's one thing if $1,200 is 4% of your monthly income, but it doesn't sound like that's what we're dealing with, here. You wouldn't even be paying for the asset, as such - it's a lease. He doesn't get to keep the car at the end. We checked the pay band for his job family and depending on his 401k withholding (who are we kidding?) and his exact situation we're talking about probably 20-25% of his take-home, not counting gas or insurance. And, clearly, he's finding it stressful too - he's trying to get out, isn't he? We've got nothing.
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Apr 28, 2016 02:03
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BEHOLD: MY CAPE posted:What a sick and weird society we live in where a passable metaphor for being in debt is "having a noose around your neck" yet people are expected to borrow hundreds of thousands of non-dischargeable debt from hell to have any kind of professional career That's the symbolic value of the necktie as a staple of professional attire.
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Jul 13, 2016 22:19
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JohnGalt posted:What are some BFC approved hobbies? I am afraid that my $50/month gym membership is going to be considered a felony here. I think the only fully sanctioned BFC hobby is numismatics, with an eye for volume, not rarity or condition. The ideal case is to have one of every serial number.
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Nov 29, 2016 18:36
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I'm not sure if this goes in the Bad With Money thread or the Schaenfreude Thread, so I'll just put it in both. It might have been posted back in April, but I didn't see it in the few pages I checked! It turns out that the obnoxiously spoiled Rich Kids of Instagram are doing their part to expose their parents' wealth to discovery by courts, tax agencies, and con artists. Of course, lying on social media is at least as common as the truth, so sometimes these stories end in admissions that the jewelry is fake, only the bills on top are real, and the boat is a rental. Renting the boat is probably the only GWM part of trying to fake a lifestyle you can't afford.
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Dec 27, 2016 05:39
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Ornamented Death posted:I refuse to believe that is real. Probably isn't. The picture, at least, comes from this three-year-old eBay listing.
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Jan 6, 2017 07:37
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Droo posted:How about a store item to probate other users for $5/day? I don't think we want that kind of back-and-forth small-time sniping going on, but we've established before that it costs $72,613 to permaban someone.
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Jan 11, 2017 00:53
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Guest2553 posted:Clever rouse to try and get us poors tobuy archives, DON'T FALL FOR IT I'm surprised it didn't get Goldmined, actually. The short summary was that Universal Module came in and asked GBS to do the legwork on a homework assignment for him, and got Mod Challenged for it. Jick Magger fulfilled the Challenge first, while UM bailed, and proposed this punishment: either donate $10 to a charity for the 2011 Japanese tsunami, or donate $10 to Lowtax for a new account. Goons, being Goons, offered to pitch in money to charity to permaban him instead, unless he matched it. This went on for a while, with goons challenging each other to eat terrible Subway combinations, shave their heads, and I've forgotten what else, and when the smoke cleared Universal Module had the odds stacked $72,613 against him. He got banned, but good.
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Jan 11, 2017 01:12
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Spermy Smurf posted:That's the worst of the worst iPhones too. Barely gets any reception at all, cheap and lovely. So so so bad. I hope work doesn't expect you to talk to anyone on that thing. You're better off with a 5km range walkie-talkie. Are you sure you're not thinking of the C? The SE is mostly 6S guts jammed into a 5S case, as I understand it; I like mine just fine.
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Jan 13, 2017 19:06
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"I didn't realize this expensive thing full of parts would require maintenance!" Cars, houses, boats, houseboats, BART... so many people just think "Oh, I can afford the sticker price, and it'll work forever, right?"
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Mar 7, 2017 22:56
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Subjunctive posted:Like they have enough cash on hand for that. In a major airport, it wouldn't be too hard to have some emergency cash locked up in a manager's back office, especially if it isn't needed often. I had an experience like that a few years back: Cathay Pacific had overbooked their flight by 20 people and offered me $250 cash and some upgrade vouchers to take a relatively minor reassignment. I agreed to it, the manager came over and counted out a bunch of 50s and 20s to me on the spot, I signed the receipt, and that was that.
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Apr 11, 2017 18:51
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CmdrRiker posted:My newest piece of unjustified advice on retirement that I learned is, "By 30, you should generally have about one year's salary tucked away into a retirement account." I am turning 30 at the end of the year and I only have about 33% of what I need to match that questionable statistic. Here is a random lovely article that supports the idea: http://www.cnbc.com/2017/02/22/heres-how-much-money-you-should-have-saved-at-every-age.html Unjustified or not, it's pretty much in line with Fidelity's numbers, which I've posted before. Their post is much better than the CNBC coverage, and shows the assumptions built in with that. Roth savings would obviously be worth a little more than conventional in those figures. Also, remember that your "salary" in those figures is your net, less the retirement savings you're making (e.g. if you're saving 10%, then you only need 90% of your top-line salary saved, since you'll be in spend-down in retirement).
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Apr 27, 2017 17:38
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ohgodwhat posted:One thing about that metric is that it's geared towards people whose incomes aren't growing, either. It's much harder to reach that goal if your income, say, doubles every year than if it stayed stagnant, and of course it's even easier if your income has gone down. This is a good point. It should really be multipliers of "intended retirement income", expressed in current dollars (the difference between "current dollars" and "retirement dollars" diminishes as you get closer to retirement, of course). It's closer to "a useful overall benchmark" than "pretty bullshit", I think, even if it needs a small salt lick.
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Apr 27, 2017 22:35
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Fitzy Fitz posted:I've been eating boring sandwiches for years, and somehow I still love them. I could probably just eat ham sandwiches for the rest of my life. Scott Walker, is that you?
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May 1, 2017 18:28
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