Reddit has become a guide to personal finance • Hacker News Board

Re: Reddit has become a guide to personal finance

#271

Post by _whiteCaps_ » Wed, Mar 04, 2020, 5:21 PM UTC

rchaud wrote: post #226

tsukurimashou wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have a couple friends right now that do not want wage raises because "it will knock them into the next tax bracket". is that not a real thing where you live?

It isn't that black and white. For example, in Canada, I can contribute a certain amount into a tax-free savings account each year. TFSAs can be created to hold ETFs, Mutual Funds and other types of investments. I can contribute $6k for 2020, and the total I can hold in TFSA is $69,500. I can contribute more annually as long as my total is under $69.5k. With a raise, I can accelerate my contributions and continue to…

Just want to be clear on this point:

> I can contribute $6k for 2020, and the total I can hold in TFSA is $69,500

As of 2020, the total you can contribute into a TFSA over your lifetime is $69500. But it's not a limit of what can exist in your account. Gains you make in the account do not count toward your limit.

Re: Reddit has become a guide to personal finance

#272

Post by throw0101a » Wed, Mar 04, 2020, 5:26 PM UTC

Humdeee wrote: post #179

waylandsmithers wrote: post #161

I would personally advise against taking advice from Reddit beyond simply basic answers about various financial products and maths. My problem with larger communities on Reddit is that prevailing opinions seem to emerge, and anything that questions or disagrees with them gets downvoted to hell. On the personal finance subreddits these include ideas like "You should always have 18 months of expenses saved" and "Any mo…

Financial literacy is pure garlic to every common vampire financial advisor. I have a couple friends right now that do not want wage raises because "it will knock them into the next tax bracket". Believe me, I've tried to explain how the simple concept of income and taxes work. I trusted my financial advisor years ago when I started my career. It took me a couple years to realize I was the product, not his client wit…

> Believe me, I've tried to explain how the simple concept of income and taxes work.

If you want to give it another shot, this article and video from Vox is pretty good:

* https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/1/7/18171975/ta...

Re: Reddit has become a guide to personal finance

#273

Post by downerending » Wed, Mar 04, 2020, 5:29 PM UTC

waylandsmithers wrote: post #161

I would personally advise against taking advice from Reddit beyond simply basic answers about various financial products and maths. My problem with larger communities on Reddit is that prevailing opinions seem to emerge, and anything that questions or disagrees with them gets downvoted to hell. On the personal finance subreddits these include ideas like "You should always have 18 months of expenses saved" and "Any mo…

Very few people can afford to pay a financial advisor that is a true fiduciary (which is what you actually need).

Lacking that, I don't take advice from Reddit, but it's a wonderful source of ideas, which I in turn research and consider myself.

Re: Reddit has become a guide to personal finance

#274

Post by 0xffff2 » Wed, Mar 04, 2020, 5:29 PM UTC

fierarul wrote: post #110

ZekeSulastin wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... what? I can get to it from the website and Apollo perfectly well.

I must be in the bad A/B bucket because I see 'This community is available in the app' and haven't been able to use Reddit a lot on mobile for weeks / months? Google gives me this article about the new trend: https://reclaimthenet.org/this-community-is-available-in-the...

Based on that article, I'm guessing this is only a thing in the new mobile site. There are a somewhat ridiculous number of ways to browse reddit these days (desktop new/old, mobile new/old, app at least) and they all seem to offer a different set of features. I've used i.reddit.com on mobile for many years now and it hasn't been impacted by any of the nonsense that reddit has been pushing lately (yet).

Re: Reddit has become a guide to personal finance

#275

Post by y-c-o-m-b » Wed, Mar 04, 2020, 5:30 PM UTC

AdmiralGinge wrote: post #231

JackMorgan wrote: post #43

Reddit is truly amazing, such that I've mostly replaced my usage of hackernews with it. I have serious issues with anxiety, and the inability for me to filter out content related to "current news" aka "clickbait fear mongering" means when I surf hackernews for too long I'll be upset for hours afterwards as I'm riled up with current events rewritten as FUD. Reddit can be filtered by subreddit, so I've got a view with…

I kind of went the other way, I prefer the discussions on HN. Any subreddit that gets over 100K (and arguably fewer) subscribers just becomes a cesspit. Take /r/ukpolitics for example, back in the day an anarcho-syndicalist could have a debate with a die-hard Thatcherite and while it'd be fairly heated, people tended to know their shit and I'd generally come away feeling like I learned something after reading the boa…

I also went the other way. I feel that Reddit is more like an all-you-can-eat buffet where the content is mediocre at best and toxic at worst. Even on seemingly innocent subs like r/oldschoolcool or r/earthporn people will launch unprovoked attacks to rebut a simple opinion. There's less tolerance for that kind of hostility here I think. The discussions on HN have more substance, are generally topics I'm keenly interested in, and I find less click-bait on here.

Re: Reddit has become a guide to personal finance

#276

Post by gbear605 » Wed, Mar 04, 2020, 5:30 PM UTC

paulcarroty wrote: post #137

throwaway9d0291 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was likely removed because the FAQ [0] already lists the differences and searching shows [1] that the question has come up before. Good culture != the ability to substitute the subreddit for Google or your own research. This is quite normal on Reddit. If questions like this are allowed, the subreddit often becomes inundated with them and there's no room for discussing anything else. [0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/k…

My question wasn't in FAQ and not Google-first-search related. Censorship is pretty normal in Reddit in general (also in Discord, also sponsored by chinese Tencent): https://www.reddit.com/r/HongKong/comments/ctyj10/reddit_is_... http://time.com/5526128/china-reddit-tencent-censorship/ https://ncac.org/news/blog/is-reddit-moving-away-from-free-s... https://www.theguardian.com/media/commentisfree/2019/feb/10/... https…

You think that... Tencent had your questions about Kindles censored? But why? That doesn’t even make any sense. Much more likely, the independent moderators of that subreddit decided that it wasn’t a helpful post.

Re: Reddit has become a guide to personal finance

#277

Post by koboll » Wed, Mar 04, 2020, 5:32 PM UTC

xelhark wrote: post #23

I think a much bigger point can be summarized with this sentence from the article: > Seven of the top ten results are trying to sell you something, which really makes you question the objectivity of the advice. This is true when searching for pretty much everything in Google nowadays, that's why if you're looking for any info, searching on reddit usually yields much more objective and generally better results.

>searching on reddit usually yields much more objective and generally better results.

Well, search on reddit has always been pretty terrible.

I find that appending `inurl:reddit` to a Google search gives the best results.

Re: Reddit has become a guide to personal finance

#278

Post by wlesieutre » Wed, Mar 04, 2020, 5:34 PM UTC

gibspaulding wrote: post #250

wlesieutre wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With DuckDuckGo as your default search, you can use "!w" to direct a search to Wikipedia, "!g" to send it to google, "!gi" for google images, "!a" for amazon, "!ais" for archive.is, and a lot of other options. If you're using search as a shortcut to get to some other service, it can be nice to go straight there instead of sifting through whatever garbage has been SEOed to the top of Google.

Perhaps more relevant to the GP, you can use !r to search reddit and !hn to search HN:)

Those are two examples where I might not do it because the built-in search on reddit and HN are worse at finding things than searching the same site through Google. For wikipedia search though, no reason to put that through Google.

Re: Reddit has become a guide to personal finance

#279

Post by chromaton » Wed, Mar 04, 2020, 5:34 PM UTC

magduf wrote: post #201

iso1210 wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dunno about the US, but in the UK there are a few wage points where a small rise can lead to a reduction in net income. Specifically moving into the higher tax bracket, which removes £200 off their personal allowance if they were using the pooling allowance option -- i.e. a £100 tax rise could lead to £46 extra income but £201 extra outgoing, a net reduction of £155 There are more perverse options with housing, child…

Does the US not have marginal tax brackets? That seems really odd and dumb. The benefit cliff you cite is real, but for actual income taxes, there's no such thing as a reduction in income from higher earnings. Going to a higher tax bracket just means you pay higher taxes on money over a certain threshold. So if bracket A is 20% under $50k, and bracket B is 30% over $50k, if you make $51k, you'll pay 20% of 50k, plus…

In addition to the benefits stuff listed here, you can also go backwards on income due to the Earned Income Tax Credit cutoff.

Re: Reddit has become a guide to personal finance

#280

Post by mm89 » Wed, Mar 04, 2020, 5:36 PM UTC

brazzy wrote: post #215

didip wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You disagree that more than $10,000 for wedding is a waste of money? That's $10k that could have gone to student loans.

It really depends on your financial situation. What if you have no student loans and a six-figure income? A $10k wedding (or a $50k one, for that matter) is only a waste of money if you don't value big fanc events where you're the center of attention, and it's only a financially unwise decision if you cannot afford it.

Many lucky individuals from wealthy families (in the USA at least) do not pay for their own weddings out of pocket, since it is tradition for the bride's family to pay for the wedding and the groom's parents to pay for the honeymoon.