291–300 of 417 posts
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/comments/4gdlu9/how...
[2]: https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2016/01/08/46...
Must admit, reddit got me caring more about my finances. It seems not many people are taught about money properly. I certainly wasn’t and non of my friends where. I’ve always been good in that I never spent what I didn’t have and lived within my means. What savings I did have where in a zero interest current account though! Following the finance Reddit’s at least put me in the right path. 6-12 months cash savings now…
> What savings I did have where in a zero interest current account though! That's not great, but overall, I'm not making very much money from my "high-interest savings account". Maybe a grand or two over decades, but even that's generous. I don't know if it's worthy of an exclamation mark. The biggest losses are prevented by not overspending and some of the other things you mentioned.
Huh? Either you have very little savings for someone on this site, or your "high-interest" account isn't high-interest. Ally Bank currently has 1.6% interest on their savings account, so you'd make $1000 in interest in 1 year with a balance of about $62k. If your savings account doesn't have at least 1.5% interest, then why do you have it? There's lots of places with rates of 1.5-2%.
I think a much bigger point can be summarized with this sentence from the article: > Seven of the top ten results are trying to sell you something, which really makes you question the objectivity of the advice. This is true when searching for pretty much everything in Google nowadays, that's why if you're looking for any info, searching on reddit usually yields much more objective and generally better results.
While you don't get as much "blogspam" on Reddit, it has a very different problem today: The amount of misinformation and echo chambering of said misinformation on Reddit is simply staggering. Very few subs have FAQs or rules asking newbies to search the sub for their question. As a result, most of the subs I follow are littered with the same questions over and over. The other problem is that when someone does ask fo…
I answer questions in r/personalfinance's "new" area, and the split is something like:
"I am upside down on my car loan/loan is too expensive/want to get out of my current car" - 40%
"How do I do I make [some crazy ROI]? I have [$small amount] to invest" - 20%
"I have no money and need to pay my bills" - 20%
"Can I afford to buy this house?" - 10%
Novel questions - 10%
So many car questions come up I'm tempted to write an ebook on it and sell it for $1 - I sold cars in college and have a lot of info on how the sausage is made.
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.
While you don't get as much "blogspam" on Reddit, it has a very different problem today: The amount of misinformation and echo chambering of said misinformation on Reddit is simply staggering. Very few subs have FAQs or rules asking newbies to search the sub for their question. As a result, most of the subs I follow are littered with the same questions over and over. The other problem is that when someone does ask fo…
I've witnessed this pattern in an array of subreddits spanning from hobbies to coding to gaming. Ultimately they become discussion forums for the lowest common denominator of skillsets.
Must admit, reddit got me caring more about my finances. It seems not many people are taught about money properly. I certainly wasn’t and non of my friends where. I’ve always been good in that I never spent what I didn’t have and lived within my means. What savings I did have where in a zero interest current account though! Following the finance Reddit’s at least put me in the right path. 6-12 months cash savings now…
>putting money in to ETF’s until I have enough in the ETF’s I’m willing to by some individual stocks which may not be as stable as the ETFs I have. Are those retirement accounts or taxable brokerage. Because for many people, maxing out their IRA, 401K, and HSA is like 35K a year alone, and putting money into taxable brokerage should take a backseat unless 1) you like the gambling for its entertainment factor 2) you c…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Care to share your collection of art subreddits?
/r/art is a mixed bag but pretty good. /r/specart has a lot of good stuff. /r/imaginarylandscapes (and their sibling subreddits) is really high quality. /r/earthporn if you like nature photography.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Almost all "financial advisors" are really just in sales.
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…
I think one of the problems is that many reddit users deploy downvotes against people who have a different subjective opinion than them. That is the lever that drowns out dissent from the majority. I have been thinking about that for a while now, what is the proper time to use a downvote? My MO is that it is only to be deployed against those who are arguing in bad faith or being disrespectful. Differing opinions shou…
I do this because of how downvoted comments get hidden and they only show the added total of votes. If one person has this view then others must have the same view. And let's be totally honest here, people aren't going to go through an entire thread to unhide every single comment in every thread they visit. Hiding wrong comments are a missed opportunity to set other people straight. I've learned so much more from the old forums from the early to mid 00's where wrong comments were quoted and set straight further down the page than on Reddit where all those comments were hidden. And because of that back then it was far less of an insult to be called out when you were wrong, because it was natural and normal.
Now when people downvote subjective things, that's where it really destroys the community. Say the up/down vote split on a comment was 900/1000. This is obviously a hotly contested issue with a small percentage of people thinking negatively of it. But if you were to only see the total (how the site does it now) you'd see -100 and the comment is hidden. Looking at this now if you didn't have an opinion before you might think this person is "obviously" an idiot and people start calling them a troll. This isn't just a ding to that commenter either but the other 900 people that up voted their comment. Do this enough and that other 900 people will start looking elsewhere. Now if the sub is some fanclub for something that's another story. But there's subs that are suppose to be more broad that have succumbed to being dominated by a side and drove away any opposing views.