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Reddit has become a guide to personal finance

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331–340 of 417 posts

Re: Reddit has become a guide to personal finance

#331
post #297
post #138

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>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…

Maybe I'm missing something, but HSAs seem to me to usually only be available if you have a high-deductible health insurance policy. That can be OK if you're 25 and very healthy, but for many other people is a high risk.

HSAs are a no brainer if you can afford to spend the out of pocket maximum. Either you pay the insurance company more in monthly premiums for a lower deductible, or you pay a lower monthly premium and invest the difference in an index fund and you keep the returns. Which grow tax free in an HSA.

Your probability of having a healthcare expense does not change based on the type of insurance you choose (high or low deductible). Only the timing of the cash flow. But the government gives tax advantages for using an HSA. It's an IRA with the ability to withdraw penalty free any amount you used for healthcare anytime you were covered under an HDHP.

Re: Reddit has become a guide to personal finance

#332

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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…

The discussion by actually passionate people gets drowned out when subs get too large. It becomes difficult to discuss things beyond an elementary level, as newcomers may not have the experience with a topic that longer subscribers would have. If you look at old HN threads, it feels more intellectually curious than today. But HN today is still very good. I wouldn't compare HN of today vs. 5 years ago, to say, what's…

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Re: Reddit has become a guide to personal finance

#333
post #125

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You can say this about any advice. My brother worked in a bank. They gave bonus for everyone that sold a specific financial product for the clients. The internal name of the product was "good for suckers".

Let me guess.. annuities? VULs?

It was in Brazil, I don't know the equivalent. The name here was "capitalization title", it has terrible profitability, liquidity, but you can win "prizes". Almost a lottery.

Re: Reddit has become a guide to personal finance

#334
post #155
post #76

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Do you mind sharing the subreddits?

not a subreddit but I cross-reference bogleheads wiki and /r/personalfinance wiki anytime I want to look for consensus or diverging opinion. Bogleheads still has a slight edge on /r/personalfinance for its specific topics. https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Main_Page

Between Reddit and bogleheads, that is all the financial wisdom you need. Bogleheads has deeply shaped my investment approach and it should be the same for 95%+ of other people as well.

Re: Reddit has become a guide to personal finance

#335

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…

spoken like a true financial advisor

Re: Reddit has become a guide to personal finance

#336
post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We get this question a lot in /r/PersonalFinanceCanada/ and the 'towards retirement' answer is the "mathematically correct" one because most mortgage rates are 5%. However, in Canada, if you put money into your RRSP, which is a tax-deferral account, you get a refund: so a popular option is to save for retirement and use your tax refund for your mortgage. Lastly, the other thing generally mentioned is the observation…

Yes there is the psychological utility consideration of not having debt hanging over you. But in a less subjective sense aren't there also considerations of risk of ruin and optionality? If you have no mortgage to pay off, you are free to do a lot of things you could not do otherwise (including buying more property to get rental income). If you have a lot of debt, you are in a leveraged position where some bad luck c…

> If you have no mortgage to pay off, you are free to do a lot of things you could not do otherwise (including buying more property to get rental income).

Except that you have to use some of your income now to pay down your mortgage so that you have better cash flow later. So that means right now you have less cash flow.

The decision is: use cash flow now for mortgage to get more financial space later, or use cash flow now for other things but have less space later.

TL; DR: Pay now or pay later.

Re: Reddit has become a guide to personal finance

#337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can’t tell which of the ideas you think are crazy. - 18 months in low risk savings (not invested) - seems like overkill. - I personally think any money spent on a wedding is overkill - we went to the courthouse and saved a ton of money by having a smallish reception (in fairness we were in our mid 30s and on our second marriage) - 401K - I have no opinion either way. I haven’t thought about the pros and cons. I don…

==in fairness we were in our mid 30s and on our second marriage== How much did you spend on the first marriage?

Not much. Much less than $10K. A family member gave us the pictures for free (professional photographer) and a friend of hers did the catering as a gift.

But, my now wife and I met at work. The company shut down and we had to scramble to find jobs. She found a job with benefits that paid less and I got a contract that paid more from a firmer customer of the company we worked for.

She suggested we get married four days after I proposed so we could save money on my health insurance I was paying out of pocket.

Re: Reddit has become a guide to personal finance

#338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 have found that subreddits almost become an anti-expertise forum over time - when actual experts show up to give advice, they are often downvoted if their advice goes against whatever that subreddit is cargo culting (which, as you mentioned, is often not great advice in the first place). Then the expert is discouraged from participating ever again. I've witnessed this pattern in an array of subreddits spanning from…

I have experienced this first hand. I wrote a novel multiplayer algorithm for a game that shipped on the consoles at the ,time and weighed into a conversation about lag on Battlefield. Downvotes everywhere...

Re: Reddit has become a guide to personal finance

#339
post #188

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…

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

Weddings are monumental, memorable, and fun events for family and friends. They add a richness to life. People in my family still talk about weddings from literally decades ago and it's a great way to bring people together and make memories. You don't need to spend $50k on a wedding. You also don't need to go uber-frugal. There's a happy medium out there for most people.

Re: Reddit has become a guide to personal finance

#340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

I'm guessing you're on your phone? I get prompts urging me to use their app, but I have been able to opt for the browser instead, and I use Tor fairly frequently (phone and desktop). Have you tried old.reddit.com instead? Maybe it's specifically targeting certain browsers/platforms. I'm on Firefox on Android, maybe they're specifically targeting iOS?

I'm also on Firefox on Android and have been getting that block for quite some time...
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