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Reddit has become a guide to personal finance

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Re: Reddit has become a guide to personal finance

#371

Post by magduf »

say_it_as_it_is wrote: post #255

Taking advice from someone on social media is very risky. There's no reason to trust that whomever is giving the advice is an authority on the subject at hand. Not a lawyer, not a doctor, not a financial professional, just a hobby programmer with really strong opinions, not a partner in a VC fund but talking as if I were, etc. On the other hand, doing something professionally also doesn't imply expertise. My god have…

>There's no reason to trust that whomever is giving the advice is an authority on the subject at hand.

>My god have I paid for doing business with alleged professionals.

This is the problem with getting advice from "financial professionals". Unless you're paying them a lot of money, a financial advisor is giving you advice that's going to benefit him, not you. Basically, they're salespeople; why else would they give you free advice? Even if you are paying them, that's no guarantee they're competent. After all, if they're so brilliant with managing money and investments, then why are they doing a comparatively low-paid office job for a salary?

Professionals are rarely experts in their field; they're just people who managed to find someone to do work full-time in that field. You'll usually get much better advice from amateurs who are very passionate about that as a hobby. For instance, cars: would you get better repair advice from a professional mechanic who works on all kinds of different cars, and whose hobby is fishing, or from an internet forum full of people who own and love your model of car, and collectively know all the common problems with that exact year/model, plus where to get the best parts? Would, for instance, some average professional mechanic know that the engine mount on your Volvo can be replaced with one from a particular Ford for much less money? I seriously doubt it.

Re: Reddit has become a guide to personal finance

#372

Post by magduf »

potatoz2 wrote: post #347
magduf wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>my "high-interest savings account". Maybe a grand or two over decades 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…

It's unusual to have $62k or more in a savings account. Either it's some sort of 6-month emergency fund and CDs typically make more sense (ladder or not) or it's money you want to grow, in which case investing in index funds is the better approach.

>It's unusual to have $62k or more in a savings account.

You're not paying attention. The OP said it would take decades to make $1k or $2k; I pointed out it doesn't take that much money to make that in only 1 year. It's not that unusual to have $30k in savings, so that's roughly $1k in interest in 2 years, which is an order of magnitude lower than what the OP was claiming.

Re: Reddit has become a guide to personal finance

#373

Post by magduf »

isoskeles wrote: post #318
magduf wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>my "high-interest savings account". Maybe a grand or two over decades 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…

Really, 2%, where? Also, that’s probably going to get knocked down this week given the announcement from the Fed, unfortunately.

As I said in my prior message, Ally Bank has 1.6% on savings. I think CapitalOne 360 has either 1.6 or 1.7, Discover has something similar, etc. I think Tab Bank has a little higher rate. These aren't hard to find. You probably won't find a full 2.0% anywhere currently.

Re: Reddit has become a guide to personal finance

#374

Post by Sohcahtoa82 »

clSTophEjUdRanu wrote: post #220
Humdeee wrote: post #179

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…

I feel like the widespread misunderstanding of tax brackets is used as a weapon. Candidate X wants to tax you 60%!

Absolutely. Case in point, I present to you Charlie Kirk, founder and president of Turning Point USA:

https://twitter.com/charliekirk11/status/1231005642413858816

"Facts:

Bernie wants a $15 minimum wage

That would mean a gross salary of $31,200 for a 40 hr. work week

But he wants to tax anyone making above $29,000 a year 52%

That would make gross salary $14,976—$288/week

$288 divided by a 40 hour work week—$7.20/hour

Socialism Sucks."

Re: Reddit has become a guide to personal finance

#375

Post by palebluedot »

lonelappde wrote: post #366
palebluedot wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My favorite example of this is that Popehat (Ken White) was banned from /r/legaladvice.

Just the opposite. /r/legaladvice is heavily moderated to keep it clean and high quality. Ken White was banned for deliberate persistent rule breaking and hijacking the sub to make it popehatLegalAdvice. https://amp.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/7xpggl/what_i...

I don't really see how that fails to fit the pattern of "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."

While /r/legaladvice is heavily moderated, it is not particularly high quality.

Re: Reddit has become a guide to personal finance

#376

Post by aguyfromnb »

bootlooped wrote: post #168
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…

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 think one of the problems is that many reddit users deploy downvotes against people who have a different subjective opinion than them.

I find this phenomenon far more extreme on HackerNews than reddit, for what it's worth.

Re: Reddit has become a guide to personal finance

#377

Post by cle »

three_seagrass wrote: post #288
cle wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stop trying to deflect blame from Google. They go out of their way to show garbage. They sacrifice their search results as much as they can get away with, in order to show more ads. Reddit does not do this nearly to the degree as Google. It’s not even close. There are ways to filter through the noise, it just doesn’t involve companies with financial conflicts of interest.

>They go out of their way to show garbage. Citation needed. Searching "index funds vs etf" on Bing gives ads for the first five results, while Google shows a card thing and organic results. If you're going to accuse them of deflecting, at least show evidence that it's not just the whole internet.

Look around at this thread for evidence. Targeted searching on other platforms that rank results based on votes from small communities yields much more relevant and trustworthy results.

Try searching for "financial advisor" on Google. I did it on my phone, and the only thing on my screen is ads.

Re: Reddit has become a guide to personal finance

#378

Post by scarface74 »

GFischer wrote: post #350
scarface74 wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best advertising I have ever found is in the Overcast podcast app. I’ve found a few interesting podcasts based on the ads. Marco Arment (the developer) created his own ad platform for his app so he would know who is advertising and he wouldn’t have any mystery meet third party binary blob in his code.

It´s very sad that Google basically has such a monopoly on online ads that people have to resort to creating their own ad platforms. Maybe that's a space worth disrupting? Google is getting fat and lazy (but still has a scary warchest and resources).

I disagree. Marco didn’t want to use any third party network because he didn’t want any content embedded into his app that he didn’t control.

All of the advertising on the internet that I don’t find abhorrent is controlled by the content creator.

Re: Reddit has become a guide to personal finance

#379

Post by scarface74 »

csa wrote: post #281
take_a_breath wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Getting out of it was probably as expensive (if not more so) than getting into it. I wish I could /s this, but I have seen too many folks take a big financial hit during and after a divorce.

And I had the great idea of giving her money instead of selling my real estate property. Because my real estate property was definitely going to appreciate.

This was around 2007, what could possibly have gone wrong...

Re: Reddit has become a guide to personal finance

#380

Post by aguyfromnb »

vntx wrote: post #319
AdmiralGinge wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> HN doesn't seem to have the same issue (at least not to the point it dominates the character of the platform), despite it being essentially a clone of old-school Reddit. That is because PG sets clear rules and actively experiments with techniques to keep HN’s integrity intact, and since HN discussions are usually of the more intellectual variety, it’s harder for shit-posters and bottom-feeders to find traction here…

>That is because PG sets clear rules and actively experiments with techniques to keep HN’s integrity intact, and since HN discussions are usually of the more intellectual variety

I hate to say it, but HackerNews is just another forum. It has its own political bent and biases (sometimes hard to see unless you step outside them). The level of discourse is better than some, and worse than others, but not particularly special in that regard; there are many good subreddits, too.

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