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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

#391

Post by prawn »

basch wrote: post #143
prawn wrote: post #22

People incentivised by karma systems seem to create better information sources than when they’re incentivised by money. Think about how often you turn to Stack Overflow, Reddit, forums (Whirlpool in Australia) over AdSense/affiliate blogs. The latter are almost always biased and essentially misleading.

I dont agree that AdSense/affiliate blogs dont have useful information. They have bias, but that doesnt mean they all need to be dismissed. Consumer reports, popular mechanics, wirecutter, nerdwallet, valuepenguin, bankrate (the points guy, credotcards.com) bicycling.com The financial and mattress websites have gotten out of hand, but there still IS good information between the ads. Its probably almost time for an ag…

I was making a general point; I favour outdoorgearlab for example. But far more often, forums seem to provide more "real" and practical advice.

Re: Reddit has become a guide to personal finance

#392

Post by prawn »

girvo wrote: post #40
prawn wrote: post #22

People incentivised by karma systems seem to create better information sources than when they’re incentivised by money. Think about how often you turn to Stack Overflow, Reddit, forums (Whirlpool in Australia) over AdSense/affiliate blogs. The latter are almost always biased and essentially misleading.

Whingepool has its own set of biases of course, they’re just less obvious than those motivated by money. Perhaps better, though.

I am usually searching it for Australian-specific house-related info (sealing concrete was a recent search). I don't know many other Australian sources that have a broad range of content. There are some reno forums which have solid subject matter experts too.

Re: Reddit has become a guide to personal finance

#393

Post by Tycho »

throw0101a wrote: post #336
Tycho wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 f…

But the overpayment is optional, you can stop it at any time if it becomes inconvenient. Whereas as long as your mortgage balance is outstanding you are legally required to make the monthly payments.

Re: Reddit has become a guide to personal finance

#394

Post by tiew9Vii »

P_I_Staker wrote: post #119
tiew9Vii wrote: post #73

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.

In hindsight it’s something extremely basic, simple and obvious to do which is why I had the exclamation mark for my lack of knowledge.

In the past couple of years I’ve made $2-3k in interest. Not much but it’s $2-3k I wouldn’t of had if sat in a checking account so to me it’s free money for holding the exact same savings just under a different account with my bank.

Re: Reddit has become a guide to personal finance

#395

Post by luckyscs »

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…

I'm right at the cusp of Roth IRA contributions being taken away. If I were angling for a raise, I would make sure I made just under the limit for this year (old salary and new salary combined in proportion to time worked under each) and try to negotiate for more time off. That's about the only time I would forgot a wage raise and it would probably only be worth it for a band of 3000 around that limit.

Re: Reddit has become a guide to personal finance

#396

Post by na85 »

sli wrote: post #345
cookiengineer wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. /r/programming in a nutshell.

/r/programming is not an anomaly. My experience is that programming-related discussion boards everywhere are like this, almost from day one. The rampant tribalism and insistence one groupthink is incredibly strong, to the point where even typos can cause a relentless dogpile and accusations that said person "has clearly never written real software in their life." You simply cannot make even one mistake, no matter how…

>The rampant tribalism and insistence one groupthink is incredibly strong

Frankly, that's my perception of HN, too. Try telling someone here that running your own email server is easy, for example, and then prepare to fend off the throngs of people clamoring to be the first to tell you that email is hard (tm), and only fastmail can save us from Google's dragnet, oh also email is deprecated and we should just use signal or some other proprietary walled garden.

Re: Reddit has become a guide to personal finance

#397

Post by luckyscs »

ar_lan wrote: post #290
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…

> You should always have 18 months of expenses saved I've never seen this sentiment on r/personalfinance. It's typically no more than 6 months, usually a 3-6 month range. Your money is (on average) better invested and the only reason to go beyond 6 months is if you really, really need that for some extra peace of mind and numbers/data don't mean anything to you. > Look how smart I am for having a mega-backdoor roth i…

My father is a financial advisor and holds my account. I wouldn't give him up simply because I trust him more than any human on the planet. Even so, I constantly seek out other sources and bounce my ideas about stocks, the market, the economy, politics, science and technology, so that he is exposed to thinking outside his bubble of finance and so that I can have his expert perspective to give me context on how professionals navigate with their knowledge, intuition, and analyst reports.

Re: Reddit has become a guide to personal finance

#398

Post by qes »

P_I_Staker wrote: post #119
tiew9Vii wrote: post #73

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.

> I'm not making very much money from my "high-interest savings account". Maybe a grand or two over decades

All that says is that you barely have any balance in the account. Maybe a couple grand.

Re: Reddit has become a guide to personal finance

#399

Post by ethbro »

Muuuchem wrote: post #385
teach wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My wife gets this a lot with nutrition. She has a freaking PhD in Nutrition Science and also is a registered dietitian but god forbid she suggest that maybe bacon isn't the mostly healthy of foods in most subreddits.

Well nutrition isn't exactly a settled science. There are many problems with studies and as a result we have a wide variety of sometimes contradictory conclusions from them. New conclusions and findings come out but the nutrition community is unable to achieve a consensus understanding on these types of aspects of a diet. There are too many confounding factors involved in studies and it is nearly impossible to design…

> settled science

That seems like an odd turn of phrase.

Re: Reddit has become a guide to personal finance

#400

Post by ethbro »

noizejoy wrote: post #363
sli wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

/r/programming is not an anomaly. My experience is that programming-related discussion boards everywhere are like this, almost from day one. The rampant tribalism and insistence one groupthink is incredibly strong, to the point where even typos can cause a relentless dogpile and accusations that said person "has clearly never written real software in their life." You simply cannot make even one mistake, no matter how…

> rampant tribalism and insistence one groupthink is incredibly strong Could that be, because so much of programming is a group activity (understanding, maintaining, and evolving other people’s code), and thus actually benefits (in an evolutionary sense) from simplistic group think more than from innovation and perfection?

I'd chalk this one up to folks with enough time to endlessly post on Reddit not spending those hours building and maintaining software.

Professionals have time for the internet as a hobby. Hobbyists have time for the internet as a job.

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