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The money I saved as a child would buy one picogram of gold today

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Re: The money I saved as a child would buy one picogram of gold today

#181

Post by Jiro »

MerelyMortal wrote: post #97
kingcharles wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny side note: the State of Illinois spent a decent amount of public funds trying to decide whether to charge me with $100 trillion in currency fraud. The state crime lab said the currency I owned was the "most sophisticated piece of currency forgery" they had ever encountered. It was a single (real) $100 trillion bill from Zimbabwe that I carried in my wallet for fun. I assume they thought for some reason it was U…

Did they at least give it back to you? I don't know how much they sell for now, but I was lucky to get one for $20 when they were normally going for $40 on eBay. I forgot the exact result, but I once calculated the value of a 100 trillion Zimbabwe dollar bill when it was printed, and it came to something like 0.06 USD (6 cents).

I just checked ebay. Real ones sell for $100-200 US.

There are also fakes, most of which admit in the description that they are fakes, and include extremely large numbers like 10^33.

The highest number that you can get cheaply and that is not fake seems to be the 50 billion. They sell for about five dollars, which given the economics of ebay is probably as low as you can expect.

Re: The money I saved as a child would buy one picogram of gold today

#182

Post by skinnymuch »

mc4ndr3 wrote: post #179
epgui wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t understand why so many people “save money” but then just keep cash under a mattress or in a savings or checking account. If you want to win at life, you “save money” by purchasing non-cash assets like stocks.

Banks can fail. Stocks can fail. Currencies can fail. I'm not saying it makes sense on the whole to bury your worth in cash. But there is an amount of paranoia that confuses things. The interest in my savings account is laughable. It's marginally better than keeping in a mattress. The mattress doesn't charge bullshit fees. The mattress doesn't arrest you for being the wrong color.

If you’re in the west. A major bank failing and Govt + insurance not covering the losses for customers means something we have not encountered as a modern society. That’s as close to a break down of modern society as you can get. Sure it’s possible. Cash will def be great then. However this is such an extreme situation that there’s no way to know what will be good in that situation.

I would think in a situation like that, we would have something similar to what happened to job losses and the stock market cratering like in March and April 2020. Except that cratering and job losses would continue while riots and protests all across would get bigger and bigger. Crime presumably would go up a lot too.

It slips out that your family has $20K in cash at your home…who knows what’ll happen in this dystopian situation.

Re: The money I saved as a child would buy one picogram of gold today

#183

Post by quantumcrypt »

dukeofdoom wrote: post #133

Saving and buying collector edition video games might be a good purchase for a kid that might pay off later. A corvette might be a good investment too, if they stop making gasoline cars in the near future.

Corvettes are mass produced. German ICE import like Porsche is far more likely to hold value.

Re: The money I saved as a child would buy one picogram of gold today

#184

Post by grog454 »

sacrosancty wrote: post #175
PheonixPharts wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> even though the utility function doesn't make a ton of sense. What if it never makes sense? One thing I didn't realize until embarrassingly too late in life is that savings should only function as a buffer for emergencies. Anything else is just burning your money since there haven't been savings accounts that consistently beat inflation even in the US. I was fed these same myths as a kid, and earnestly believed tha…

> that anyone who has built themselves serious amounts of wealth typically does so by making high risk/high reward choices. You have the logic backward. If it was "typically, anyone who made high risk/high reward choices has built themselves serious amounts of wealth", it would be good advice, but what if most of those people failed terribly? An example is pursuing a career as an artist/sportsman which are common hig…

> Luckily, I learnt it by buying a house which appreciated fast and showed what a disaster savings would have been.

The better way to learn this is to be able to look at a graph like this: https://inflationchart.com/spx-in-m3 understand it, and make an informed decision taking in to account your personal risk tolerance.

Re: The money I saved as a child would buy one picogram of gold today

#185

Post by ClumsyPilot »

tmn wrote: post #170
epgui wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Risk of loss, theft or physical degradation. Then there’s the costs of holding cash, which are known to give you a negative yield due to inflation (nevermind bank fees or insurance costs, etc)

You hold cash for short or mid term optionality. If you want long term stable store of value buy gold or treasury bills

Most people who want to secure family wealth and have the option of trickle incompe buy real estate

Re: The money I saved as a child would buy one picogram of gold today

#187

Post by throwawaybsd »

t43562 wrote: post #3

I remember my dad encouraging me to save my dollars and not spend them on choc-99 double ice-creams ($2.13). These were soft whip ice-creams with 2 cadbury's flake chocolates stuck in the side and they seemed like the closest thing to heaven on earth to me. What my dad said seemed logical though and I saved. When I was 16 I had a holiday job that earned me many ice-cream-worths but I kept it - didn't buy a bicycle or…

No post body was provided.

Re: The money I saved as a child would buy one picogram of gold today

#188

Post by ClumsyPilot »

ozim wrote: post #140
epgui wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t understand why so many people “save money” but then just keep cash under a mattress or in a savings or checking account. If you want to win at life, you “save money” by purchasing non-cash assets like stocks.

Because most of people can only do that. So saving small amounts of money to build up some buffer. When you have a buffer only then you can start buying assets. Until web brokers started I did not even know how to buy stocks. I think most people still don't know how to buy stocks unless they are from really well-off family. My parents were also not "financially literate" so I had to figure out all kind of stuff on my…

> Until web brokers started I did not even know how to buy stocks. My parents were also not "financially literate" so I had to figure out all kind of stuff on my own.

Same

Re: The money I saved as a child would buy one picogram of gold today

#189

Post by MrFoof »

innagadadavida wrote: post #5

Are there any kids book that explain these money concepts to elementary school kids? I feel one the big failings of the school system is that these are not taught early on and instead a lot of time is spent teaching things that kids will never use in their lives.

A book I read well over 30 years ago, and is still apparently updated today, is "The Kids' Money Book" by Neale S. Godfrey, which you can certainly find secondhand for cheap. There are updated versions authored by Jamie Kyle McGillian, and so long as they are in the original vein they are probably excellent.

However it's not something I would throw at a 6-year old. A sharp 8-year old should be able to grok all of it though.

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