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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

#211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a lot of people that think we can print spend endless amounts of money without consequences. Heck an alarming amount of people don’t understand that bonds need to be paid back.

> There are a lot of people that think we can print spend endless amounts of money without consequences. I’ve seen this said more than I’ve seen people who actually think that. Most people have heard horror stories of hyperinflation and, if anything, are overly weary of inflation than not. The comment above makes a good point. These types of hyperinflation situations are the result of serious mismanagement and deeper…

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

#212
post #33
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's about the lesson more than anything else. I really want my kids to learn how to save and be well practiced at it, even though the utility function doesn't make a ton of sense.

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.

The strategy you suggest is clearly good, but the percentage of people who can afford to think beyond ‘if the car breaks down I need some money’ and imagine a retirement is probably smaller than we both think.

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

#213
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's about the lesson more than anything else. I really want my kids to learn how to save and be well practiced at it, even though the utility function doesn't make a ton of sense.

IMHO the saving you do as an adult is a very different kind of activity from the saving you learn to do as a child. Saving as a child is more about delaying gratification by not acting on one's desires; saving well as an adult is more about taking action by making prudent financial decisions. I'm not sure if learning the former really helps you much with learning the latter, though it is a useful lesson in its own ri…

Even among people who seem financially stable, I've been surprised how many of my peers spend money as soon as they see it and have never had more than $X000 at the same time ever. The lesson of delayed gratification is actually a pretty big factor in being able to save up money as an adult.

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

#214
post #54
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.

I mean, liquid asset vs variable and tied up asset? I'll be the first to admit to being fiscally conservative: money I can't spend and that is sunk into something else does not guarantee that I get my money back. I'm losing money on the savings I have every year, which is why I put nearly all my savings into a fund, but then that fund dropped in value almost immediately by 30%, if I had done nothing with my money and…

I don't understand the mindset that losses aren't real until you convert them back into cash. If you had turned your money into casino chips and were sitting at a poker table, and had just lost 30% of your chips, would you consider that your losses weren't real until you cashed out your chips? Of course, you might win your money back, and if you were a good poker player who usually came up net-positive from situations like this, you'd be well advised to keep playing.

I'm not giving you financial advice - I don't know anything about you or your investment. It just seems fundamentally wrong to me to consider different forms of money (cash, shares of an investment fund, casino chips, etc) as being distinct. Changing forms may have tax implications but it's not like the form protects you from loses in some way. If you keep your money in an underperforming investment it should be because you expect it to go up in the future, not because you are afraid of realizing a loss (which you have already suffered).

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

#215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin is an unbelievably stable platform with an uptime of 99.98% with only 13 years to draw from. It's been sticking with it's algorithmically defined inflation rate with perfect predictability, unlike any other currency or scarce asset like gold, which depends heavily on incentives to mine and accessible reserves. Don't mistake the volatility of the USD price of bitcoin (which is based on the erratic, unpredictab…

Inflation (at least in it's common usage) tracks the price of goods, not the supply of currency. While those traditionally affect each other strongly you cannot say that bitcoin has a stable or well defined inflation/deflation curve because the price of goods denoted in bitcoin are extremely volatile. You can say that the monetary supply is very predictable, but that doesn't do much good if the price of goods fluctua…

The word is 'inflation' is overloaded to mean both depending on the context.

It can mean inflation of the price of things, which may be driven by supply constraints OR demand changes OR currency debasement. This is notoriously difficult to calculate a single value for, because all goods and services can oscillate wildly in prices in both direction. Electronics and mass produced things are a strongly deflationary good because they're constantly becoming less scarce while food, education, health care, and housing are significantly inflationary in price, because they're not getting less scarce at faster than demand.

It's impossible to give single CPI style inflation number that isn't deceptive in some way, because to do so, you have to put every person in a box and declare a "standard" basket of goods that everyone is expected to consume. But reality is messy, so my basket of good is likely going to be quite different from yours. Everything from diets, the types of education and housing we choose, the transportation choices available to us, our reproductive choices, and the hobbies we pursue can be radically different, which can mean that your "true price inflation" can be radically different from my "true price inflation" and both radically different from official and heavily manipulated government CPI numbers.

Inflation can also mean the inflation of the currency supply. This is the more traditional definition, and it gives a simpler way to understand whether prices for goods and services are rising because of changes to supply and demand, or if the prices of goods are rising because there's suddenly a lot more units of currency available to chase those scare real things. And of course, when it becomes clear that it's the currency getting rapidly debased, people start hoarding the actually scarce goods and resources, because the money is becoming toilet paper, and that's bad for all of us, because hoarding scarce real world resources that we don't need right now is bad for all of civilization.

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

#216

When Ceausescu's regime fell in late 1989 a piece of bread was costing 3.75 lei. About 10 years later, late '90s-early 2000s, a piece of bread was costing 3,000 lei. Hight inflation is a bitch.

An, but it wasn’t the same piece of bread. :) I’ve always wondered what happened to mortgages and loans during those periods. Did borrowers effectively get free houses? Did borrowers not exist?

1. Scams. Romania had a lot of banks defaulting.

2. Yes, the number of loans and mortgages was minuscule.

3. Do you think anyone gave out fixed interest loans? :-)))

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

#217

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.

Porsches are mass produced, too.

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

#218
post #8
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…

As a childhood lesson you don't need crazy inflation for this to hold true though. Anything that takes more than a few of months to save up to just doesn't make sense as a kid. Your disposable income goes up by factors of ten every few years. You have 2$ to spend at 5, 20$ at 10, 200$ at 15. Then it slows down but you might still get to 2000$ at 25. Saving as a kid really never seemed worth it to me.

Wish I had this logic when I was 16 and working my awful minimum wage jobs. Sure, that money ended up in an IRA eventually, but $1k gets made much faster as a software engineer than it does frying chicken wings for minimum wage, to the point where the trade off from having a bit of fun in high school or college would vastly outweigh the small gains I made.

I remember thinking my friends and peers were wasteful for spending their earned money on a new graphics card or even buying a $2 drink when they stopped at the gas station instead of saving what was required for necessary expenses, setting aside a little bit for fun, and saving everything else. Turns out I was the fool.

I am happy for that habit of saving, but I wish I had more perspective and reduced my savings rate to focus on having a buffer instead of saving for retirement at 16. I guess that's what growing up is for.

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

#219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel most of my saving habits came from RPG games, not from my parents (although they did try to teach me that too).

Your comment reminds me of this interesting article: https://crpgaddict.blogspot.com/2010/06/game-economies.html?... In many rpgs as you progress through the game the need for expenditure diminishes to zero. Different case if it is mmo or designed around grinding though.

Feel like you would like this[0] article that goes extremely into MMO economies.

[0]: https://www.desogames.com/virtual-labor-and-lessons-from-eco...

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

#220
post #2

Ah, the magic of interest: http://www.threepanelsoul.com/comic/at-the-bank

Why exactly do we want to reward already rich people at the expense of poorer people? Somehow, people convinced themselves that giving money to those who don't need it is efficient.

Because economists without even an undergraduate understanding of mathematics say the right things to those in power.
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