221–230 of 550 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But, the economy doesn't stop when there is no inflation or deflation. Well, I suppose that depends on your meaning of the word economy.
Certainly I was wrong if you take those words literally. You got me. At the end of the day hopefully you got positive insight out of it. :-)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm in the US. I certainly could do something like that. I just won't. I hope it works for you. That's a level of debt-based risk that neither myself nor my wife have any interest in. There have been a lot of people throughout history who thought similar arrangements were "sure things," and they were, up until they weren't and it all came down around their ankles. We live in a very modest ( manufactured, gasp! ) home…
You do you. But assets like real property are historically good investments. It doesn’t make sense to not buy the best house you can afford. I’m with you with cars… but even then the maintenance expense starts to catch up.
I heard that a lot in the 2006-2007 era. And plenty of people lost that "best home they could afford" back then. Fortunately, I couldn't afford a four-figure car, much less a house - though some other grad students seemed able to convince someone to offer them loans. No idea how all those worked out, I do hope some of them were able to keep the houses.
I know quite a few people who are able to afford their houses, but wish they'd purchased smaller. A larger house, all other things being equal, will cost more to heat and cool, take more time to clean and maintain, and will generally have far higher carrying costs. You can mitigate some of them, but they're quite a bit more expensive than something smaller, simpler, and cheaper to maintain.
I don't own a house as an investment. I own it as a place to live, with some land to do things outside. And at this point, our "minimum monthly spend" to keep the house climate controlled and lit is pretty darn low. Again, I recognize it's not a particularly popular point of view, especially in the tech circles, but I find "buying a big house as an investment when you don't need it" to be entirely absurd.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm in the US. I certainly could do something like that. I just won't. I hope it works for you. That's a level of debt-based risk that neither myself nor my wife have any interest in. There have been a lot of people throughout history who thought similar arrangements were "sure things," and they were, up until they weren't and it all came down around their ankles. We live in a very modest ( manufactured, gasp! ) home…
You do you. But assets like real property are historically good investments. It doesn’t make sense to not buy the best house you can afford. I’m with you with cars… but even then the maintenance expense starts to catch up.
Mark Twain once said that “History never repeats itself, but it does often rhyme. We should use the bottom up approach for investing stocks. I don't believe that macro prediction is useful. Nonetheless, we should prepare for the worst because the recession is looming.
Unfortunately I leaned on history to make investment decisions during this period of rising inflation. Gold, stocks, and real estate were historically good hedges against inflation and cash holdings should be minimized. But that conventional wisdom has been a bad strategy this time. As a reminder one ~sure bet is iBonds (the i is for inflation). Last I checked the yield is little shy of 10% and your money only needs…
It’s $10K per tax identifier, so if you’re married you just doubled it. If you have kids, each of them can buy $10K as well (though be sure to understand that you’re permanently transferring the assets to them, you can’t take it back it’s effectively an early inheritance).
You can also buy $10K as a corporation, LLC, or anything else with a tax identifier.
In California, people fitting certain economic criteria are now being issued $1000 checks for inflation relief. This is beyond ludicrous. We have printed so much money, the only solution is to... print more? It's almost like it is all a sneaky backdoor to letting the government redistribute wealth without real oversight...
California doesn't print money, the Federal Reserve does. California is required to balance its budget by law, like every state but Vermont. Nearly every state has more money than normal right now (some of it from high tax revenues due to nearly full employment, some due to federal stimulus), so they're finding ways of getting rid of the money. This is a second order effect from the much too large stimulus in 2020/20…
Gavin Newsom in this case is acting like Robinhood. Taking from the rich and giving to the less well off.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>That does imply that you might consider some backup energy solutions for the winter. I'm a fan of kerosene lately. Less annoying to use than propane, and stores almost as well. By backup you mean for heating? Can you safely burn kerosene indoors? I thought you would have all sort of pollutants on top of monoxide?
"Safely" is relative, but here in Japan kerosene heaters are totally normal in older homes.
History teaches us that inflation will continue as long as the government keeps printing fiat money with no backing. For a historical example, the Confederacy had high inflation. The printing press was in Richmond. When Richmond was threatened with a siege, the Confederacy hustled the printing press out to get it to a new, safer location. Confederate inflation paused during the move. The reason is pretty simple - the…
In California, people fitting certain economic criteria are now being issued $1000 checks for inflation relief. This is beyond ludicrous. We have printed so much money, the only solution is to... print more? It's almost like it is all a sneaky backdoor to letting the government redistribute wealth without real oversight...
California doesn't print money, the Federal Reserve does. California is required to balance its budget by law, like every state but Vermont. Nearly every state has more money than normal right now (some of it from high tax revenues due to nearly full employment, some due to federal stimulus), so they're finding ways of getting rid of the money. This is a second order effect from the much too large stimulus in 2020/20…
It may also help to see the cumulative inflation picture: https://totalrealreturns.com/s/USDOLLAR?normalize=end (disclosure: my side project) The 1974 and 1980 peaks from the article correspond to the steeper slope regions in those same years on my graph. (I'm plotting 1/[CPI-U price level], while the article is plotting d/dt [CPI-U price level]) On my y-axis is the purchasing power of a US dollar, relative to curren…
Yeah but that’s not the whole picture… in 1962 the ford truck was $2000 now is around 40,000 so while a new one is better you still have to earn 2x as much to get the most basic one available
Housing and healthcare are better examples of goods or services whose prices have increased faster than CPI-U.