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Buy payphones and retire

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Re: Buy payphones and retire

#181

Post by sbochins »

andrewla wrote: post #57

The concept of "passive income" is almost a scissor concept. Or maybe only if you couple it with the categorical imperitive. On the one hand, it's so obviously true that it would be great to have passive income. Draw the salary you're drawing now, with some growth, and not have to work. On the other hand, if everyone had access to this capability then society and civilization would grind to a halt. People make things…

It’s pretty easy for me to envision a world where nobody makes anything and nothing comes to a halt. It’s just a matter of adding automation in places where we didn’t previously have it.

Re: Buy payphones and retire

#182

Post by SirMaster »

stonemetal12 wrote: post #125
SirMaster wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rental income doesn't need any work if you are just an investor though. I don't do a single thing. The people who are managing the deal are the ones who do the work and hire the workers to work on site and such. They of course get an even better return during the sale, but I am happy with what I get for doing nothing. My rental properties are paying me a decent passive income of about 6%, and additionally the total i…

The rule of 72 suggest 6% doubles in 12 years not 5. Meaning you have ~400K at 50 making 24 grand a year.

It's 6% income plus a doubling of the investment.

100K after 5 years became about 230K. 30K of passive income that was essentially tax free because of the offset from the depreciation of the property and the assets within the property that depreciate at a significantly faster rate than the rental property.

And then with all the improvements made to the property and the increase in rent that the substantial improvement could garner, selling the revamped property nets roughly double the initial investment, which if put into a new property within 90 days also incurs no tax for the transaction.

But I am also not even accounting for investing any of that income. Just with the roughly doubling every roughly 5 years, 100K in ownership stake can become 1.6M after 25 years. I started with 100K and already had a property that sold, and then did it again, and it's currently invested as a roughly $400K stake 11 years after I started with a yearly income of around 24K on the 3rd property that I am now invested in and so far things seem on track as normal.

Re: Buy payphones and retire

#183

Post by lumost »

andrewla wrote: post #57

The concept of "passive income" is almost a scissor concept. Or maybe only if you couple it with the categorical imperitive. On the one hand, it's so obviously true that it would be great to have passive income. Draw the salary you're drawing now, with some growth, and not have to work. On the other hand, if everyone had access to this capability then society and civilization would grind to a halt. People make things…

I suspect the appeal of this in its present state is that passive income confers a sense of security to millennials. Our jobs are inherently temporary, and at some point in tech fields - it is likely that you won't have an easy time finding the next one.

Given that loss of income would lead to massive penalties in lifestyle up to expulsion from life's basics... It's obvious why the winning strategy would be to acquire a secure income stream within your control.

Re: Buy payphones and retire

#184

Post by SirMaster »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #149
__turbobrew__ wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and additionally the total investment about doubles in roughly 5 years That is a big assumption. What happens during the next real estate bust and your real estate value goes down to 1/4 of its prior worth? You are now set back 10 years. I think residential real estate is a bad bet long term. As real estate gets more expensive and more and more young people cannot afford to buy there is going to be more political c…

Real estate is special because of multiple federal government and state government policies limiting (subsidizing) borrowers’ risk, allowing borrowers to lever without commensurate increases in risk. The federal government taxpayers (especially future ones) provide enormous subsidies in the way of 30 year fixed rate loans with no prepayment penalty, and no risk of having the loan be called. Many state governments mak…

When I learned how a lot of the government policies worked it just kinda blew my mind. Yes you are effectively 4x leveraging your investment with a way lower risk than doing something like that in the stock market. You are certainly leveraging other people's money in a way. Plus the tax deductions on asset depreciation are wild.

Maybe it won't last forever, but I'll pursue it while it works.

Re: Buy payphones and retire

#185

Post by Jach »

nostromo wrote: post #86
hyperhopper wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then why are there so few? And containing such a small variety of goods? In Japan anywhere from a busy subway to a remote park, there will be rows of vending machines everywhere, with more varieties of sodas, coffees, soups, ice creams, candies, hell even clothes or meat! And those are just the common types. You're never far from what you want in an automated fashion. Why are we so behind in America when there seemin…

Crime and theft is why. Japan has a whole host of nice things we can’t have in the US because we let bad actors run wild.

On a roadtrip a few years ago I was struck by the design of a row of vending machines at a rest stop: entirely walled off / caged off by a solid metal security mesh, with small holes to just barely let people operate them. Very much like this picture: https://s3-media0.fl.yelpcdn.com/bphoto/NudVpPKiq1AsWL1CSAa_... So I agree crime and theft is a big factor. But it's not enough of an explanation, as other high-trust societies (and even more parts of the US not that long ago) don't or didn't emulate various Japanese aspects, and even in Japan there are various "why do they do things this way" aspects that would make most sense in a low-trust or corrupt society. Some of them can be traced to being an over-reaction, like the lack of public trash cans in Tokyo. Increasingly I think the real answer to these "why can't place x have this unique thing Japan has?" sorts of questions is "because it's not Japan" -- you need the whole collection of aspects that only came about via Japan's unique history, you can't do it by just capturing a few aspects like their low crime state. It's an unhelpful answer, but at the same time suggests maybe people should look for ways to do something better, not emulative. (As much as I find the vending machines everywhere in Japan very cool, I don't particularly want them.)

Re: Buy payphones and retire

#186

Post by jancsika »

KK7NIL wrote: post #142
lotsofpulp wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The S&P500 was flat or negative from 2000 to 2012. And this isn't unusual. At its worst, 1999 to 2009, SP500 total annual return was only -0.2%, per dqdyj. Thats really good considering the upside (which has since been realized), and it shows that the government is willing to pull out all the stops if the market is down just -0.2%. > How does the government decreasing the purchasing power help old people? Old peopl…

Your average retiree should not hold stocks as they usually can't survive a 10+ year drawdown (which, as I just showed you, happens a lot more than people think, even in the survivor biased S&P500 example). This is why target retirement funds transition to safer fixed income assets as the target date approaches. You're also forgetting that inflation doesn't just affect assets, it also affects living necessities (and…

> Your average retiree should not hold stocks as they usually can't survive a 10+ year drawdown (which, as I just showed you, happens a lot more than people think, even in the survivor biased S&P500 example). This is why target retirement funds transition to safer fixed income assets as the target date approaches.

Target retirement funds transition to a safer mix of bonds and stocks as the target date approaches.

Even VTINX has a conservative mix of 30% stocks.

I'd say if you cannot afford to hold any stocks you're probably not yet ready to retire.

Re: Buy payphones and retire

#187

Post by somat »

bluGill wrote: post #114
tomjen3 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on what you want to launder. Drugs are paid for in cash, so you need to launder cash - and the best way to do that is to have a business that does some amount of cash legally. I can imagine vending machines being useful here. You are right about needing to buy cans that you can then pretend to have sold. Unless of course you order from a supplier who is willing to write an invoice for a higher number of cans…

You sell a can of soda for $50 and include a gram of cocaine. I don't know what cocaine sells for but that is how you make it work. more often this is done not in soda which has a street price that you can't get absurb values on. Better to sell a custom leather purse which can sell for a lot but you can make a junk one for almost nothing.

I have always wondered if some of that audiophile gear is to hide transactions of illegal goods.

"If you buy this $600 cable and include the code CC in the order we will make sure to ship it with some white powdery desiccant packages included to protect the cable"

I mean not all of it, there are enough people with more money than brains to keep the legitimate(hah, right. I guess as legitimate as these sort of companies get) companies around. But sometimes you see a product priced so outrageous, you think there has to be something else going on.

Re: Buy payphones and retire

#188

Post by JoshTriplett »

hunter2_ wrote: post #143
williamdclt wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what if the market sucks when you retire? if it's been good (on average) for 30y but then sucks when you're about to retire, you still probably accumulated a lot of money from these 30y of interest

I wonder what the longest duration has been, in the history of let's just say S&P500 or similar, between [a low so bad that people would say "sucks that I'm retiring now"] and [the point in time prior to that, where it had the same exact value but as an all-time high]. A decade maybe? So basically one would conclude that they could've begun taking withdrawals a decade ago with the same size of retirement account (wel…

There was a study (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinity_study) showing that you could count on a 4% withdrawal rate for retirement income over any 30-year retirement period, including periods spanning the Great Depression and other market lows. Most of the time you can count on more; that was the lowest across the entire study. And with compounding, the difference between "30-year retirement period" and "indefinite retirement period" is not much; withdraw a bit less, or be able to adapt to prevailing conditions, and your retirement portfolio will last indefinitely.

Re: Buy payphones and retire

#189

Post by morgante »

ElFitz wrote: post #106
andai wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If the goal is to have a system where everyone can have passive income, then achieving that goal is the end of the world. If AI and robotics continue to be developed, then eventually most human labor becomes uneconomical by comparison. At that point, the system provides passive income on a mass scale (UBI) to prevent its own violent destruction. At least, that's the good ending.

To me, a major obstacle on the path to UBI is that it seems to conflict with the interests of those who benefit from the current status quo. If everyone receives a sufficient basic income, who will fix their toilets or clean their yachts? If the answer is ’no one’, then I’m afraid we’ll need significant advances in automation and robotics—or pitchforks—before we see UBI implemented. But my point of view may be simpli…

> If everyone receives a sufficient basic income, who will fix their toilets or clean their yachts?

Obviously in this scenario we have robots that fix toilets and clean yachts. That's not even farfetched.

Re: Buy payphones and retire

#190

Post by ensignavenger »

khuey wrote: post #102
hifromwork wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>just put up some initial capital in exchange for even more money back, is always a scam. some people might come out ahead sometimes, but more people will lose than win. How so? My all-world index funds are doing pretty well. For more risk averse, almost every buyer of USA governmental bonds gets "even more money back" in exchange for the initial capital. I don't think that's a scam either.

> For more risk averse, almost every buyer of USA governmental bonds gets "even more money back" in exchange for the initial capital. In nominal terms, sure. In real terms, ask the banks that bought 30 year treasuries in Spring 2020 how that's going for them.

The problem for some of those banks wasn't the 30 year treasuries, it was that they bought those treasuries with other peoples money, and other people did not commit to 30 years, so now when the other people come to get their money, the bank doesn't have it.

The 30 year treasuries are still doing just fine, in accordance to the terms of the treasury when it was bought.

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