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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

#281

Post by csa »

take_a_breath wrote: post #218
scarface74 wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can’t tell which of the ideas you think are crazy. - 18 months in low risk savings (not invested) - seems like overkill. - I personally think any money spent on a wedding is overkill - we went to the courthouse and saved a ton of money by having a smallish reception (in fairness we were in our mid 30s and on our second marriage) - 401K - I have no opinion either way. I haven’t thought about the pros and cons. I don…

==in fairness we were in our mid 30s and on our second marriage== How much did you spend on the first marriage?

Getting out of it was probably as expensive (if not more so) than getting into it.

I wish I could /s this, but I have seen too many folks take a big financial hit during and after a divorce.

Re: Reddit has become a guide to personal finance

#282

Post by balls187 »

I too recently started using reddit for personal finance r/investing.

I was lucky in that my mom instilled the need to put money away for retirement, which I did as soon as I graduated college. On the flip side, both my parents were secretive about their finances. It was until now, as I am ensuring I am aware of my parents wishes through their golden years, that we are having honest discussions about money.

The benefit I see is that many of the subs promote transparency. My college friends and I also discuss openly our savings and investing strategies.

My financial goals are:

1) be able to live near my current lifestyle at retirement

2) Ensure both my children have money should they suffer a catastrophic loss near middle age, as my parents did for me.

Re: Reddit has become a guide to personal finance

#283

Post by throw0101a »

Tycho wrote: post #205

Here's a simple personal finance question that seems very hard to answer: should you overpay your mortgage, or put more money towards retirement? The well informed answers you tend to see on sites like MoneySavingExpert seem to converge on putting money towards retirement. They cite things like difference in interest rates and tax relief. But I feel the analysis is too one-dimensional, and there's actually a myriad o…

We get this question a lot in /r/PersonalFinanceCanada/ and the 'towards retirement' answer is the "mathematically correct" one because most mortgage rates are 5%.

However, in Canada, if you put money into your RRSP, which is a tax-deferral account, you get a refund: so a popular option is to save for retirement and use your tax refund for your mortgage.

Lastly, the other thing generally mentioned is the observation that some people are just uncomfortable with debt 'hanging over them'. So if it helps you sleep at night, there's nothing wrong with paying it down, as long as you recognize that there is a "financially better" option.

Re: Reddit has become a guide to personal finance

#284

Post by icedchai »

neves wrote: post #125
xelhark wrote: post #23

I think a much bigger point can be summarized with this sentence from the article: > Seven of the top ten results are trying to sell you something, which really makes you question the objectivity of the advice. This is true when searching for pretty much everything in Google nowadays, that's why if you're looking for any info, searching on reddit usually yields much more objective and generally better results.

You can say this about any advice. My brother worked in a bank. They gave bonus for everyone that sold a specific financial product for the clients. The internal name of the product was "good for suckers".

Let me guess.. annuities? VULs?

Re: Reddit has become a guide to personal finance

#285

Post by bityard »

xelhark wrote: post #23

I think a much bigger point can be summarized with this sentence from the article: > Seven of the top ten results are trying to sell you something, which really makes you question the objectivity of the advice. This is true when searching for pretty much everything in Google nowadays, that's why if you're looking for any info, searching on reddit usually yields much more objective and generally better results.

While you don't get as much "blogspam" on Reddit, it has a very different problem today: The amount of misinformation and echo chambering of said misinformation on Reddit is simply staggering.

Very few subs have FAQs or rules asking newbies to search the sub for their question. As a result, most of the subs I follow are littered with the same questions over and over.

The other problem is that when someone does ask for advice, the quality of the advice is usually somewhere between mediocre to terrible. I think this is largely because there is no incentive for experts to stick around in subs to provide good answers. And because they are tired of giving the _same_ advice over and over. This gives space to the non-experts who don't _really_ understand the concepts behind the advice they are giving and end up giving bad (and sometimes dangerous) advice because that's what they were told by other non-experts in the same situation.

Re: Reddit has become a guide to personal finance

#286

Post by tunesmith »

Tycho wrote: post #205

Here's a simple personal finance question that seems very hard to answer: should you overpay your mortgage, or put more money towards retirement? The well informed answers you tend to see on sites like MoneySavingExpert seem to converge on putting money towards retirement. They cite things like difference in interest rates and tax relief. But I feel the analysis is too one-dimensional, and there's actually a myriad o…

Best solution I've come up with - if your allocation model says to put a certain % of your savings in cash, that cash will undoubtedly work better for you if you send it towards your mortgage. That way you sidestep the whole "but it might make more money in the market!" thing. (At least, until interest rates start rising a ton.)

Re: Reddit has become a guide to personal finance

#287

Post by balls187 »

WA wrote: post #105
swarnie_ wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

/r/wallstreetbets

Don’t know who downvoted you, but as someone who joined WSB two months ago, it is mind blowing. Yes, these are bets. You are likely to blow it all. But imho it gives perspective to the topic of personal finance. Even if it’s just to understand one’s own limits. Valuable sub.

I imagine that WSB is the internet version of what young wallstreet professionals are like.

Go out into the late evenings, drink excessively, do designer drugs, party it up, all while mixing locker-room talk and investing strategies.

Re: Reddit has become a guide to personal finance

#288

Post by three_seagrass »

cle wrote: post #245
Goronmon wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google is filled with so many garbage results. In this case I would just replace 'Google' with 'the internet'. Switching search providers isn't going to make a marked difference the vast majority of the time, as at the end of the day, if the vast majority of the internet is filled with 'garbage' a search engine can only do so much to avoid it.

Stop trying to deflect blame from Google. They go out of their way to show garbage. They sacrifice their search results as much as they can get away with, in order to show more ads. Reddit does not do this nearly to the degree as Google. It’s not even close. There are ways to filter through the noise, it just doesn’t involve companies with financial conflicts of interest.

>They go out of their way to show garbage.

Citation needed. Searching "index funds vs etf" on Bing gives ads for the first five results, while Google shows a card thing and organic results.

If you're going to accuse them of deflecting, at least show evidence that it's not just the whole internet.

Re: Reddit has become a guide to personal finance

#290

Post by ar_lan »

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 ira instead of a regular 401k like all the idiot sheeple.

This is also uncommon.

> I still think having a relationship with a financial advisor you trust is better than taking advice from strangers on the internet.

Why not encourage people to do their own research? How much more can you really eek out from a financial advisor?

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