321–330 of 452 posts
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FATCA makes Americans pariahs at foreign banks. I would love to store cash outside US jurisdiction but it is a compliance nightmare usually only worth it for high net worth clients. We know better systems exist, we just often can't use them even when we live overseas. Crypto is the last offshore banking for the middle class. It essentially took over right when FATF eliminated banking privacy and bearer shares -- whic…
Crypto is not banking.
Look how that turned out.
US banks are weird [1]. Archaic. Slow. Filthy rich. Incompetent. And yet they're nearly impossible to disrupt due to the benefit of size. Starting a new bank is expensive, unless you want to pretend at being a real bank and letting another bank handling all of the nitty-gritty details. In which case you've now become a reseller of that bank, and will likely be even worse. The only thing that can disrupt US banks is c…
Banks are the most immune to disruption, because they function so closely with government, and they are nothing without the blessing of government. And the hurdles to create your own bank are very high. Check out this great Netflix documentary "Bank of Dave": A moderately successful businessman decided to start his own bank, just to see if it could be done (and to lower fees for his local community). The results are.…
What does "disruption" look like in the banking space? Banks want the perception of immovable, confidence, reliable, resilience, etc. It's what gives them the credibility to move big money. They don't want to "move fast and break things". Some may think about digital currencies. My warning is this: Be careful what you wish for. If we were to switch to a full digital currency, there are significant concerns that money…
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For some people, the mortgage application process can be complicated. Maybe I'm in graduate school and my salary is called a 'stipend' and I don't get any payslips, plus I have a part-time job in sales where my base salary is very low and about 75% of my income is commission, and also my girlfriend will be helping with the mortgage, but not the deposit, and she's a Ukrainian refugee and self-employed content creator.…
That doesn't make any sense. At least in the USA, if the school is paying you then they have to issue you either a W-2 or 1099, regardless of whether they label it as a salary or stipend or whatever. Mortgage lenders are accustomed to verifying income from sources like that, it's not complicated.
> That doesn't make any sense.
Tell me about it. They still won't give you a mortgage, though.
The products being pointed out in this article as an attempt to disrupt banks seem to be basically the same product for a different price. Like, a high-yield savings account is just a savings account with a better price, right? How do you disrupt an industry by selling the same products? The advantage of startups is that they're more nimble, can pivot to fit the market better, and can adapt to customer requests faste…
I can tell you right now what I want from a "bank" as a consumer: Putting the consumer first, not seventeenth or whatever I typically experience with retail banks. As a random example, I had $3,600 stolen from one of my accounts by transactions labelled "Microsoft Online Services" or something like that. The bank reversed most , but not all of the transactions, and then had the nerve to lecture me -- an IT profession…
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You seem to be confused about finance. There is no particular connection between a fund's risk and tax exposure, and whether it is exchange tradable or not. Some regular mutual funds are very low risk. Some ETFs are very high risk. Tax exposure is largely irrelevant for 401(k), IRA, and other tax-free retirement accounts.
> no particular connection between a fund's risk and tax exposure They seem to be posting a lot of word-salad comments, but assuming good faith, they're saying these are separate downsides of mutual funds over ETFs. Mutual funds trade on your behalf, like an ETF, but they pass through the gains and losses. That can be painful if they realise those gains when you'd rather not have them, or crystallise losses when you…
My issue with bank-fool recommend mutual funds is primarily they are often a self-serving structured product. i.e. the odds a sucker never sees a consistent behavior is far greater than random chance, and a unconstrained arbitrary guess of a chicken would likely perform better in the markets.
Best of luck, =3
I'd be thrilled if US banks figured out how to do "instant" money exchanges. Today, if I pay my credit card from an account with a different bank, the payment is reflected immediately in my Visa account, but takes 3-5 days to reflect in my main checking account. It's completely bonkers that a 100% electronic transaction takes days to fulfill.