Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I accidentally loaned all my money to the US government

beanlog.vercel.app

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

421–430 of 512 posts

Re: I accidentally loaned all my money to the US government

#421

Post by simsla »

galangalalgol wrote: post #378
PawBer wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's no wonder that people vote for less government influence in the US. They just never had a good experience with it so they want to get rid of it as a band-aid solution.

Are large organizations in other countries more human friendly? That sounds delightful. My impression from friends in the EU is that it is similar there, at least for housing and healthcare regulations.

For Belgium: The rules are often still a bureaucratic mess, owed in part to the fact that it's easier to slap bandaids on existing systems than design a new system from scratch. The bandaids compound into systems that are often unintuitive, and not always transparent.

I do feel like I benefit greatly from these systems, convoluted though they may be. The goal still is to help people.

The few times I got the short end of the stick, I managed to reach a human the same day.

Re: I accidentally loaned all my money to the US government

#423

Post by lvl102 »

boris-ning-usds wrote: post #331
lvl102 wrote: post #103

That’s why you buy through a bank. Edit: I am wrong. You can only buy it two ways which is ridiculous in my view. More to the point of the website that belongs in a museum, why can’t they update this consumer facing portal? What happened to all the people from “digitization” govt organizations? Such as 18F and usds. Oh. You mean all they do is replace the front end? Got it.

We absolutely can update this consumer facing portal, and I believe there is a Treasury team actively working to modernize this portal. Personally, I didn't even know of this portal's existence until I signed up for an account and and went through the same process the author went through. I noted the same security theater and passed it over to my USDS team to see if there's anything we can do. At first glance, simply…

Thank you so much and I will look forward to what you guys can do with this. It’s definitely getting used right now and am sure you can confirm that on your end.

Re: I accidentally loaned all my money to the US government

#424

Post by zerocrates »

mindslight wrote: post #321
FireBeyond wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not sure how much clearer "Your deposit exceeded the limit. The excess funds will be returned" could be.

You have not quoted the email correctly. The email says "excess purchase". As someone who has experience with savings bonds and Treasury Direct, I still have no clue how to interpret that phrase. Savings bonds are discrete things with discrete values, even though TD has worked to smooth over that quality with arbitrary purchase amounts and partial redemptions. "Excess purchase" may very well mean a refund of the enti…

They are probably getting a full refund of both the $10,000 and the $9,975 purchases. Eventually. It's possible they'll get $25 and $9,975 back and end up with $10,000 in bonds total, though I'd doubt it.

The website not stopping or warning you is one thing, though I think the real change needed here is on the backend: when executing the order it should check your limit before trying to transfer the money.

The way they're doing it is probably safer for them in terms of races or whatever, and who knows what ancient Treasury system it's probably interfacing with, but still.

Re: I accidentally loaned all my money to the US government

#425

Post by oneeyedpigeon »

zarzavat wrote: post #170
eterm wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's an odd interpretation of the refund. The email clearly states, > "A refund of the excess purchase..." So they'd be refunded the excess, i.e. $25. Putting another $9,975 through just feels like being "too smart".

It’s bad English. The unambiguous terminology would be simply “excess” or “excess part of the purchase”. The term “excess purchase” sounds like the entire purchase is excess i.e. the adjective “excess” is modifying the noun “purchase” [the purchase was excess]. But they intended it as a noun adjunct where the noun “purchase” is modifying the noun “excess” [the excess was a purchase]. But this parse is not at all pref…

Imagine if the email had just said "excess part of the purchase: $25". No way thy would've made that mistake.

Re: I accidentally loaned all my money to the US government

#426

Post by drewcoo »

Brian_K_White wrote: post #350
cortesoft wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This happens whenever something bad happens to someone else, be it a car accident or a major illness or being the victim of a crime. People want to think it wouldn’t happen to them, so they go through all the reasons they would have been able to avoid the situation so that they don’t have to fear it happening to them. People really don’t want to admit to themselves that there are a lot of things outside our control t…

People don't want to have to care about anyone else. They are so burdened with looking out for themselves they only see caring about anyone else as just another burden that they shouldn't have to bear, instead of seeing it as an avenue of shared and thus relieved burden. So, any excuse to make it so they don't have to care about any other misfortune than their own.

Humans are social animals. How do you reconcile that?

Re: I accidentally loaned all my money to the US government

#427

Post by [deleted] »

Someone1234 wrote: post #183
jefftk wrote: post #62

> They require you to enter your password by clicking on a virtual keyboard. This pseudo-security measure actually only slows down humans, not bots, because you can still edit the value of the text field using Javascript. I don't think this is generally worth it as a security measure, but the goal is not to protect against automation. Instead, custom on-screen keyboards are attempts to thwart keyloggers.

> Instead, custom on-screen keyboards are attempts to thwart keyloggers. Commercial malware doesn't work this way. The term "keylogger" is a misnomer. "Keylogging" without context provides an unintelligible stream of garbage that might have well be from a random number generator. Most malware that I've seen either directly target the browser or the operating system, but in both cases they're looking for an unencrypte…

[deleted]

Re: I accidentally loaned all my money to the US government

#428

Post by zerocrates »

mise_en_place wrote: post #326
hedora wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you ever paid taxes in the US? The IRS loves creating scenarios that lead to them incorrectly holding big wads of your cash.

One of my coworkers told me a long time ago, it's better to increase your withholding allowances. That way the government is giving you an interest free loan.

There's a limit to how much you can do that and not owe a penalty.

Re: I accidentally loaned all my money to the US government

#429

Post by busyant »

I did something analogous?/similar-ish recently.

I tried to pay my parents' credit card balance (let's say it was $1000).

I went through the process and received an automated email saying, "Thank you for paying $1000 on the credit card."

Got a call from my father a few hours later telling me he spent another $300 and could I please pay the extra $300...?

So, I signed in again and paid another $300.

Only thing is, unbeknownst to me, the $300 payment canceled the $1000 payment -- because they both were scheduled for the same day.

I only found out when I signed in a few weeks later and saw a $40 interest charge for not paying the full balance on the credit card.

...

Definitely my fault for not paying closer attention, but still annoying.

Re: I accidentally loaned all my money to the US government

#430

Post by scarface74 »

UncleMeat wrote: post #394
scarface74 wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, I get downvoted merciless on r/personalfinance when I say that my only conceivable true “emergency” is a job loss. Anything else I can use credit to income smooth and cash flow. I keep one month of bills in savings More specifically, I have a HELOC and I’m always getting low and no interest balance transfer options from my bank.

It is also worth understanding when you situation is far more stable than most people. If you've got a stable job and considerable assets then you can basically self insure. Yes, if you surprise need $40,000 and the market is down it will suck to sell a bunch of investments from your taxable brokerage account or rapidly get a HELOC but that case is rare enough that you are willing to eat the loss in that case for add…

This was my same thought process when I was making $80K and trying to dig myself out of bad real estate decisions post 2008 and had less than $100 in savings. Yes I know $80K isn’t a bad income in the grand scheme of things. But it is when you have five mortgages on three properties totaling a half a million dollars during the worse real estate crash in years.

Even then my focus was to always be employable and to be able to find a job quickly.

Post reply on HN