partial_accumen

I can go to a cafe where I’m waited on and served decent food for $20.

How much do you tip on you cafe meal on top of that $20?

He said all this kind of nonsense the last time he ran.

And he violated all kinds of laws when in office and after his term ended.

I think there is a high likelihood we will see President Vance before the end of this second Trump term. I can’t really tell which is worse.

That drone sitting on the ground taking off to chase the motorcycle. That’s a new definition of “loitering munition”.

The purpose is to rate the users.

Individual communities can set up guidelines, that if you have a new account under 6 months, and you have a negative overall karma, you’re banned from that community until a human can look through your post history to see if you should be unbanned. you’ll have to repost previously highly upvoted content to pump up your karma numbers, until you have a positive overall karma.

FTFY, I’d really prefer to leave that mistake of karma at Reddit instead of polluting Lemmy with it.

Lemmy karma-less method also drastically reduces the value of bot accounts to farm karma (for nefarious or advertising use before being banned).

Free rent, or so they thought

This is NOT what I thought people meant when they use the phrase “Living rent free in your head”

Stop. The Vanguard retirement funds all did this if the target is before 2060. And those are invested in index funds by professionals. OP likely had the VTINX

OP’s losses are more exagerated than just the Target Date fund experiencing a dip from bond exposure.

Here’s OP’s same initial investment on the same day but 100% in VTINX:

So instead of a $4k loss that OP showed, it would been a $71 loss. OP went picking individual stocks and got burned (assuming they liquidated their position after seeing their portfolio balance).

Or I completely disagree with the idea of individuals investing for their retirement as a base expectation when the options available are not universal nor affordable for half the population.

Then you should have led with that. I wouldn’t have wasted my time trying to explain how to use the system to someone not interested in any part of the system. None of your arguments are about the mechanisms of the system, but instead lack of its universal applicability. You weren’t interested to learning how the system can work, you’d already dismissed it from the get-go.

Your post comes across as dismissive of anyone criticizing the current system.

Your posts come off as trolling because you’re arguing about particular internal steps to the current system when you don’t even care about it.

You do understand a significant portion of the population doesn’t have a dollar to spare when they live paycheck to paycheck, right?

Listen friend, its entirely possibly you started off with good intentions in this thread, but somewhere along the line it looks like you got so concerned with “being right” or “getting zingers” that your responses got more and more useless and simply argumentative for arguments sake. I’m human, I’ve been there. Look where you started off this line of conversation with this:

So if the market crashes the year before I want to retire I should just put off retiring for another 30 years.

The way I know you went down the wrong path is that if you were genuine with your argument, you would have started HERE with your comments about people not being able to save anything for retirement. Instead, you attacked a legitimate way to save for retirement for those that can save for retirement. Worse, you did so from a position of ignorance, but then attacked the response that informed you how your stated position was inaccurate.

The other possibility is that you started your whole rant without any thought to having a good faith conversation about the benefits or challenges to Americans saving for retirement. That would make you a straight up Troll. I don’t that thats who you are, so maybe just let this conversation thread die because its not producing anything productive for you and its otherwise a waste of time for everyone.

Earns enough money to set some aside for retirement.

Do you literally not even have $1 in your pocket that you earned for yourself? Thats all it takes to open an IRA and start saving for retirement.

Only 32% of people have 401k accounts.

45% of 18-29 year olds have a retirement account. That number keeps rising to 77% of people 60+ having a retirement account. source

You don’t need a 401k account to save for retirement. You can do this same savings/investing in an IRA or even an brokerage account (but you wouldn’t get the tax benefits). There are ZERO employer requirements to opening an IRA, you just have to be someone that earns money.

I recommend FSKAX over FZROX. There are few minor differences. Yes FZROX has a lower expense ratio, but it BARELY lower when compared to FSKAX. My understanding is the biggest downside to FZROX is that you can’t hold that in any other brokerage. So if one day you decide you don’t like Fidelity you have to sell all your FZROX and then buy something else offered at the other brokerage. In a retirement fund this isn’t so much a big deal, but could mean you miss out on gains between the sale and the purchase of whatever else you replace it with.

If you’re investing in a non-retirement account this is a BIG deal, as any gains would be taxed at the time of sale. This can mean you pay 15%-20% on the gains just to switch brokerages. FSKAX doesn’t have that limitation, and you’d be able to simply do an “in kind” transfer of the securities to your new brokerage without any tax events/consequences. To me, that portability is worth the tiny different in expense ratio.

Haven’t found a good fund yet except FSKAX and VTI

You found the good ones. No need to go looking further.

So if the market crashes the year before I want to retire I should just put off retiring for another 30 years.

Thats not how to do it. As you approach retirement age (5 to 10 years out), you move your money out of riskier (but higher return generating) stocks and into safer (but lower performing) investments like bonds or even cash (actual cash, CDs, Tbills, etc). Generally you also don’t move it ALL out of riskier stock. You don’t need 100% of your savings on day 1 of retirement, so you convert a few years worth (5 maybe?) to safe stuff and let the riskier stuff ride usually gaining more value even after you retire.

I lost $4k on my retirement plan. It’s invested in total market funds, some tech, some big cap companies, and healthcare. But every sector has been ravaged by the stock market changes.

Its not your total market fund killing you, its your individual stocks. I don’t recommend picking specific stocks for your real savings. Save individual stock picks for money you can afford to lose. In your case it cost you $7,000.

I used your same data and here’s what it would have looked like if all of it was in your Total Market fund.

You would have $18,679. This would have been a gain of $3479 or a 22% return on investment in only 2 years. That is crazy good! Retirement isn’t a total scam, but unless you are VERY lucky, picking individual stocks is risky. You can successfully save for retirement with just one, two, or three funds: Total Stock Market fund, Total Bond Fund, and perhaps an International fund. I mainly focus on just the boring Total Stock Market fund and it performs fairly consistently well over time.

EDIT: Just to underscore retirement is possible with saving and investing with boring Total Market investment, if 20 years ago you had that same $15,200 and invested it in a boring Total Market investment and never save another penny, today it would be worth $88,982.

I’m not saying that you can go back in time, but with 20 years of growth (very typical for retirement savings) it can really grow. The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago. The second best time is right now.

I wish this was occurring because Switzerland saw the good in helping Ukraine, but no. The Swiss are losing customers of Swiss made weapons because of the Swiss ban:

Viola Amherd stated that the embargo is hurting Switzerland’s industry and security. As an example, she cited the Netherlands, which refused to buy Swiss weapons because of the re-export ban.

If Harris wins, they can ask for a cease fire, and then will the US and Europe deny it?

I think a ceasefire will be denied. There was an unofficial ceasefire in 2014 with the taking of Crimea. A month later Russia invaded Donbass. Until Feb 2022, the frontlines were fairly fixed. Then in Feb 2022 Russia invaded Zaporizhzhia, Kherson, and Kharkiv while trying to take even more Ukranian territory.

A ceasefire from Russia only means they will be back to take more land later. That, and Russia’s war machine is running out of equipment. Unless China suddenly starts supplying tanks and armored vehicles, in 6 months to a year Russia will be fielding horses for assults.

What would be another plausible benefit to ramping up your own casualties for marginal land gains when the outcome of the war is largely going to be influenced in a month or two?

I remember back before 2020 there was tons of mountain and cabins and homes and stuff like that anywhere from 2:50 to 500K. Now you won’t find a single one less than 800k…

WFH and good satellite internet were a bit of a game changer here. You could now live in a remote place and work a job with a high income.

Regular homes are just as bad. I’m seeing homes in my area that sold for around $200 to 300K in 2019, now they are 500k and above.

Supply and demand here. There aren’t enough houses being build for people (and private investors) that want to buy them. The price rises.

I don’t understand how this makes any sense? Salaries were not doubled, but somehow the price of all homes are now twice as much.

Lots to unpack with this one. First, some people’s salaries were doubled. There has been some niche sectors of industry that have seen large year over year increases in income, specifically some STEM fields. Second, housing price rises are not linear across all pricepoints. The cheaper house are going up significantly faster than more expensive homes. Why? Because there are more people shopping at the lower pricepoints. When we bought our new-to-us house a few years ago buying a house $150k more expensive than the house were were living in got us very little more house. However, buying a house $250k more expensive got a lot more house (larger, better neighborhood, more outside space, etc).

From the updates I’ve seen, I get the sense that Russia is fighting through the culmination of their multi-front offensive in hopes of making gains ahead of the muddy season.

This is what confuses me about Russia’s choosing these huge losses in the past couple of months. In less than week the USA will have submitted all ballots for the Presidential election (with likely another week of confusion and complaints until the victor is clear). If Trump wins, he will destroy US and possibly European support for Ukraine causing Ukraine to be wiped out by Russia. If Harris wins, then at least the amount of military and economic support continues as it has so far, or it could get even larger. Even if Harris keeps the support the same, Putin doesn’t cannot take 4 more years at the current rate of attrition, and he’ll have to withdraw or be kicked out when the Russian well runs dry.

So when the answer is less than a month away, why double down on meat waves with such tremendous losses? Why not wait for the results of the election defensively, while building up your forces, and either go forward with attacking a then weakened Ukraine under Trump, or turn around and use your forces at home to attempt to suppress your population to keep Putin in power under a Harris win?