I sold all my stocks and bonds today.
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Absolutely. Things are getting so bad at Microsoft right now (debt load really more than anything) that they've had mass layoffs every month for years. They're getting brutal to the point they come in and axe whole departments and don't give warning or severance.
Their latest one, they created an entirely new department, moved everyone they didn't want there, and then shut it down and blamed "performance evaluations". I mean, it's getting difficult to hide. ("I'm not saying it's stack rank, but it's stack rank!")
Yahoo Finance yesterday had a graph showing hiring vs job openings. Since 2022, 4 job openings have disappeared for every 1 hire, and both are trending downward. Much of what's happening is them taking down a few million job postings they didn't ever intend to hire anyone for.
Tech in general is being brutalized. Someone I know well who went from Google to worked at a startup that was paying him over $300,000 a year and all these crazy fringe benefits let him go and nobody is returning his calls. He got flustered because he was summoned finally and it turned out to be one of those fake interviews.
Unfortunately instead of saving he let the good times roll and mortgaged an expensive house and then another place out in the middle of a national park. It was fire damaged and now there's ongoing problems with it.
Instead of getting neck deep in house debt and praying there was a job later, and getting a place to vacation at on the side, he should have built up savings to last a couple years of potential unemployment.
(I hope that Crostini doesn't end up in the Google graveyard. It was a big selling point on Chromebooks for me.)
I would say bonds are safer because they're less volatile in general and if companies fail, bondholders get paid first and stockholders get wiped, but also because the relatively good stock returns and high interest rates really took a big bite out of the bond funds a while back making them cheap, so I see it as a decent place to park money. The freaking bond fund returned over 11% last year.
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"Nearly 70% of Single People Struggle to Afford Housing Payments, Compared to 52% of Married People"
One of the headlines on that website.
Single people have one income and most of the same expenses. The federal tax structure tends to reward marriage and punish people for being single. Marriage tends to make careless people a lot more cautious about risk.
Speaking for myself, I was a slob that didn't care if I had two bucks to my name who just slept on the couch while the credit card debt gathered, and things fell where they may when I was in my 20s and single. Now if I screw up, two of us get to suffer for it, so I watch my budget a lot more closely and pay attention to how to minimize taxation and invest.
Completely different person. You'd hardly know I was that guy eating those sad TV dinners and flipping between Cartoon Network and the Sci Fi Channel in my underwear.
I even learned Immigration law and successfully advocated for my spouse to become a US Citizen.
One of the headlines on that website.
Single people have one income and most of the same expenses. The federal tax structure tends to reward marriage and punish people for being single. Marriage tends to make careless people a lot more cautious about risk.
Speaking for myself, I was a slob that didn't care if I had two bucks to my name who just slept on the couch while the credit card debt gathered, and things fell where they may when I was in my 20s and single. Now if I screw up, two of us get to suffer for it, so I watch my budget a lot more closely and pay attention to how to minimize taxation and invest.
Completely different person. You'd hardly know I was that guy eating those sad TV dinners and flipping between Cartoon Network and the Sci Fi Channel in my underwear.
I even learned Immigration law and successfully advocated for my spouse to become a US Citizen.
I don't even remotely see that happening.
S&P 500 is still up 2.70% YTD. Assuming you are like most retirees in your age bracket with $1M-3M in savings and assuming 60% stock. That means you’ve already missed out on $16K-48.6K worth of potential gains. Again, there are better ways of handling risk.
Illinois still has a special Kruggerand tax due to the apartheid era. They never repealed the law. Technically all gold and silver coins issued by South Africa are subject to sales tax whereas most other gold and silver coins are not.I will say this. One of my older friends wanted to buy gold, but was going to buy it from a place that would "store" it for him.
I convinced him that was a fraud. They would take his money and buy nothing. It was a Ponzi scheme that would disappear with everyone's cash. Told him that if he wanted gold, to buy Krugerrands, and bury them somewhere secure that he had access.
a Krugerrand contains one troy ounce of gold. 40 coins would be 40 ounces..
but Astro 14 is correct. This discussion is about stocks and bonds. Not other kinds of investments, such as Gold, or Beanie Babies.
Given the state of the economy in South Africa, I wonder how many gold and silver coins are coming out of there lately.
People leave some Kruggerands in the Salvation Army kettles every year. Nobody knows who is doing it.
Many Boomers I know didn't save anything and don't know how Social Security works or what the Trust Fund is, and they never run out of "verbiage" to describe people in my generation, who have 401(k) accounts we haven't raided for, oh...
Plastic surgery.
Vacations.
We want a car but didn't save so retirement account.
Raid it again to remodel the house that some jerk will get in the divorce.
By the time mom retired, she had $1,600 in her 401(k) which was also frozen because the feds accused the company managing it for the Archdiocese office of embezzlement. Turns out 11 funds were embezzled from, but not hers, so she got her $1600.
Then she went shopping on Amazon.
If it wasn't for a tiny pension and Social Security, she'd have nothing. Many people in her generation saved nothing and said "I'll never live that long." One of the people my Dad worked with at RCA in the 90s didn't sign up for the free pension system and said "I'm not going to retire from here."
Someday I would like to be one of those late night comedians who goes out and asks Americans simple questions they can't answer. Mine will be mainly economic.
Mom had four mortgages, lost all of them, ended up in bankruptcy for two of them at the same time. There's an accomplishment.
Then she's always on the phone with me going "Some Millennial.... this or that. Your generation is dumb, dumb dumb dumb....blah blah dumb!"
If you did nothing except buy some Series EE Savings Bonds today, they're guaranteed to double in 20 years. She didn't get anything that lasted. Like gripping onto water.
I guess the upside is if you didn't bother to save anything you don't have to notice there's a recession happening. Mom didn't even know there was a recession in 2008.
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It seems you know many I'll informed and/or poorly educated people.
If you're the financial planning maven you claim to be, why did you not advise your mother better?
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You can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink it.
She could have made several thousand dollars in bank interest just investing my grandmother's money (it's joint account and she's my grandmother's POA) into a MMSA or a CD ladder over the past few years, but she was skeptical of bank interest, so she let it all rot to inflation in a checking account. It wouldn't have even been unethical, illegal, or wrong to make the interest money. The only thing it would have meant was more money there to pay the nursing home bill, or a bigger inheritance after my grandmother passed.
It's really so not the job of her adult son to nag her about not managing her own life better. She got herself in way worse trouble than only having nothing in her retirement account. She married two men after my dad who did nothing except abuse, live off her, and drinking and smoking the money.
They put her in bankruptcy. Then she bragged about what a genius she was for filing bankruptcy and how glad she was that her employer stole all that paid vacation time so she could go on vacation without any money while she was having financial problems leading to a bankruptcy. (The lack of being paid the PTO meant she cleared the means test for Chapter 7 bankruptcy by $100 that year.) Bragged about filing bankruptcy like she'd unlocked some secret wealth building strategy that puts you back at zero,
You have to set boundaries to avoid having a heart attack over watching other people mess up so badly. Realize that they're not going to take your advice and just stop offering it.
I'm glad that my dad taught me how to earn, handle, and invest money at a young age. I had three jobs by the time I was 13. And I was putting most of the money in interest-bearing investments. Some of it is still out there because it doesn't finish maturing for 30 years from when you bought it.
I kept the paper notes even though you can't redeem them anymore. I converted them to electronic bonds and they continue to grow in Treasury Direct.
Anyway, I love my mom but she doesn't have a head for finance. Bankruptcy isn't an investment. It's a kindness that we have for people who can't pay their bills where they go to court and tell a judge that and their bills go away, but the punishment is being branded as a bankrupt, which will make your life much harder for ten years. People will see you didn't pay your bills and the court had to get involved.
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If you have a job, best to keep your job.
As for investing - I still think retirees have too many risk assets - that includes longer dated bonds and stocks. If you have enough to do what you want, why have the volatility? Plenty of safer ways to beat inflation, and neither of those beat inflation in the 1970's. They both got smashed.
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Powell mentioned it in his most recent word salad apparently. Something to the affect that mass lay-off's are not occurring, but no one is hiring either.
If you have a job, best to keep your job.
As for investing - I still think retirees have too many risk assets - that includes longer dated bonds and stocks. If you have enough to do what you want, why have the volatility? Plenty of safer ways to beat inflation, and neither of those beat inflation in the 1970's. They both got smashed.
Ok, I look around my part of this world and all I can say life is great!
ALL Family, friends, neighbors and the (NC)state I live in and the last state (SC) I just moved from, things are going amazingly well.
If you don’t feel that way maybe it’s time to pack up and move.
Living a successful life here in the USA is like no other place in the world.
Sadly for those checking how many people lost their jobs on internet sites is counter productive. It’s a snapshot of an ever changing job market since man walked this earth. No different. Sad yes but no different.
The tech industry lived high and mighty for a long time. If those employees saved money instead of spending sprees never seen in our lifetimes they are in good shape. Same happened to much of Wall Street over a decade ago. Replaced by technology. The layoffs are happening only because technology has replaced their jobs, no longer needed. No different than automobile assembly lines of the 50s and 60s. Or any industry that became more efficient.
Gone are all the owner operated hardware stores, drug stores, retail stores, independent doctors and dentists. Everything, technology jobs no different. Ummm almost everyone here buys from Amazon or Walmart did anyone care about the small business and employees you threw under the bus?
It’s always a changing job market, here today, gone tomorrow. Part of life is making it happen/survival is up to the individual and sadly we all don’t make it or make bad choices.
ALL Family, friends, neighbors and the (NC)state I live in and the last state (SC) I just moved from, things are going amazingly well.
If you don’t feel that way maybe it’s time to pack up and move.
Living a successful life here in the USA is like no other place in the world.
Sadly for those checking how many people lost their jobs on internet sites is counter productive. It’s a snapshot of an ever changing job market since man walked this earth. No different. Sad yes but no different.
The tech industry lived high and mighty for a long time. If those employees saved money instead of spending sprees never seen in our lifetimes they are in good shape. Same happened to much of Wall Street over a decade ago. Replaced by technology. The layoffs are happening only because technology has replaced their jobs, no longer needed. No different than automobile assembly lines of the 50s and 60s. Or any industry that became more efficient.
Gone are all the owner operated hardware stores, drug stores, retail stores, independent doctors and dentists. Everything, technology jobs no different. Ummm almost everyone here buys from Amazon or Walmart did anyone care about the small business and employees you threw under the bus?
It’s always a changing job market, here today, gone tomorrow. Part of life is making it happen/survival is up to the individual and sadly we all don’t make it or make bad choices.
This is NOT directed at BaronHK….
I’ve noticed over the past 30 years talking to many women in the workplace they are not that concerned about investing for their financial future. Very little money was put into 401K, most had no idea what an IRA was.
I ask basic questions about:
Retirement, 401K, IRA, disability insurance, life insurance, Social Security, retirement plans, drawdown of savings, taxes on distributions, etc….
90% are not concerned about not having enough money to last throughout their golden years. Their attitude is they will have a retirement similar to parents 40 years earlier where you could live off Social Security.
Some of these women might be collecting shopping carts at Walmart when they are 70 years old. I’m not kidding.
I’ve noticed over the past 30 years talking to many women in the workplace they are not that concerned about investing for their financial future. Very little money was put into 401K, most had no idea what an IRA was.
I ask basic questions about:
Retirement, 401K, IRA, disability insurance, life insurance, Social Security, retirement plans, drawdown of savings, taxes on distributions, etc….
90% are not concerned about not having enough money to last throughout their golden years. Their attitude is they will have a retirement similar to parents 40 years earlier where you could live off Social Security.
Some of these women might be collecting shopping carts at Walmart when they are 70 years old. I’m not kidding.
I don't think its just women. "Forty-three percent of 55- to 64-year-olds had no retirement savings at all in 2022, according to the Federal Reserve Board"
I wonder how many older people are still 100% in equities because they feel like they have to be?
https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/ret...of-boomers-have-adequate-savings-will-younger
I resemble those remarks, maybe a year away from retirement.
Please: share your cookbook to better ways to handle risk in retirement. Needs to be simple because I'm not a retirement financial expert. My "guaranteed"* fixed income portion of my portfolio (enough to maintain current living standard) is only making about 5%+/- interest now. It's "safe". How do I make more on the remaining 60% safely?
Note: guaranteed and safe - what if life/government as we know it collapses?
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You should invest monthly and be consistent and play ball with companies that have 50+ years of gain..... and play the long game. We have all seen the tables where a 22 year old starts to invest and what they have when they hit 60. Now, I wouldn't be pulling out right now, but I would be a little shy of the tech stocks. Oil and Gas have always been nice long term investments and will continue to be so long after I die. In 200-300 years.... not so much. Even a market cash won't affect those investments if you stick in long term. Everyone is addicted to their autos and that stuff that makes their engines run.
Good post, the only thing I don’t like is the sensationalism of Social Security and Medicare.
Those two programs aren’t going any place, but it adds sizzle to every single story you read in this country on the subject. The problem is the public believes there is a problem.
Adjustments will be made as they always have been. I do agree costs will be higher for the working people because there’s less workers working but that’s life.
The fact is those two programs aren’t going any place and they are not going to go bankrupt.
Agree with the rest of it. Humans are like rodents. We are never happy with what we have and spend and spend and spend for things we do not need nor can afford.
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Enlightenment is not sitting on a mountain contemplating life 24/7.
People indeed don’t use the gift they have been given which is a balance of contentment and drive. Everyone can have this - it’s there waiting to be used.
Seems like your forum name fits
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