Retirement investing...
- Thread starter Ws6
- Start date
I'm glad your experience was positive.
I just want a little break before I kick it. I'm not planning to sip off this until 90 or something, and I'm leaving nothing but a corpse behind, so no real plan on building anything beyond what I'll use.Astro14 is 100% correct when he said it takes decades to build wealth.
It doesn’t happen in a short amount of time and it takes some smart, well informed decision making.
This is my final post on this thread but I’ve mentioned in the past I opened Roth IRAs for our 4 kids when they turned 18 and funded the max contribution the first year to get the snowball in motion. All 4 were working at 18 and they’ve been contributing to their Roth IRAs ever since.
To retire comfortably you have to plan for it and look forward to the finish line.
@Ws6 - read this.
The nature of your thread, the questions you ask, and the things you want to achieve, demonstrate a lack of understanding of the topic…of how to get where you want to go.
It needs to start with education, articles like this, and a couple of books I can recommend, these are what you need to start with.
You can’t build a plan if you don’t understand how to accomplish the task
I saw that. Good insights. I'm opening a Roth IRA along side my ind brokerage, tonight. I think I can max it for 2024 if I do it before April 15.
Also, yes, that is why I began this thread. I grew up poor af at times, and noone around me knew how to do anything with money. So, now that I've got land, a home, and a reliable vehicle, and no other debt, Im looking to sort it so I can have 5 or 10 years of peace at the end of it all maybe.
I'm happy for them. I still view it as a disgusting indoctrination scam and only went because of a full academic scholarship.Place was full of bitter old buggers who just wanted power over a captive audience. I wasted 2 years getting a bachelor's because I knew nothing about college when I started. A 2 year would have netted me the same income, plus less time in that cesspool and more time earning it.
I will forever hold to "those who cannot do, teach", and my experience sees it true. The instructors I had who still actually had real jobs were very helpful and level. Good people there to teach. Those who cashed out and took up the school role were stains.
I like this comment, if perhaps from a different prospect...
I see a lot of comments from self directed investors. I disagree with this approach. If I needed brain surgery, would I choose self direction or to a skilled surgeon?
Now, I do not take all the advice I have been given from professionals. In fact, I fired Fidelity.
Schwab has introduced me to investment vehicles I could never have known of. I will be 72 in March; a few years ago my Schwab Wealth Advisory team scaled my risk way back; there was no need at this stage in the investment game.
Best of luck to you @Ws6. I am sorry you have the bad feelings towards higher education. IMO, America needs to value education far more than we do.
It's a struggle for me because of always having to come behind and fix, or to direct professionals in fields not my own due to their incompetence. An example is a plumber who was installing my new hot water heater. He wanted to use flexible tubing, bent at a hard angle, which would place pressure on all joints. I had him install 90* elows which resulted in no tension on joints, and future adaptability baked in for different size heaters. As the home owner who has never plumbed anything, I was sad to have to suggest this.
However, I do not think this means I know anything at all about plumbing. It just makes me distrust "experts".
Education is wonderful. It's college that's trash. See, college has good info, but its mostly a gatekeeping tool. A way the muckety mucks get to pick and choose. You better fit or assimilate, or they'll block your path. They tried numerous times with me, but I beat their system and did indeed graduate. But I'll never advocate for them. I remember the backstabbing instructors coming up to me congratulating me after I made it off the stage. Hah. I don't do Stockholm.
I read a few books in the 80's but can't remember the author now. At the time a fairly well thought of financial advice writer and I guess ok since I'm not broke now. I wouldn't mind to read them again, if I could remember them, or read some new ones, not that I'll be doing or changing anything at 68. But I like reading.
Growing up poor is a disadvantage - but not a disadvantage that makes it impossible to succeed.
Look, I grew up pretty middle class. Borrowed my Mom’s five year old 1976 Impala wagon (vinyl seats, AM radio) for my senior prom. Hardly wealthy.
What I know about financial planning and investing was all learned in my late 20s, as a result of my Dad dying at a young age.
So, like you, I knew nothing about it growing up.
In addition to a couple dozen books that I own, there was my local library. I read, I learned, I followed markets and the news.
Then, I got to work, and started investing.
But education precedes the development of a plan. And an Internet forum is not an education. Some decent advice here, to get you pointed in the right direction, but seriously, it’s time to start reading. To start learning.
Including learning about what vehicles/options exist through your employer.
The information is out there. Go get it.
Sounds like you went to a terrible school. Like I said, I've spent a lot of time in academia and at 46 I'm still a student. Everything I have is a direct result of my education. As far as who teaches, sure, my medical/dental school had PhDs who were super productive and did little teaching and people whose research didn't pan out and they paid their way by taking on a heavier teaching load. This is nothing new, Einstein wasn't teaching physics 101 at Princeton, he had better uses of his time. Teaching it the easy part, having the imagination to get past research obstacles is hard. I also have had several profs in business school who are there because they absolutely killed it in life. The woman who taught me real estate investing has tens of millions of dollars worth of real estate personally and worked for 30 years for a company with billions in real estate holdings. She knew her stuff like few others and her knowledge is very valuable to me moving forward.
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Yeah, the school was pretty terrible, but I have to admit it did teach me about the job and workplace backstabbing politics well, as it mimicked it perfectly.
No. Because others in my field share the same experience. I also watched my girlfriend go through UM getting her Master's, and it was the same BS, except it cost a lot more. College is a collection of has beens and trash dead set on gatekeeping and making others miserable, with a few sprinkles of gold throughout.
Whether or not it's valid is up to the reader, but it is enough for me that I will never set foot there again. I did my time, I paid my dues, and I beat their system. No need to go back through it. They would kick me out in a heartbeat because now that I've done what I do for years, I would not take their abuse silently and let them trash talk me etc. the way they did back before I had the life experience and money to tell them to kiss my arse. I was broke, desperate to finish my education so I could feed myself properly, and willing to endure their petty abuses and insults.
I had professors come up to me in the hall and tell me things like "You know noone likes you, right? Can't you see how the atmosphere in a room changes when you're there?" and other professors erase my name off of rosters that I signed because they alleged I didn't attend the event (They almost cost me a full scholarship doing this, and yes, I did attend the full lecture they erased my name from, and began quoting it back to them and they had to re-instate my scholarship.), etc. One even tried to have me kicked out of the college for carrying too large of a water bottle (which was not used in a disruptive way or controversial---it was a gallon jug of water I drank during the day). Another professor told them her son did the same, would they try to kick HIM out?
I can go on and on about the petty trash people who teach at colleges and who luckily met a few flecks of gold that protected me in part, as well. I just don't have the humility in me to pander to those washed up bags anymore and could never go back now that I can stand without their "approval" in life.
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I'm thankful for apparently going to "non-typical" schools. I had mostly excellent professors and interesting other students. I had a few classes I especially liked and looked forward to. I still remember them fondly now, half a century later. I have no experience with or knowledge of anything as awful as described and find it unlikely to be common.
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