I like many others would like to eventually retire, preferably earlier than later. Money does not make sense to me beyond paycheck pays for rent and food.

  • adultswim_antifa [he/him]
    ·
    3 years ago

    I recommend Betterment because their portfolios and management strategies are good and they make it easy to do the smart thing in the long run. The priorities in my opinion:

    1. Take as much 401k match as you can. It's free money. You're basically getting double returns if your employer is paying half.
    2. Save enough money so you can survive 6-10 months if you lose your job. Betterment.com safety net fund is much better than putting it in the bank.
    3. Fund a Roth IRA every year.
    4. Save money in a normal Betterment retirement fund (not tax advantaged).

    You can use the money from 4 to fund 3 and 1. You can use your contributions to 3 to fund 4 if you decide you'd rather have money sooner. I have an overfunded 401k and fixing that is much harder than fixing any of the others, so I would recommend to only take employer match and use Roth IRAs rather than try to abuse the advantages of 401ks. Frankly you'll probably be fine without 401k if you use the other options.

    I gotta add the caveat that I think we're in a very large asset bubble, maybe the largest in American history. But you'll never be able to time the top or the bottom and buying the top is not that bad in the long run as long as you keep saving, unless the stock market dies forever (please) in which case either we're doing socialism and you'll probably be able to retire some day, or we're doing Mad Max and it won't matter either way.

    • Shinji_Ikari [he/him]
      ·
      3 years ago

      I'll look into betterment, thanks for the advice.

      and yeah, part of my adverseness to investing is I actively want the stock market to die so why would I want to take part in it. Yeah I might as well improve my material station if I can while its around, but with my investment luck, as soon as things look up is when the stockmarket dissapear button will be hit

      • adultswim_antifa [he/him]
        ·
        3 years ago

        Nothing destroys class consciousness more than 401ks in my opinion.

        • The working class is divided into people who get 401ks because they have arbitrarily defined "good" jobs and people who don't.
        • Social security is de-emphasized since 401ks are "better" and poors can go fuck themselves I guess.
        • As far as your 401k is concerned, your interests are completely aligned with the bourgeoisie. You want wages to stagnate (for everyone but yourself?). You want big profits. You want a desperate working class. You want low inflation austere fiscal policy.
        • With everyone buying into these funds, it is literally pushing up prices of assets rich people own.
        • Rich people can use their inflated assets as collateral to borrow money at lower interest rates than the rest of us.
        • Buying stock in a thing has either no link or an extraordinarily weak link to actual money being invested in the thing, so you're not really even creating employment opportunities for anyone. I think socially conscious investing probably achieves little to nothing. Money just bounces around like hot potato until it ends up funding a deep sea oil rig or something.

        But there's no alternative. Your individual actions won't change anything and you understand that you're literally going to be invested in you and your fellow worker being poor and the alternative is making sure you can only live paycheck to paycheck.

        • Shinji_Ikari [he/him]
          ·
          3 years ago

          A friend of mine likes to taunt me whenever I wish for the end of the stock market, saying my retirement account will be gone. Oh well boo fuckin hoo. Most of the US will barely be touched and it will just be boomers living on their high horses that we'll have to read sob stories about.

          I hate it and its criminal how we've tied everyone's ability to just be old and chill into this magical and fake system of rapidly moved numbers in a computer system.