• altphoto@lemmy.today
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    3 hours ago

    I hope someone takes my retirement and invests it on bitcoin. I don’t want to live much longer past my useful life. A good heart attack could do the trick.

  • Assassassin@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    13 hours ago

    That’s my secret trick: if you never earn enough money to be able to afford to invest, you lose nothing when the market crashes

    • TankovayaDiviziya@lemmy.world
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      8 hours ago

      if you never earn enough money to be able to afford to invest

      That’s a misconception. You can now buy shares in fraction depending on the investment platform. You can put however much money you want. Of course, the fewer shares you buy, the fewer the returns should the stock price increase (and fewer losses if share price goes down).

        • TankovayaDiviziya@lemmy.world
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          6 hours ago

          You can still invest $10 in a share price of $100, which means you own one-tenth fraction of a share. Even a broke person have $10 (unless you’re homeless, which is understandable, saying “I’m broke” is most of time a hyperbole and does not mean you only have your clothes on your back).

          I’m surprised I’m the only person yet on Lenmy who corrected that you don’t have to be rich to buy shares to invest; usually someone would have done so almost immediately when it comes to this thing. Even a blue collar worker throughout his entire career can be a shareholder with 97 holdings and eventually become rich, like literally.

          • rumba@lemmy.zip
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            4 hours ago

            The problem isn’t actually not being able to invest, it’s not being able to meaningfully invest.

            If you have $10, you can throw away. $10 doesn’t mean that much to you. So let’s say you sock it away into a decent stock. Let’s get edgy. Let’s pick something that’s going to double in a year. A year goes by, you have $20. Now you can really afford that carton of eggs.

            Investing at poultry levels doesn’t mean anything to you because it’s not enough money to do anything with. You generally need to be socking away 10-30% of your income to get anywhere significant enough to retire.

            The argument that you can invest because you can afford to spend $10 is as useless as investing $10.

            • TankovayaDiviziya@lemmy.world
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              3 hours ago

              But if you did your research well and leave the $10 in a stock with huge potential growth in the future, that could triple or even grow to one hundred percent in years if not decades. Of course, if you really need the money, simply don’t invest.

              Another person replied to me and mentioned about debt. I hadn’t initially consider it because in my country, debt crisis is not really an issue unlike in the US or elsewhere so I didn’t mean to be callous. If the person have debts and really need every penny and cents count, of course pay them off first before starting to invest; I’m not a financial advisor but that’s the general advise that a qualified person will also make.

              My very first comment is a counter to the idea that you have to be extremely rich or an institutional investor to start investing, which has never really been the case. You can start investing with any amount you can afford.

              • Feathercrown@lemmy.world
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                2 hours ago

                You cannot meaningfully invest without at least a few hundred spare dollars. Expecting a multi-hundred-percent increase is not realistic.

                • TankovayaDiviziya@lemmy.world
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                  2 hours ago

                  You can treat it like a pension fund or savings account and put however amount every now and then, and let the power of compound interest work. If you read the Wikipedia entry on Ronald Read that I linked, that’s what he did. He also redistributed the gains and dividends to buy more shares on another stock. And he was a gas station attendant and then a janitor who eventually made $8 million by the time he passed away.

          • Trainguyrom@reddthat.com
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            6 hours ago

            To build off of this, the best thing an average (American) Jane/Joe can do is pile money into their 401k and when they switch jobs move the money from the 401k into a (Roth)IRA

            Individual investors can basically never beat the market no matter how smart they are nor how many hours the pile into their research. Best to just pile the money into diversified fund containing a solid mix of stock indices and bonds. If you want to be extra smart, deposit more while the market is down/super unstable so you can ride the wave up when the market grows again.

            There’s generally advise to not invest if you have high interest debt and to instead pile your spare cash into paying that down. My personal opinion is that if you’re someone who has a consistent revolving balance of debt just start shoving spare cash into a retirement account (and don’t touch it!) because that can at least build up while you slowly get your debts under control and while maybe you won’t pay off your debt as quickly, at least you have something already saved and compounding 10 years from now once everything is stabilized and paid off

            • Feathercrown@lemmy.world
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              2 hours ago

              If the debt grows faster than your investment I don’t see how squirreling away some money is smart. The amount your investment “builds up” will be less than the amount it will have saved you if you paid off your debt.

              • JesusChristLover420@lemmy.sdf.org
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                2 hours ago

                This advice is intended for people with more money than sense who are going to spend their way into debt no matter how much they have, and who will only cut down on spending when they’re in the red.

              • Trainguyrom@reddthat.com
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                4 hours ago

                If I’m remembering correctly IRA is pre-tax money and rothIRA is post-tax money, and you can do a Roth conversion on a traditional IRA if desired, pay the income taxes now then have no income tax to pay on it when you pull out at retirement and it’s gained quite a bit through compound interest

              • nonfuinoncuro@lemmy.zip
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                5 hours ago

                yes Roth is not free you pay taxes when you convert as income vs paying taxes later after you retire for traditional 401k typically most people take far less income in retirement so you tend to be in a lower bracket than your earning years so deferring tax makes sense but nobody can tell you for certain how much taxes will be in the future or how productive the markets will be so ultimately it’s all a guessing game

  • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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    13 hours ago

    People in 2020: “I’m buying at the bottom of a market, I hope I get 30% yoy returns for the next five years”

    People in 2025, last week: “Omg, it happened! I’ve more than doubled my money in less than five years!!! Crazy!!!”

    People yesterday, after a 5% market correction: “I’m destitute”

      • CoyoteFacts@piefed.ca
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        8 hours ago

        I’d definitely start considering inflation. If your money is stagnant and not earning interest, it is shedding value. Like it or not, we’re all inherently playing the game; it’s in everyone’s best interest to learn the rules.

        • Trainguyrom@reddthat.com
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          6 hours ago

          High interest savings accounts are still offering 3-4% or more. It’s a good spot to park your emergency fund. $600/year just for storing 15k ain’t bad at all plus it’s all FDIC insured (and you can also invest some of it into CDs if you’re willing to lock that money away for a couple of years in exchange for a higher interest rate)

          • CoyoteFacts@piefed.ca
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            5 hours ago

            E-Fund, yes, for sure put that in an HYSA so that you can access it when needed. However, if a person is keeping non-E-fund money out of the market for fear of volatility, they’re actually technically undertaking a larger risk than being in the market because their money will never outpace inflation, whereas investing in a low-cost broad index fund has an extremely high chance to outpace inflation over a 5-10+ year horizon. Not to mention that when an investor undertakes market risk they’re also getting a positive risk-adjusted return in exchange for doing so.

            Also, keep in mind that HYSAs don’t always offer such high rates every year, whereas inflation will always be present. And despite the “official” inflation numbers being around 3%, my actual expenses say otherwise, so I’d still be eyeing 3-4% as treading water at best.

            If at all possible, get the snowball rolling on compound interest and let gravity do the rest; your future self will thank you to bits. Head over to one of the finance communities and they should set you straight. Personal finance is effectively a solved math problem; there’s really only one good answer that people will give you as long as they’re not trying to reach into your pockets for a cut, and the skill required to invest is zero. All you need is any amount of extra cash every month to pack onto the snowball. Time is by far the most valuable part of investing, so the earlier you start, the less of your cash you need to invest to get the same outcome: a reasonable retirement age with a body that isn’t burnt-out.

    • sobchak@programming.dev
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      4 hours ago

      Options and margin day-traders/gamblers. Single day declines like that on index funds are pretty rare (or used to be), so some people may bet against it thinking it’s a “sure thing,” that they wouldn’t lose too much money if it’s a more normal 0.5% decline. Some trades could cause people to lose all their money (and more) on such declines.

    • There was a drop of about 3% on Friday because of rumors of tariffs/insider trading. Trump waited for markets to close on Friday to officially announce it. But futures don’t look bad anyways.

      Also Crypto fluctuation, as usual, have been more than that. Bitcoin is only down like 7% over the last week and 3.4% over the last 3 months, but its up like 80% YOY, so hardly a problem if this has been a long-term thing.

      • rainwall@piefed.social
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        5 hours ago

        Bitcoin didn’t drop much, but lots of alt coins dropped 90% or more. The memes are manly coming from accounts that lost it all on those alt coins, sometimes in the millions. One of the big cases lost 30 million Friday.

        See here for some schadenfreude