A weekly thread to discuss financial matters - from personal all the way up to global.
Ground Rules
- Remember that we're all just Internet randos. Don't bet your life savings on a hot tip from this thread.
- Keep culture war in the culture war thread. Yes, global events may impact our personal finances, but that does not mean we have to incessantly harp on culture war aspects here. If you are going to discuss it, please stick to the practical impacts of it on an individual level.
- Be kind. Remember that everyone here comes from different circumstances. We all have different resources available and different risk tolerances.
- Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Better is better. Celebrate people when they take a step up and work to move their finances in the right direction. Don't flame out because they haven't followed what you consider the optimal path. Everybody has to start somewhere.
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Notes -
Success story/total brag/I'm an asshole:
I got a somewhat panicked call from my broker about 3 weeks ago. He periodically (like every 3 years or so) goes through the accounts of the people he serves with a fine-toothed comb to see if there are diversification issues and noticed boy did I have a shitload of money tied up in Nvidia. This was total serendipity, luck, and completely careless financial negligence on my part.
In mid-2017 my beloved aunt died and left me 200k that I was not expecting. She had two kids, one with kids of her own who aren't exactly doing well, so I figured maybe she'd give me a token amount for old time's sake not big money. Apparently, though, my mom and her sisters are/were extraordinarily frugal investors; my other aunt died this year and she left behind 4 million to my mom and two cousins on a college admin's salary. Mentally, I treated it as monopoly money so I figured I'd build a gaming PC and put the rest in my kids' college fund. In the process of researching parts I thought the graphics cards were imo too pricy and the buzz on reddit was that cryptomining was fucking up the market. So I took a risk betting on crypto and told my broker to put 100k in Nvidia ("...are you sure wsgy?" "yeah I got a feeling") and took what was left and bought bitcoin in 4 instalments in the last 4 months of 2017. I printed out my wallet number and stashed it in our safety deposit box at the bank. I largely, but not completely, forgot about both of these investments because I am an idiot, but again, my mindset was "monopoly money".
So yeah the two of those put together as of last week was like 5.5 million dollarydoos and I sold the bitcoins, almost all of the Nvidia, bought 1.3 mil in T-bills (anticipating that would be my cap gains taxes this year) and put the rest in an S&P 500 index fund, and then took my wife out for champagne and oysters to tell her after everything was stitched up.
I'm on the threshold of being a 1%er now. I'm done putting money in the kids' education funds. If the 4 of them go to 4 years of private high school, 4 years of private university, and 4 years of private medical school (though that last one isn't likely to happen), we'll still have money left over for each of them to take a gap year to find themselves in Thailand. All the better since the oldest kid is 10. My in-laws (who are loaded) have said they will keep sending us 15k checks per kid for their college accounts and hell I don't think that's necessary anymore. We're at a point where there's too much money.
I feel guilty about this. We're financially secure enough that I can just drop 200k on some insanely risky investments and not think about it, meanwhile tons of people are living paycheck to paycheck. I guess I could have lost all of it fairly easily but man it does seem like the universe is extraordinarily unfair.
I'm going to go ahead and doubt this, but you could always give 100k to a charity you find deserving. Anyway, congrats and I'll do my best to not plot murder while I'm at my shitty public defender job tomorrow.
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