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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • This is good advice but far more technical than I was trying to give. I was trying to give very easily actionable advice for the average person who doesn’t know much about personal finance and may not be a numbers person like I and maybe you are. The kind of person I was aiming for isn’t going to be contributing more than 10% of their income to retirement and probably has a couple of car loans and some credit card debt and/or personal loans floating around that they should sort out but might not ever get fully sorted.

    If they’ve worked jobs with 401k retirement accounts but don’t work there anymore, they should go to the bank and ask about meeting a retirement advisor to roll that into a IRA or similar and probably make a small monthly contribution to their IRA as well as their current job’s 401k retirement account. That’s the gist of my advice. If they want to actually put in the work to learning more about personal finance and fully take the reigns your above flow chart is brilliant, but I think that’s far more complex than who my advice was aimed at.



  • 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

    Edit to add: I mentioned rolling 401ks into a rothIRA or IRA because I see it as incredibly risky to leave your retirement in a 401k account controlled by a previous employer. Employers get to choose what financial institution holds the 401k funds, as well as manages employee and former employee access, so they could choose to cut costs and transfer the 401k funds to an institution with higher account fees for you for example. Also many 401ks when you depart an employer get automatically converted into IRAs and may be converted into an IRA populated purely with low return CDs/bonds and high fees (one of mine did exactly that actually!) so rolling it into a (roth)IRA with a financial institution you trust and can control the trajectory of those funds is both safer and financially smarter! I’ve even heard of folks having their entire 401k drained by fees from the IRA it got automatically rolled into when they left the organization



  • 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


  • The issue is that people ‘follow their passions’ and then later find out there are no liveage wage jobs in those areas, and act outraged and like life is unfair.

    We should be building a world where this is not the case! We should be building a world where people can become skilled at something without significant cost and shift careers when they decide they need to. Even better, a world where careers are optional and people just do what they need to to contribute to society and can otherwise enjoy life

    Sorry, I just have no empathy for the tons of people who get an edcuation, then throw it all away because they didn’t get the dream job they think they are owed who actively refuse to apply to jobs that are ‘below’ them.

    Remember these are life-changing decisions made by teenagers, a cohort specifically known for making poor decisions and not considering long term ramifications of these decisions. Yes everyone can name someone who made poor decisions in college and is paying the price for them, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t build a world that’s less harsh to people who do so!

    Your friend went into a field were jobs are scare and difficult to get even good times and you often need a masters or better in any science field to get an entry level position.

    I love the projection here as you make up a story for someone you never met. I met this individual when we both worked at a callcenter making $12/hr. He did everything right, he got his Masters from a good university, he published research while in college, continued to do what independent research he could outside of college, yet because some idiot in power who themselves never graduated college decided to demolish state funded university research with a single stroke of a pen, my colleague was left to fight for whatever scraps he could get after doing everything right. He did everything right and still ended up royally fucked, yet he still continued to do the right thing and eventually found himself finally in a job in his field a decade after graduation. This is not a system that’s setup optimally, this is a system that badly needs to be fixed!


  • How do you know what loan you can afford before you have any income? How do you expect a 17 year old who’s never lived on their own and only financial experience is maybe a part time job to be able to comprehend money on the scale of 10s of thousands of dollars?

    Sure you can try to be smart and look at the BLS data to get an estimate of your income after college, but a ton of minutae gets lost when doing so, such as what you’ll make early on in that position vs after 20 years in that position, regional pay differences, etc. that also assumes you’ll graduate and get a job like you researched in your field but maybe you picked a field that’s about to collapse for reasons outside of your control, maybe the field you picked is already saturated with talent, or is experiencing some other significant shift.

    I worked with one person who had gone to university to be a biologist just to graduate right after a significant number of university research positions were closed and laid off, leaving him fighting with folks who have 20+ years of experience for a handful of job openings

    Student loans are the one type of loan you can’t simply perform a debt to income calculation to determine if you can afford the loan. There’s a million and one things that can happen between when you accept the loan and when you start paying on it that can greatly impact the affordability. The risk of course grows with the cost of education, but so does the potential reward.


  • My first car loan had a 26% interest rate. Over that 36 month loan I would have literally paid over twice the total value of the loan if I didn’t refinance it after 6 months.

    I learned a lot through the mistakes I made that day and have endeavored to not repeat any of those mistakes (and so far I haven’t!)




  • I don’t work in healthcare and I have not needed gender affirming care myself so I can only rely on what I hear from the trans folks I know, and none of them had an easy time getting the healthcare they need. Everything I’ve heard indicates that it takes multiple years to begin receiving any kind of gender affirming healthcare outside of psychological so it’s not something people are going to go through on a whim. They have to be feeling a fairly significant amount of dysphoria to go through that much medical gaslighting and reach the first actually medical step of a prescription for HRT. But transgender, just like gender and sexuality is a spectrum. Some folks don’t want to do more than socially transition, some folks want to go all in but some will skip some procedures, and some are absolutely 100% and need to completely transition

    There have however been actual pushes to try to create discorse exactly matching what you said “I’m not against trans people, I just think it’s too easy for kids to permanently modify their bodies for a fad!” And of course the more extreme version “you send you kid to school and they home fully transitioned! And if you try to do anything about it they tell you you’re endangering your child!” So definitely don’t trust anyone trying to spread this discourse


  • Y’know what, reviewing your post history, I believe you. You happened to step on a landmine though with your above comment about criminals, because the general problem of overpolicing and excessive force is reinforced by a laws that help perpetuate it.

    For an extreme example, if you make it illegal to sleep under a bridge, any homeless person trying to get some rest in a public space that happens to provide a little bit of shelter is now a criminal. But do you think the police are going to hassle grampa who dozed off sitting at a park bench because it’s 3pm and he usually has had a nap by now? And when the newly deemed criminal gets upset about being arrested for just trying to get some shut eye that can be determined to be resisting arrest therefore the police can use more force. Maybe that triggers some PTSD and they start fighting back in which case the amount of force escelates.

    The law and the criminal justice system are unfortunately designed to perpetuate a cycle of criminalism. Punitive prisons and sentencing make it difficult for anyone who has been arrested to adjust to living in society again. Parole and probation (the supposed support structure provided to people as they leave the prison system) is structured to penalize folks who already have it rough for struggling to make ends meet, and can quickly land people back in prison for offenses as simple as having work schedule them during their mandated parole meetings and needing to choose between potentially losing their job and becoming homeless or potentially being arrested again. Or they might find that they can make an actual living wage working in a black market (drugs, vehicle chop shop, etc.) because having a record excludes them from better paying employment options that offer a better work-life balance. Or maybe they couldn’t afford the restitution payments required (fines that were part of their sentence and fees for participating in the justice system) they go back to prison and ultimately come out much later even less able to adjust and the cylce continues until they die in prison, die homeless living in a gutter or die a death related to whatever trade they can pick up with their criminal record (industrial accident, drug overdose, gang violence, take your pick)

    So yeah in short, some folks have a tight line to walk so that their existence isn’t criminalized







  • You chose a pretty poor example. People don’t spend years seeing doctors about transitioning without being slightly very gender disphoric. One trans dude I know literally had so many hoops to jump through including having multiple kids before they could finally convince their doctors to prescribe HRT because the doctors kept saying “well you might change your mind though! What if you want kids? What if you want to breastfeed? What if you just don’t like the way you look and that’s why you’re trying to transition?” Etc.

    Or just look at the viral tweet of the one trans woman being like “yeah I offered a single hormone pill to my buddies as a joke and they all recoiled in horror”

    A better example for holding actual debate would be arguing over how to approach the housing shortage in America, or the best approach to reducing the wealth gap. Basically anything where you can agree on the premise and debate policy. This is usually how I talk to republicans at work or in my family, I focus purely on policy because generally people can agree on problems that they can see, and if you can avoid the common turns of phrase that political pundits use you can probably even agree on some policy ideas. I had a brilliant conversation with some conservatives at work recently regarding insurance where we basically were all in agreement of “holy shit something has to change here now that we have multiple disasters a year wiping out entire cities and counties”


  • Yeah I guess I failed to distinguish between maga and conservatives

    To be fair, the entire Republican party seems to be all about blurring that line right now. I think the big challenge is Trump awakened something in folks who haven’t been politically active in a very long time, and because they haven’t been politically active, they aren’t coming into politics with a clear ideology or set of policies they want to see passed other than “I like trump!” Which is probably a big part of why we just have a bunch of attempts at turning his presidency into a dictatorship and state-sponsored racism as the only clear policy trump actually cares about, and any policies that are directly enriching large businesses are just a case of those with deep pockets cozying up to folks in power with loose morals.

    But let’s be real, the Republican party hasn’t been about conservatism for quite a while. They’ve definitely been coasting off of pure brand recognition with occasional injections of christofascism and state sponsored violence against minorities to help maintain their old jim crow roots. They’ve successfully cultivated a culture of being Republican, so they can do what they want policy-wise and still reliably win around a third of the elections in the country without resorting to voter suppression, and they can reliably win about half of the elections in the country with voter suppression