That's just an affordability question. A nice person from the dealer picks up the car from your house and then drops it back off when they are done. You just pay the bill.
It's not a good idea if you can't afford it or it is distracting you from your real problems, but a nice car can be very fulfilling and makes the miles you are forced to drive or drive voluntarily many times more enjoyable.
Getting into nicer cars and real sports cars was one of the best calls I ever made.
Engineers punish themselves with pretty terrible cars when they could easily afford something that is better in many dimensions.
I started using E-trade because of this instead of transferring my vested stock to Vanguard. Already had an account so it was zero effort to convert to my usual funds as ETFs which has the bonus of being transferable between brokerages unlike mutual funds.
Do you mean that you sold mutual funds at Vanguard, and used the cash to buy ETFs at eTrade? This means you had to pay tax on capital gains, right? Or is there some trick I don't know about, vis-a-vis converting mutual funds into equivalent ETFs, without a taxable event?
Many Vanguard mutual funds offer ETF as a share class of the fund. For those funds, shares in the traditional share classes can be exchanged for ETF shares, if you hold them at Vanguard.
But not all of the funds have an ETF share class. And if you hold Vanguard mutual funds elsewhere, you'd need to transfer them in-kind to Vanguard to convert.
I started buying Bluray/UHDs as a replacement for going to the theatre and purchasing/renting digital copies and streaming.
I was spending the money anyways, why not own a copy?
Streaming is primarily just for specific TV shows, subscribe, immediately cancel, watch the series, then resubscribe when something worthwhile exists. I can't stand the bugs, slow interfaces, forced ads in ad free tiers, bad audio quality, and bad video quality.
I have a few continuous subscriptions, but they are for weird stuff and they are pretty inexpensive (5-6$ a month). Dropout TV and some D&D podcasts for example.
What most streaming services are asking in no way aligns with the content they offer that is worth watching.
For a while the cheat code for cheap Blu-ray Discs was to buy them from RedBox. Now, I’m struggling for a decent place to buy discs from. When I was a student and had far less cash I had no problem spending $20 on a DVD of a new release. Now that I have the cash, it seems like I’m always looking for those great sales where you can grab a BluRay or UHD for $10.
I started doing it as well. Not only is the quality great (4k, HDR 10+ or Dolby Vision, uncompressed audio) but equally important is that it cannot be taken away.
If I love a movie on X streaming service and they have some licensing problem or decide it's not worth what they're paying to host it, they can remove it at any time. I'm sick of that. I'm sick of what's available changing on a daily basis, and constantly getting split among more and more services that charge more and more monthly.
I've been ramping up on UHD Blueray lately, especially since I upgraded to an OLED TV. It's a massive picture quality upgrade. I think I have like 6 discs, all ~$10. A mix of newer movies I haven't seen, and 80s-90s movies I want to show the kids in a few years. It's been fun.
Had to log in to upvote this. The sheer arrogance of this not being obvious to people is telling.
Even very stupid animals can think about the future and have anxiety which is pretty direct evidence they are thinking about the good things and the bad things that happen to them. You could argue well yeah, but they don't have an opinion about it, but Occam's razor suggests otherwise. We are built from the same plumbing in most cases even if ours is better.
In a country with not much of a social safety net and runaway medical/elder care costs is there really another option? You need to sock away massive amounts of money as quickly as possible if you want to reduce tail risk and as a side bonus you might get to reach financial freedom earlier.
My choices would be very different if I didn't think I was more or less on my own.
That doesn’t address the tail risk concern, and a huge number of people are living far below a comfortable level. Just because it’s possible doesn’t mean it’s reasonable or desirable.
Medicaid covers the cost of nursing homes, and it's not necessarily an advantage to have money saved just for that, because they'll just take the money anyway. Some people try to give away their assets to their families beforehand so that Medicaid will cover the costs, which is a legal no-no.
> Just because it’s possible
This is an understatement, when the subject is how 99% of the people live.
Of course it can be great to be in the top 1%, but it's not "unreasonable" to be outside the top 1%.
My mother ran a senior family home for 15 year. Private business founded by her.
I do not want to end up in a Medicaid paid for nursing home or family home.
Even the stories of her residents coming from other expensive family homes were horrifying.
Elder care is horrifying.
People die in pain all the time from neglect and incompetence. People who came to her were regularly on their way to a painful death and she brought them back by just not being an idiot and putting in some effort.
Broken bones and many other conditions went undiagnosed or improperly diagnosed/treated. Doctors prescribing medication after medication to deal with the side effects of the medications they already prescribed that weren’t needed in the first place. Dosages all over the map that are inappropriate for someone in the given age and condition.
You better hope you keep your brain to manage your own medical care or have someone who can do it for you.
> Even the stories of her residents coming from other expensive family homes were horrifying.
You just made my point for me. The money you've saved won't actually "reduce tail risk".
To the contrary, your best strategy for that is to focus on your family rather than on your job, to ensure that there's someone on the tail end who cares enough about you to take care of you if you can no longer take care of yourself.
The tricky part is that there's "living within your means" and there's "living within what your means could be if you made significantly less money than you do now".
You can live just fine -- hell, still be in a top income percentile -- on half of what a well compensated big tech SWE gets in their total comp package. But just as software expands to fill the hardware available, so do lifestyles expand to fit the budget available.
So you might need to move to a cheaper house, apartment. Take fewer vacations. Lower your savings rate. You might even need to -- shudder -- budget and plan your spending in advance.
Even if you come out the other side still comfortable and financially stable and working an interesting, rewarding job, it's still a whole thing, a stressful transformation that takes a large investment of time and energy to achieve.
Why do people think they're entitled to comfort, a rewarding job, and financial stability? Almost no one has these things.
We use the language of conflict and courage in making moral choices for a reason, it is an acknowledgement of the real costs, the allure of doing the remunerative thing. You won't go to jail or be ostracized for being a coward and building killing machines because it pays well. But you should not lie to yourself about there being a justification other than cowardice.
Almost no one actually gets to choose comfort over the safety of others, most people get neither. The few of us who have this choice and choose their own benefit deserve at least our contempt.
> it's still a whole thing, a stressful transformation that takes a large investment of time and energy to achieve.
Unless you're born with a silver spoon in your mouth, I wouldn't call it a "transformation". I would call it "normal". If there's a transformation, it's from a person who has to be concerned about budgets to a person who makes so much money that they don't need to care.
I guess I'm just "lucky" that I've never had BigCo compensation, so I don't have to worry about the stressful transformation.
What, you think having experienced the stress of having to work multiple jobs or barely getting paid enough to survive or having an employer who looks at you as a subhuman cog makes someone more willing to leave the comfort of being given enough money you don't have to care about it while having a decent work/life balance and an employer who at least pretends to care about you?
We're not playing "who has it worse" here; I'm not asking you to shed tears for the poor SWEs going from mid-six-figures to low-six-figures.
I'm telling you that changing jobs is already stressful, and very few people are going to chose even more stress by moving houses or cities, etc, over just getting another soulless corporate job that pays well enough to make everything go back to normal, if they're given the option.
> having an employer who looks at you as a subhuman cog
The big tech companies do that too, which is kind of the point of the submitted article.
> We're not playing "who has it worse" here
That wasn't my point. My dispute was with "I also see it as the only logical outcome" and "In a country with not much of a social safety net and runaway medical/elder care costs is there really another option?"
> very few people are going to chose even more stress by moving houses or cities
It should be noted that living in Silicon Valley is obscenely expensive, and you could buy a much bigger and better house for much less money in most other areas of the country. And lately I've heard constant complaints about San Francisco going downhill, yadda yadda. (This is also related to the issue of WFH vs. RTO.)
> over just getting another soulless corporate job that pays well enough to make everything go back to normal
You're conflating two different issues here. One, which you explicitly mention, is changing jobs, but the other, left implicit, is getting the soulless corporate job in the first place.
Of course I'd acknowledge that someone who strove to obtain and took a soulless corporate job is likely to take another one. But I think it says something about their personal values that they voluntarily entered that category of business, knowing what we know about it, and given other options. Did they not already "sell out"?
Let's be super explicit here: you're arguing that risk reduction is your top priority, above any moral or ethical concerns. (And that risk reduction requires maximizing compensation.)
Can't really fault ya, but yeah, there is another option.
My country does have a good safety net, so I choose to work for a company that shares my core ethics and has a solid work/life balance. I could be earning a lot more but I choose sanity over wealth.
Pension plans as they were are still kind of bad because they could be mismanaged in a variety of ways.
Pensions are kind of always problematic because you take control away from people and give it to people with misaligned incentives.
It's the same if you give people control over their own retirement because they can not contribute or mismanage how the money is invested. Defined contribution pensions are maybe an improvement on this because at least you know there is money there and can have a regulatory framework that is simple and heavily restricts how the money can be used. I would really like to see broad market index funds only. Dumb money should stay dumb.
Maybe if you pull the responsibility up to the federal government you minimize the risk of mismanagement, but it's still pretty large.
Seems like we are doomed to pick an option that is still risky and it's every person for themselves. You need to super save and not rely on any framework provided by others. And this is where 401ks shine. Sure I am stuck relying on the stock market, but I think the distribution of outcomes there are more in my favor than if it were managed by someone else. Whatever is in my 401k (or IRA or whatever) is owned by me and is heavily diversified.
> Pensions are kind of always problematic because you take control away from people and give it to people with misaligned incentives.
Maybe I'm the weird one, but I don't necessarily want control of my retirement fund. My primary requirement is that it exists when I need it. Somehow the financial industry convinced the public that being able to micromanage their retirement investment and pick their own stocks and mutual funds is somehow beneficial. I can probably count on one hand the number of people I know who find this kind of micromanagement interesting.
I just want "money goes in" and "enough money eventually comes out" and I don't think I'm alone in that. You can accomplish that with a well-run pension, a well-run government plan, and so on. Lots of options that don't involve me having to decide between stock and bond funds.
Having watched a close friend of my dad's sell at the bottom in 2007-2008 after he had retired, I understand your sentiment.
However, before the advent of discount brokerages and widespread 401(k) plans investing really was only for the extremely wealthy and inept fund management - resulting in extremely high expense ratios - was rampant. Now investment is more accessible and ETFs are offering near-zero (or actually zero (!) - see FNILX) expense ratios on the strength of the economy, which has been a net win for a larger segment of the population than the 0.1%. We're up to 20% now!
I would like to see a much larger percentage of the population to be able to get in on this opportunity. Doing away with wealth and income inequality will get us halfway there. Trust-managed investing addresses what you're asking for, where a company manages your investments and retirements for you at some level of expense ratio. (These companies exist today for retirees.)
>I just want "money goes in" and "enough money eventually comes out" and I don't think I'm alone in that. You can accomplish that with a well-run pension, a well-run government plan, and so on. Lots of options that don't involve me having to decide between stock and bond funds.
They're not meaningless. Someone can get a line management role and be terrible technically. In fact that's a good thing to do with someone who's not good technically.
Granted I DIY it all just for entertainment.
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