I suggest buying low-fee domestic index-tracking ETFs like "Vanguard S&P 500 ETF" (VOO), using a low-fee brokerage app like M1 Finance.
... or not. Your situation may call for something else. Any specific suggestions people give you will likely sound unnecessarily specific and perhaps arbitrary, unless you have spent a lot of time learning about the modern investing landscape -- you really need to do that for yourself.
And how to do that? Especially for those of us in Europe?
That's one thing I can't get my head around. The ecosystem seems filled with scammers and financial advise salesmen, and my "scam alert" is running on constant overdrive whenever trying to look for any current and actionable educational material.
I have an account with Vanguard directly and research their funds when investing. Currently my US employer retirement fund partner has very low cost access to Vanguard funds I follow already so I am linked into that.
It really depends on your goals and starting point. Avoiding management fees is one of my priorities as well as direct visibility of my accounts and numbers (all offered via Vanguard directly). There are a lot of great, free information sources. Some are directed at people who are paycheck t paycheck and need to start setting like $100/month aside while digging out of debt. Others focus on middle class style employer retirement plan+personal savings like for a down payment on a house. Others focus on those willing to toss thousands on what becomes a bet on the market and YOLO it (not recommended).
I started by just looking at Vanguard funds and using open/free tools to understand terminology and get a grasp of the history or background like lessons learned.
Read "the long and short of it" by John Kay which deals with a lot of the basics around investing for yourself. It's a truly useful book, and I've given quite a few copies of it to people. It is quite UK-centric, but I think the central lessons could be applied in other jurisdictions.
There are places in the US where this is the rate of appreciation on real estate. While there are periodic setbacks (see: 2008-2012), real estate is remarkably stable across the country, especially in major cities. The small, somewhat rural area I live in had an average appreciation of 13% last year, which is not sustainable for this area but still indicative of the overall trend.
It means we aren't going to see 13% every year in my localized market, but we will see a continued upward march - where the data from the past 30 years bears that out. Other markets like Seattle, given the geography and current restrictions it isn't much of a jump to think you could average a 10% appreciation for the next decade.
I don't recall anyone saying anything about participation @ $100 / week, so don't be flippant. The comment was made about low risk at 10-15%. If you had $100/week to spend, I'd put it in a drip and buy pharma stocks because there are many paying a sizable dividend, but I'm not your broker so get your own advice.
Real estate is absolutely not stable across the country.
Per your website, you live in Washington state. Rocky Mountains and west are generally very desireable areas to live in, and WA has no income tax.
But you can look all the way from Maine to the Dakotas, down to Oklahoma, and then of course the poor gulf coast states and easily see that real estate is a terrible investment in those areas outside of a few urban areas. Especially in the heavily debt laden rust belt states with undesirable weather and shrinking economic prospects.
It doesn't seem difficult to avg +1% per month doing relatively basic trading in my experience.
The challenge I have is remembering to actually care about it and do the trades, life gets too busy and before I realize it a month has gone by.
But whenever I'm on top of it, 1% gains have been very easy over the past decade, I'm rarely in the market for more than a few hours. But I risk having a pile of cash to trade with I suppose, the dollar could crash.
If you do +1% per month you're already +12%/yr, I consider 12%/yr the minimum acceptable yield for any kind of investment given how easy it seems to be to DIY.
1. The S&P 500 has returned about 14% per year over the past decade, so a return of 12% isn't particularly notable.
2. Market returns vary greatly from decade to decade, so we shouldn't necessarily expect this 14% rate of return to continue. (Most obviously, there were no recessions in the past decade, which is unusual.)
Average rate of return is 7% accounting for inflation, actually. That assumes you're doing dividend reinvestment and such.
Vanguard's predictions of 3-4% over the next decade mean that if you do a straight dollar calculation you'd be closer to ~7%, because that 3-4% number includes inflation, once again.
No, they're just non-existent. Anyone with a brokerage account had a ~20%+ return last year... it's over 30 years that matters.
I'm sure there's SOME ETF that managed to do 15% returns over a 30 yr period, but that's just selection bias after the fact. It doesn't mean that ETF would do well this year, or next.
Perhaps they're referring to leveraged ETFs like UPRO (Direxion Daily 3X Bull & Bear S&P) and TQQQ (ProShares UltraPro QQQ).
Be advised that they are not designed to be held over more than a day, although with the current bull market, they have not actually been hit by the decay factor inherent to all leveraged ETFs.
Other higher-risk ETFs would be things like solar/wind sector ETFs (e.g. TAN, FAN, PBW, IQCLN, QCLN, etc.) or bleeding-edge biotech (e.g. SBIO).
Why would I, a business owner, want to pay extortionate rents for floor space in London when I could instead have an office in Crewe for 1/10th the price and still reach my clients when I need to?
Well for me in the UK they usually ask if I want to see my "usual" doctor or if I don't care. There is sometimes a longer wait to see my usual one. Usually I want to see the same doctor for an ongoing condition but don't much care if it's something new.
Yep and that problem becomes way more clear when you read the supplemental material that includes the actual question for measuring 'patience' [0 page 12-13]: They were given 5 rounds of the question "Would you take 100 Euro now or X euro in 12 months" Where X starts at 151 and goes through the tree on page 13 to assign you a patience score. The less you were willing to accept to wait 12 months the more patient you are.
This is clearly going to be affected a lot by how much 100 euros is relative to your current living situation.
Maybe you can't be patient in the weathering a siege sense, but you can absolutely be patient on a shorter time frame. A little short-term patience can get you a long way as opposed to being reckless or hot-headed.
That said, this study seems to be bogus in that obviously people from wealthier countries will view $100 as less significant than countries with poorer economies. That money will go a lot further in such an economy, and is much more valuable there.
I live in a poor African country, and even here, people choose to buy things instead of their basic needa being met. Meat instead of beans, alcohol, weed, cigarettes, etc. They rather go hungry and get drunk than have a lot of bland food.
There are some people who might be close to starving, but they’re a small minority.
In the US these people are virtually non-existant. Even homeless people manage to hustle over $100/day. And they don’t spend that money on food, either.
I used to run with a sketchy group of homeless people that did heroin together in NYC. Most of them were making over $100 panhandling/hustling/scamming per day. It’s probably lower in other places, though.
Sure you can. Forego the $100, and then sacrifice booze/cigarettes/lotto for a few weeks to make up for it.
Drugs and lotto are not a "basic need" yet a surprisingly high percentage of impoverished people prioritize them over said basic needs. It's a coping mechanism, yes, but 20 days of fasting cigarettes could easily yield the foregone $100
Your narrative is that the poor lack the moral fibre and self-control to quit.
The reality is that they lack the cash to quit. Drink, drugs, and alcohol are used as coping mechanisms to make life bearable. When people move out of poverty - for whatever reason - a substantial proportion suddenly find the self control to change their habits.
And your narrative is that the poor lack any sort of free agency.
The reality is that there is some wiggle room for sacrifice and saving that is not unreasonable. My next door neighbors are on Maryland's public assistance for housing program (which places poor families in middle-ish class neighborhoods), so they pay little to no rent. They live off of food stamps. Yet they smoke, drink, use marijuana every weekend, and play lotto (I know because they litter the used tickets on the ground).
Are all of those coping mechanisms necessary to make life bearable? Or just some of them? Is there some room to exercise free agency and periodically forego one or some of them to save a little extra cash so they aren't constantly in crisis? I say yes.
I never said all poor people use cigarettes, lotto, alcohol, and weed. But there are tons of studies showing that use of those things is elevated among the poor.
Anyway, the whole point of this thread is that having some buffer money allows you to make more optimal savings choices in the future. It's a cascade effect.
Even $1000 in savings as a buffer would allow you to make better decisions grocery shopping (you can afford to hold off and wait for better deals, etc.) or in the case of this article, have the patience to forego $100 now to get $200 later.
Well graph coloring in a more general sense is used for things like register allocation in compilers. So any proofs or increase in theoretical knowledge in the area could lead to improvements in that area.
I think this looks very good.
The main thing though is that it is opt-in where you want it. If it became the default, or required then it would make the language difficult and unsuitable for many things, but as an option it's great :)
'Semi-detached' can be used about the end unit of a long chain of terraced houses, so while a semi-detached can be part of a duplex, it might also not be.
Building with two separate housing units. In most of the US, probably similar to what you call a "semi-detached" or Germans call "Doppelhaushälfte" (units are next to each other, sharing a wall in the middle), but especially in the Northeast, sometimes a larger old house split by floors (ground floor and basement as one unit, second floor and attic as another unit, with some sort of separate entrance to reduce disturbance of first unit residents)
To be a duplex, it needs to be 2 homes on one property that are touching. It is expected that the wall would be shared and that the two homes would be mirror images of each other. There exist houses that touch each other but are on separate lots; these are not duplexes.
A townhouse is 2-story and it touches another one. It could be a duplex, but it might be on a separate lot or it might be part of a group of more than 2.
A single property (usually a single building) consisting of exactly 2 housing units.
> I guess "semi-detached" would be closest but not sure?
Semi-detached is similar, but AFAIK usually refers to separate properties sharing a wall not two housing units on one property. There appear to be regional variations in both terms, though.
Coming from the East Coast of the U.S. I always called these houses twins. One building with two housing units side by side, usually mirror images of each other. We would refer to a building with two housing units above and below each other as a duplex.
I imagine that once a majority of people are using the google dns servers that everyone seems to advise these days, that google will simply decide to ignore most of this and serve whatever domains they like.
I don't know if this is better!
Let's see how aware the "general public" are about Facebook's lack of trust, or whether they'll adopt this. Obviously FB have probably seen how WeChat does it in China and are copying them.
It's interesting to think that money is one of the things that the Internet hasn't "distrupted" yet, but maybe this is one attempt.
Speaking of trust, one should remember that the dollar bill was a promise from the Federal Reserve to pay whoever had that piece of paper to pay them the actual money written on it. I wonder who would trust the Central Bank of Facebook that they're "good for it"?
> was a promise from the Federal Reserve to pay whoever had that piece of paper to pay them the actual money written on it.
FYI, as written, that statement makes little sense. The term "actual money" does not mean anything. US dollar notes are actual money.
Before Nixon Shock, the dollars were on a gold standard. The government had a promise to give whoever had the US note the specified amount of physical gold (metal). As it is now, it is called a fiat currency, and no government exchanges it for gold or any other metal or any other form of money. It is still "actual money" though, by most sane definitions.
