Finance thread

[mama2one]

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[createdtoworship]

Interesting list. Here’s my approach in no particular order.

1) keep cars long time & save for next car/pay cash

Develop wise household and money management skills. Reference older books for helpful tips on running a home economically. Read books, magazines and take classes on budgeting, saving, and money management from secular and Christian sources. Learn from other’s mistakes and never stop learning.

I don’t drive. It is more economical to use a service as needed. I don’t use it often.

2) pay extra on mortgage principle each mos to pay off in 15 yrs or less & save all that interest

Purchase income producing property whose tenants offset the costs. Live there until you’ve acquired another (more is better). Use the spoil to pay for your home.

3) if don't have the money, don't buy

Live within your means and use credit wisely.

4) reuse, repurpose, recycle, donate

Purchase items you actually use and prune when needed.

5) buy at second hand shops/garage sales

Stop shopping. Learn how to create a capsule wardrobe and what colors and items are most flattering for your figure. Factor in your lifestyle then buy quality items.

Don’t fill your house with stuff. Be intentional with your purchases. Avoid emotional buying and being sucked into sales.

6) marry a spouse who can fix anything, lol

Purchase quality goods that need little repair from reputable companies with generous customer service. Hire reputable repairmen or move to a place with a great maintenance staff. Few ask that question when renting.

I’m single.

7) use coupons & negotiate @ stores & with insurance, internet, any bill

Purchase food seasonally from direct sources who offer sizable discounts on bulk items. Can, freeze, and dehydrate as needed and use a meal planner.

Frequent deals sites for current discounts and unpublished sales or price mistakes.

8) pay cash upfront to save on anything

Double dip when possible. Make your money work for you. Use rewards based cards for large purchases and smaller items if cash is plentiful or you can pay it off during the 0% interest period. If they offer a better deal by paying cash, use a check instead (provided by the company).

9) Develop a side hustle.

Rainy days always arrive. It will fund early retirement, unexpected expenses, and extras for loved ones. Teach your children how to do the same.

10) Pay it forward.

Leave the next generation in better straits. Record your knowledge and share it generously. Be charitable with your plenty.

~Bella

that is a good reminder, to use rewards. I pay cash for gas everyweek so there is no reason not to use a credit card for that, as long as I pay it off every week. Also I recommend paying an annual rate for auto insurance, a lump sum. That saves as well.

 

[createdtoworship]

Interesting list. Here’s my approach in no particular order.

1) keep cars long time & save for next car/pay cash

Develop wise household and money management skills. Reference older books for helpful tips on running a home economically. Read books, magazines and take classes on budgeting, saving, and money management from secular and Christian sources. Learn from other’s mistakes and never stop learning.

I don’t drive. It is more economical to use a service as needed. I don’t use it often.

2) pay extra on mortgage principle each mos to pay off in 15 yrs or less & save all that interest

Purchase income producing property whose tenants offset the costs. Live there until you’ve acquired another (more is better). Use the spoil to pay for your home.

3) if don't have the money, don't buy

Live within your means and use credit wisely.

4) reuse, repurpose, recycle, donate

Purchase items you actually use and prune when needed.

5) buy at second hand shops/garage sales

Stop shopping. Learn how to create a capsule wardrobe and what colors and items are most flattering for your figure. Factor in your lifestyle then buy quality items.

Don’t fill your house with stuff. Be intentional with your purchases. Avoid emotional buying and being sucked into sales.

6) marry a spouse who can fix anything, lol

Purchase quality goods that need little repair from reputable companies with generous customer service. Hire reputable repairmen or move to a place with a great maintenance staff. Few ask that question when renting.

I’m single.

7) use coupons & negotiate @ stores & with insurance, internet, any bill

Purchase food seasonally from direct sources who offer sizable discounts on bulk items. Can, freeze, and dehydrate as needed and use a meal planner.

Frequent deals sites for current discounts and unpublished sales or price mistakes.

8) pay cash upfront to save on anything

Double dip when possible. Make your money work for you. Use rewards based cards for large purchases and smaller items if cash is plentiful or you can pay it off during the 0% interest period. If they offer a better deal by paying cash, use a check instead (provided by the company).

9) Develop a side hustle.

Rainy days always arrive. It will fund early retirement, unexpected expenses, and extras for loved ones. Teach your children how to do the same.

10) Pay it forward.

Leave the next generation in better straits. Record your knowledge and share it generously. Be charitable with your plenty.

~Bella

1) keep cars long time & save for next car/pay cash
2) pay extra on mortgage principle each mos to pay off in 15 yrs or less & save all that interest
3) if don't have the money, don't buy
4) reuse, repurpose, recycle, donate
5) buy at second hand shops/garage sales
6) marry a spouse who can fix anything, lol
7) use coupons & negotiate @ stores & with insurance, internet, any bill
husband has even negotiated @ big box stores with mgr
8) pay cash upfront to save on anything
i.e. we saved on orthodontist/other medical by pay in full

Here is a short comparison of stocks versus real estate....

1. What about real-estate? Well let’s look at it historically, granted you bought your home at the bottom of market you would have gained approximately 250% interest or a little under. And say you buy a 160,000 dollar home at the bottom of the market and charge 1500 a month rent that is another 144,000 in income over 8 years. so 390 plus 144 minus original investment of 160 = 374,000 dollars return on a 160,000 dollar investment that is 233% return for 8 years. Or 29% a year return. Now take away about .75% for taxes and .005 for home owners insurance, so say taxes and insurance cost you 1 percent of your return. So you are 28% now which is still pretty good. Now if it’s a first time home you may have more perks, down payment options etc. But you also cannot sell at anytime to cash out due to it being your primary residence. If this is a second or third home then that is not the case. Now that is a good return in perfect situations, granted nothing breaks on home in 9 years. But a good rule of thumb is to put aside 1% a year for maintenance. So now you are at 27% gain a year. So your at 216% roughly for 8 years. That is not counting compounding. Just straight math. You still doubled your money in 8 years and have a tangible asset - a home (like a commodity that provides passive income). The only problem would be that the real estate is not in a prime rate. Like right now market is pretty high. So it's possible you can owe more on the home that it's worth if the market goes down. So you do have risk and rarely do you have a perfect opportunity like in 2009 to buy a home, so that takes more upfront money in the case you want to flip homes. And that takes more elbow grease and knowledge on remodeling. (I just installed a toilet this week, it's was not easy I had to find a fitting and grind out my old steel flange under the toilet.) So realestate investments is good, but Let’s compare that to index funds and stock market. The market went up 10% this year, and if you were in a triple leveraged fund you would have made 50% this year in (UPRO). So you can make more in the stock market, and can make money any year and in any economic situation. Houses not so much, it could take 1-5 years to hit the bottom of the housing market to enter responsibly, that is if realestate even falls during this recession. In the dot com boom realestate did not fall at all. But say it does fall within five years, at 50% a year lost income, That is a loss of return compared to if you were in a leveraged fund, and monitoring it. I don't recommend people use leverage, or do investments on borrowed money, or on money they can't afford to lose. But you cannot beat the returns if you know what you are doing. Also for long term investments (over a year), you only get taxed at a 15% rate. If you do less than a year hold, you pay your normal tax rate.

Other ideas for getting debt free, is to pay off all high interest debt first. Pay off smaller credit balances first, it's called a debt snow ball affect, and paying off those cards will encourage you to pay off all debt.

have passive savings.... even if you are in debt it's important to save passively. I like the acorns app, it's not hard with that app to save 5 dollars a week just on expenses. It rounds up so if you buy a soda for 1.25, it will charge 2.00 and save .75 cents and invest it for you. Here is the results of a 5 dollars savings a week, in five years. Now optimally a passive savings account should give each household an emergency fund of 3-6 months wages. That is optimal.

Now with a stock account you can make way more than just 10% a year. You can do that in a week in a leveraged fund. But higher reward upward, means higher risk downward as well. So it's important to know what you are doing.

 

[mama2one]

everyone has to live somewhere
@createdtoworship are you saying to rent/not buy a house?

 

[bèlla]

Investing and savings are implied in the first principle of educating yourself.

Real estate is one of several vehicles you can use to build wealth. It isn’t the lone option nor are stocks. Advice should be tailored to the person’s situation, resources and goals. I mentioned real estate because purchasing a home is a common goal.

A savvy person would focus on securing family real estate which enables descendants to forgo the cost of home buying and apply their resources to upkeep and investment. You’d need a legacy plan in place but its doable. That would retain the large sums outlaid generationally for housing.

~Bella

 

[createdtoworship]

everyone has to live somewhere
are you saying to rent and not buy a house?

we had a house built shortly after we married
since we were young, we worked with builder to allow us to do work and save money
so we did ALL the painting and ALl the staining-doors/trim
we built a deck and also put down kitchen floor
also, allowed husband/his dad to build beautiful kitchen cabinets

husband is a good negotiator so we saved a lot & also why we were able to pay off mortgage in less than 15 yrs

of course buy a first home, to save on rent. That is a given. I am talking about second or third homes. There are better investments out there. But some people like the idea of having a tangible asset. Like a commodity. Stocks are sort of a fiat money product. And can fail in a dire economic situation. But again I would say we have a good decade of money in the economy till things start getting ugly with the amount of debt we owe as a nation impeding the liquidity of the markets. At 50% a year, that is quite a return. Say you invested just 1,000 dollars and got a 50% annual net return after taxes.... (in a roth IRA you don't have taxes btw) but never the less that rate would provide a sum of 134,107.18 cents at the end of 10 years. That is how compounding works. It's quite impressive. Now debt, and credit cards uses compounding against you. But realestate is a good investment, but you need to always add more upfront cost. The above is just a 1000 dollars, and some tips on how to invest. But stocks can be risky if you don't know how to do it. I lost 5,000 dollars over the last five years. Now I have made money consistently for last few years, and have learned some tips to reduce losses, and let gains run longer.

 

[bèlla]

everyone has to live somewhere
are you saying to rent and not buy a house?

I didn’t mention renting. I spoke of an investment property with tenants whose rents pay a portion of the mortgage. Most who go that route live in the building rent free.

I would take 15 years of income with mortgage assistance instead.

~Bella

 

[mama2one]

we had friends who bought a building with several tenants as a way to make money (they lived in nearby town)

they had to evict several tenants for non payment

 

[createdtoworship]

we had friends who bought a building with several tenants as a way to make money (they lived in nearby town)

they had to evict several tenants for non payment
pretty much the worst thing they ever did/stressful being landlords

husband has suggested it & I always say "remember what happened to our friends"

I don't like people enough to have to deal with tenants, lol
(Being an introvert)

well you can hire a property management firm. And they usually deal with evictions. Condo's and duplexes are more profitable than single dwellings. And it's always good to diversify, I wouldn't put all the eggs in one basket. I typically recommend 5-10% in tangeable gold, and 90% in stocks. As you get closer to retirement and you want to secure it, you can slowly reduce your 90% allocation and replace it with bonds, which don't yield much. But what I like rather than bonds is just holding cash in like a corporate bond, or in a savings account. But again it's easy to learn investment principles and how to manage risk. Bonds are sort of for people that just let it sit and don't monitor it. For instance I got an alert on gold today. And it proceeded to break out of a downward trend so I will watch it for opportunities. So I can show people how to set up alerts that tell them when to buy and sell. It can become all automated. You can an email, or a text when it says you should sell. You can even program a trailing stop. Say you are willing only to risk 10%, then the stop will trail the price upward and as soon as price drops it locks and it will time a sell order to sell at a 10% drop from the high point. Then if stock continues to go up, it will keep it. Day traders can put their stops at a fraction of a percent, while swing traders a percent or two, and long term traders could put theirs at 10-30%. If someone didn't want to learn investing, they could just put money in SPY or SPX, and hold it forever, just put like a 20% trailing stop on it. Then when it sells in recessions, just rebuy at bottom. You will typically only lose half of the money lost in a recession.

 

[createdtoworship]

duplicate

 

[createdtoworship]

everyone has to live somewhere
@createdtoworship are you saying to rent/not buy a house?

Here is some tutorials. There are a lot of online courses, but alot of it doesn't work. This stuff is way better than all the proprietary oscillators and indicators and stuff that people sell you.

but it's just learning the trend. It takes about a hour or two to go through all the videos they are somewhat repetitive, but it gets the job done on how to use trend lines on a stock chart. That is really all I have done over the past few years. That an praying a lot for wisdom. It's important to make God a active part of everything we do.

(maybe send these links to your husband if you are not interested in them, he probably manages your retirements, and it allows you to see how to do that). All funds chart the same way, stocks, futures, forex, etc. So if it says forex in the video, it's all the same type of idea. It's about charting the highs and lows of a fund, and buying and selling at the right time.

 

[mama2one]

husband contributes max to 401K
I've made a few changes to it over the years
he put me in charge of all financials when we married
so I do taxes, watch 401K, pay bills, etc

 

[createdtoworship]

husband contributes max to 401K
I've made a few changes to it over the years
he put me in charge of all financials when we married
so I do taxes, watch 401K, pay bills, etc

yeah I know a lot of very capable women who day trade, and make a killing. Way better than myself even. In fact my wife does all the bills in our home. I am just the worker bee. But I do the retirement stuff. But those videos are really helpful for learning to trend. A few websites that have good chart features are Investing.com, trading view, and if you desire a platform to download, I use think or swim with TD ameritrade. But again all the stock schools will teach you a particular loop hole or their particular way to make money, but if you can do trending, you can verify all of that. There are also referral services that you pay for example 150 dollars a month and they tell you exactly what to buy and how much. One guy is called the trading analyst, and I basically watched all of his video's on youtube and learned a bunch from him. I sort of gleaned everything I could from him, but I can verify that he does it right. And he will tell you what to buy and when and when to sell.... thetradinganalyst.com
he also has for large accounts (of like over a hundred thousand), and he will actually link your IRA or 401k to his account and just trade your account for you, and charge you a monthly fee.

darksky.capital.com (Dark Sky Capital)

just google search those sites, and it will bring you to the home pages.
so there are lots of options, but those video's above will teach someone to do it themselves. But those guys I know for a fact do it right. When I looked at his performance he was averaging between 30-60% a month on his trading alerts. That is not his managed account at Dark Sky, but that is his text alerts. He does options mainly, but shows how to do them.

 

[mama2one]

everyone has their level of risk
isn't that what a fiduciary or financial planner first determines with a client

we have a child to raise so not into risk taking
and would never consider day trading

 

[createdtoworship]

everyone has their level of risk
isn't that what a fiduciary or financial planner first determines with a client

we have a child to raise so not into risk taking
and would never consider day trading

Yeah the first thing is realize, what you want to risk. But again with trading you always have risk. But like I said realestate is also a risk, as the housing market could tumble. I have friends who are still under water....'owe more than the house is worth.' So everything involves risk. I don't personally day trade.

But for example I like oil right now, it's fundamentally over sold. I am up about 50% in a month of trading it. It's gone sideways for a matter of weaks and has eroded some gains but I am still up on it. I think it's not done going up, here are a few charts....this one is the short term, you can see it is bouncing up and down in a channel...

Here is the longer term so you can see how it's still undervalued...

I don't have a lot of time to explain, but I am buying and selling oil right now....it's sideways and sideways is the hardest to trade. But again I am up fifty percent in a month already. But opportunities this easy don't come often.

I don't actually buy oil futures, but you can. I do something called UCO which is a leveraged fund.

But if oil is not undervalued you can go to others like natural gas, or gold, or silver, or even the general market, biotech, or tech sector indices. For people who don't like to chart all the time, I would consider just buying into something called TECL, which is a tech sector fund, leveraged. Just hold it for like five years, or ten. But buy it on a dip, that is definateley a buy and hold type of fund, if someone did that after the 2008 crash they would have made like four thousand percent in ten years. Remember when I said that realestate in a prime time period would make about 260 percent? That is if you don't remodel. Just buying a second home and renting it for 8 years. That would give you roughly double or triple your money. But a fund like TECL would have given you 20 to 40 times your money in the same period. So that is all I am saying,

 

[mama2one]

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[createdtoworship]

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the neat thing about leveraged fundo is it does not take much to gain much. If you are holding for 5 to 10 years, you can buy say 2 to 4 shares of TECL, and it only costs a few hundred, and holding it for five to ten years would produce 10, 20, 30 ,40 fold return. Ways to limit risk, is once you are up say 50% or so, you can put a 20,30,40% trailing stop, so when you have a huge recession hit, you limit your downside. That is a way to do what is called dollar cost averaging. You basically buy in an index fund, and continue depositing a set amount every month into it. So even when its going down you are buying those cheaper shares systematically and you are averaging it. But anyway. Yeah I guess the videos to watch are those trend videos and maybe a video on dollar cost averaging. Basically just putting a set amount in the market regularly. Not touching it. That is how retirements work and 401k's basicall people leave money in a certain fund all the time. I only feel comfortable doing that with an index fund like UPRO, or TECL. Those funds are spread out over dozens or hundreds of funds in their sector. So if onE or 10 companies fold it won't affect overall sector.

 

[mama2one]

401Ks are only good if people use
many people don't OR they don't put in max allowed

 

[createdtoworship]

401Ks are only good if people use
many people don't OR they don't put in max allowed

I like Roth IRA's. You can withdraw after five years and for any reason. If you open one for you and one for husband you can have 6000 each for a total of 12,000 a year. Tax deductible and tax free gains. 401k's are nice because I think you have like 20,000 a year contribution. But 401k's are very limited to what you can invest in. If your employer allows external 401k brokers, TD ameritrade is good. I don't put the max in my IRA, right now I am contributing 5%. But in a few years it will compound nicely.

 

[mama2one]

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