Bruh, if you had invested your school lunch money instead of literally eating it and thus draining it down the toilet, you would have been a millionaire by now. Subscribe for more of my finance tips for just $20 a month.
i was so fucking dumb at 8 years old. instead of buying a house for renting for passive income i bought a 5 dollar guitar hero rock the 80s game on ps2
Wait, what did you do with the small million dollar loan from your parents?
Loan? I was supposed to pay that back?
Hookers and blow, my friend. What else is there?
bought rock band dlc with all my money
sadly i was still unable to get all the beatles dlc and spinal tap. metallica got delisted before i knew what dlc was
You had lunch money? I had enough to cover 1 small milk carton a week. I had hunger and no investments.
tax. every. trade.
If you mean a small tax per share when purchased then that would be a great idea. Make high frequency trading, that contributes zero to society, unprofitable. It wouldn’t hurt household investors as the tax would be small but it would hurt the assholes who manipulate prices through trading back and forth.
High frequency trading is fully automated insider trading done in broad daylight, but nothing gets done about it because most people don’t understand what it is. It shouldn’t be taxed; it should be illegal.
It’s a long and convoluted route from that to their 401ks not bring as plump as they could be. Indirect robbery of thousands is more palatable than being mugged for a few dollars.
I wish I remembered the name of it but there was a really interesting documentary/video about how crazy the rapid trading got, to the point that companies were trying to install systems as close as physically possible to the physical location of the NASDAQ so their requests would have less “travel” time and show up before anyone else.
Absolute insanity…
Yeah. Didn’t the feds have to regulate that so that it was an equal playing field for transaction latency?
We’re not asking for 5 minute intervals. Just 1-2 second intervals would stop that automated stuff, or at least diminish it significantly. How about setting it to how long it takes light to go around the world twice +1 second?
How about abolishing the system altogether?
It clearly isn’t working for real people.
Thats a great idea.
Hard agree. Make it impossible to dodge with loopholes for the wealthy. Eliminate capital gains and losses Taxing every trade is the only fair way to do it. And people don’t need shares of stock to live, so it’s not a burden on the poor.
Don’t worry, they’ll raise a panic alarm about how everyone and their brothers retirement pensions are invested in the market, and so “you’ll hurt the poor” will resound, ignoring that a lot of those poor never had a choice to not have their pensions gambled on the fucking market.
Abolishing the stock market in general would be nice, or at least moving towards that direction gradually. The wealthy don’t typically get their money from great trading, but parking their money and letting it grow.
The stock market itself isn’t the problem either though, it’s that the wealthy have money and the poor do not. If you want to buy a house and you don’t have the cash for it, you need to borrow from someone…and that means someone who has a lot of money. And you’ll pay interest for the privilege because there is a time value of money. That doesn’t go away without a stock market.
The real solution is to tax the wealth itself, either directly or through taxing the step-up in value after the owner of a stock dies, or a massively increased estate tax.
The stock market shouldn’t be abolished without also abolishing other aspects of Capitalism, yes. Workers must currently take advantage of everything they can within the current system. However, people should be striving towards worker ownership of the Means of Production, and keeping the stock market would allow Capitalism to resurface.
Or, require a stock buyer to hold that stock for 365 days before they can sell it. Then tax the sale.
Well of course they do. That’s the whole point of the legal scam of investing. If it benefits regular people it wouldn’t exist.
Don’t worry, it’ll trickle down… Annny day now.
I can already feel it trickle on me! No wait, that‘s asbestos.
Just give it 30 years or so, and we’ll be swimming in that sweet sweet mesothelioma money.
It’s ok though because they sprayed it down with urine first.
This is an important thing to note when someone claims that you should be eager about stock market performance because of your [comparative handful of] shares in your retirement account. Accounts such as the 401k were probably devised to tie up regular people’s money into the stock market, injecting more money into it and making it seem more important (and thus worth bailing out).
They were devised to get rid of pensions so companies didn’t need to care for their employees, they could just have the option to match input, but retirement was made to be 100% on us.
More bullshit to benefit corporations, but to be honest there are so many scumbags out there and so many pension plans that were stolen from, I don’t know how to feel about it.
It was also devised so that when a crash occurs, the lower classes get wiped out, the rich still have piles of cash, and they get to buy up everything at fractions of a penny on the dollar.
You know exactly how to feel about it. Douchebag MBA’s who think they’re Masters of the Universe gamble with other people’s retirement money. And all those sweet sweet fees…
We should invest in guillotines.
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This point is huge and seemingly overlooked by most people? Once a majority of boomers start pulling their 401k money I don’t think millennials and gen x will be putting as much money back in.
They really cooked up such a great Ponzi with 401k. I’m sure it’ll get rugged right when we come of age to cash out.
Accounts such as the 401k were probably devised to tie up regular people’s money into the stock market
Aren’t pensions also tied up in the stock market. Yes there’s a difference of who manages and how the contributions are made, but both plans put the security of your retirement in the market in some capacity, right?
Pensions also allocate some funds in stocks, but overall they invest conservatively. By default, most 401k funds are set to a target retirement date fund and early on those are mostly stocks. These funds also often have significant annual fees. Instead of a single large fund managed conservatively, you have many individual funds that are managed all over the place. The common advice is to invest more aggressively when you’re younger, there has also been a huge push toward ETFs which are their own tangled mess and have a potential for trouble in the future, but that’s a different topic.
Are the fees of target funds usually that significant? Vanguard Target Funds have an expense ratio of 0.08%. They say the average comparative fund is 0.44%, which is a bit high for my liking, but not terribel compared to other managed funds. https://investor.vanguard.com/investment-products/mutual-funds/profile/vfifx#performance-fees
Vanguard is good with fees. That 0.44% is an average so there are also funds that charge more. I think fees have come down as 1) more attention was brought to them 2) Such funds became more computerized and straightforward to manage. Still, a 0.44% average fee each year is a significant chunk of change.
I fully agree on .44% being high. I raise an eyebrow on anything over .10%. But if you follow the old reddit personal finance prime directive… You should max out your 401k inso far as you maximize the employer match. Then max out your Roth IRA where you hopefully have access to better expense ratio target funds. I have been trying out the 0% Fidelity index mutual funds as opposed to older S&P500 funds to maximize potential there.
I haven’t really looked at the robo brokers though. What are fees like for betterment and the like?
Either way, I think people are shooting themselves in the foot for not investing in index funds or target funds out of moral principle. Unfortunately there isn’t much other safety net for your retirement, and you’re probably going to be forced to spend cash for everyday goods from major corporations. Might as well try to secure some value of those same corporations at the same time instead of letting your savings constantly depreciate over time.
Billionaires shouldn’t exist.
No no you guys all don’t understand that this is a good thing because… (let me check my notes…) ….uh…hm…derrr…communism.
One thing the article doesn’t make super clear to me is if that figure includes investment funds and whatnot, and to what degree. It sounds like it might but elaborated very little beyond a vague statistic.
It is extremely vague, because the top 10% of Americans in net worth are those who have over about $850,000.
My wife and I constantly lament how we were born a few decades too late. For everything
Born too late to explore the world, born too early to explore space. Born just in time to explore Dank memes.
Truly, a time to be alive.
Cause and effect
No shit. If someone does not have money they don’t need then they can not buy stocks or any investment.
So many hands
As is tradition.
Gasoline is relatively cheap.
Just saying…
Is this really a new thing? Haven’t the rich always been the stock-holders?
Tax stock over 100,000 shares 1% per current price, per stock, per quarter.
Guillotine anyone who tries to buy a yacht or private jet.
I don’t think it’s good to have such wealth inequality, but I do this general investment into the stock market should be encouraged.
401ks are so much better than pensions as a retirement vehicle. Better return on investment and more financial separation from the company I work for. I never worry about someone raiding the pension fund or a company going bankrupt, and I’ve received much better return on investments than the numbers you hear from pension funds! That’s not even considering 401k matching…
Ok rich person, or it will be owned only by a tiny few and collapse bc of it.
Your comment makes no sense. Try replying to what I wrote please.
