Personal Finance

Trying to get to know the community a bit more.

If you want to share figures (you don't have to) you might probably want to use a throwaway account, better safe than sorry.

Hello everyone,

As you all know, Lemmy does not support wikis at the moment. I have seen other communities using solutions such as rentry.co (example: https://rentry.co/manjaro-controversies) to host their wiki content, do you have any suggestion on another solution we could use?

I am very lucky to have a chunk of disposable income every month. However, I want to invest and save most of it, because I recognize that disposable income can quickly disappear given the right circumstances.

My problem is a time old one, that I struggle with material desires, and how easy it is to treat it as play money.

Does anyone have any advice how to offset those impulses or otherwise make it easier in the moment to check myself?

Hello everyone,

I would like to keep this community active, as it is probably a topic everyone is interested in.

However one of the main issues I have is that back on Reddit, most of the content was about people sharing personal stories/concerns with their financial situation. Not really something that easy to emulate as we have a much smaller group of people.

Is there any other type of content you would like to see? I sometimes feel like personal finance strategies are usually detailed well enough in the various wikis (we might want to copy Reddit's one at some point, but for the time being, I guess just go back there).

Should we orient it more like an open question community with things such as "what is the best change you made in your investment strategy?" "what do you always plurge on beyond reason?"

Feel free to share your opinion!

The advanced retail sales report showed a seasonally adjusted increase of 0.7% for the month, better than the 0.4% Dow Jones estimate. Excluding autos, sales rose a robust 1%, also against a 0.4% forecast. Both readings were the best monthly gains since January.

It seems as long as consumer spending remains strong the risk of recession is low despite the rapid Fed rate hikes.

Curious to see how the community deals with this kind of situation

I was never a fan of the subscriptions model (I have never had a Spotify, Netflix, or any other similar services).

My girlfriend that used to make fun of me is now considering cutting some of those costs.

What is your stance on this?

Feel free to share, ask questions or advice on any financial matter.

Asking the question as it seems to be a recurrent issue among finance-aware people.

Also if people have tips to save money on eating out or cooking, feel free to share!

Hi, Personal Finance. I'm a relative novice to investing, but have thrown some money into the market pretty regularly since last year. Before that, I had really only put money in on a handful of occasions, whenever I had money I felt would be better invested than spent. My portfolio is just around $30k, and I'm investing money every month in order to ensure I'm dollar cost averaging whatever isn't doing so well but has promise, and throwing more into the things that are doing well. In addition, I'm also reinvesting my dividends and not selling anything I hold.

That said, I got pretty lucky over the last few years and found a few ETFs and stocks that have since taken off because I happened to invest at a few key points when the market was at its lowest (boy do I wish I had put more in). I wish I could say it's because I know what I'm doing, but I just see it as really good, accidental timing. I've got some stocks and ETFs that I bought because of good dividends, and others that I bought because of a potential upside in the future.

I've found myself continually adjusting the dividend side of my portfolio, but doing nothing with the growth stocks and ETFs that took off. I feel like I should continue to invest in those, beyond dividend reinvestment, but seem to have a mental block because the price per share is so drastically different than when I first bought. Do any of you struggle with this? How do you get over it? What's a good way to keep investing without just chasing success like a drug? Four items in my portfolio account for 74% of my growth portfolio value, despite only making up 39% of my total growth portfolio shares. I'm torn on whether to invest more in what's working, or leaving those alone and continuing to diversify.

So i got into a disagreement with ChatGPT about whether you earn more interest overall if you contribute daily rather than monthly, if the overall contribution over 1 year is the same.

I made CGPT write some python code to prove it. His code is on the left. I still didnt believe him so I wrote my own, on the right.

Our results seem to disagree, so Im asking you guys, if your interest is calculated daily and paid monthly, is it better to contribute $143 per day for 365 days, or $4349.58 monthly for 12 months?

Vehicles under $15k are 1.6% of the market, and their share of the market has dropped over 90% since 2019. The old advice that you can get a beater and drive it in to the ground for $5k hasn't been true for years but it still seems pervasive in personal finance spaces.

Came across this tool on HackerNews last week and gave it a try and thought it was a really comprehensive (in my experience) tool for doing long term financial planning yourself.

It costs money, but you can even self host it for a certain price tier.

About a year ago I hired a financial planner to manage assets in my retirement accounts but am starting to think about doing it myself.

I don't disagree with the general approach they're taking, but it seems like it should be simple enough for me to do myself every 6 months or whatever.

The gist of the strategy is a balance across large/mid/small cap and sectors at certain percents along with some % of bond funds and some real estate funds.

I think my main questions are how do I identify and compare various funds that fall into these broad categories to try and pick the ones I want to actually invest in.

After years of Mint I’ve decided to look for other options. Im considering doing it myself in a spreadsheet but before I go that route (not ideal) I thought I’d see if anyone had recommendations on good basic family-budget apps. Would be great if it could link with bank accounts but I’m open to anything at this point.

About is not up to date, for pf, need age brackets and all the other wikis

Are Mods going to update or wait to make new ones, once peeps start flooding in over the years?

Edit: typos

cross-posted from: https://lemmus.org/post/167976

Do you think that the AI bubble will pop? Is entering the stock market dangerous right now?

Gross domestic product was expected to increase at a 2% annualized pace in the second quarter.

In the face of persistent calls for a recession, the economy showed surprising resilience despite a series of Federal Reserve interest rate increases that most Wall Street economists and even those at the central bank expect to cause a contraction.

Is there a general rule of thumb on student loan interest rates and whether or not it's better to pay off ASAP vs invest in an index fund? Sold a lot of company stock from an ESPP and RSU program that happens to be the value of our household's student loan debt that is just entering repayment after graduation. Can't tell if a 5 or 6% is worth drawing out or paying off in one go. Not worried about rainy day or emergency fund and already maxing out my retirement. So really it's a question of debt payoff or non retirement investment.

The quarter percentage point increase will bring the fed funds rate to a target range of 5.25%-5.5%.

During a news conference, Chairman Jerome Powell said inflation has moderated somewhat since the middle of last year, but hitting the Fed’s 2% target “has a long way to go.” Still, he seemed to leave room to potentially hold rates steady at the Fed’s next meeting in September.

I have a comprehensive financial plan and look to have up to 48k in about one years time saved. With 16k on hand after paying off my student loans this October which will likely start the one year plan.

I want to use the money to put 20% down on a house (plus have an emergency fund)

Outside of say a high interest savings account such as Ally, is there anything else I can do with the money I have on hand now, or is that the best option?

/r/personalfinance was one of my more frequented subreddits and I find it pretty valuable. I figure I should try to help get the ball rolling over in the Fediverse and it seems like this is the most active substitute so far.

The "rule" as it were is that to have income in retirement broadly in line with your income before retirement, you need to hit 1x your salary by 30, 2x your salary by 35, 3x by 40, etc. This rule works well for people who 1) start working at 25 and 2) do not experience significant pay raises, as either of those things will set you significantly behind.

Ultimately I use this as a target for what my 401k contribution should be, since I'm already maxing a Roth IRA each year and my company match is fairly low so maxing that is easy. But I definitely can't afford to max the 401k, so I use this to help gauge where I really ought to be in between those bounds.

The way I calculate the target for a year is just sum up my gross income from paychecks for that year. This means it includes salary and bonus but not RSUs. The stocks are too volatile to make the accounting easy, and thus far haven't been a significant fraction of my income. Then, multiply by the factor for the age I turn in that year. It looks like this:

2023 of course are estimates, I won't know those real numbers until ~mid November. "Actual" is the reported balance of my Roth + 401k in Fidelity at the end of the first trading day in November.

A few explanatory features. I started my current job in 2018 but only worked about half that year. I only had a tiny rolled over 401k from a job in grad school. So I've had both reasonably large raises and obviously started super late (even for someone who went to grad school - but hey at least I got in-state tuition!).

It looks like I'm not doing too hot. I started late, wasn't contributing enough in 2018 and 2019 clearly, in 2020 I was saving for a house and finally got serious about contributing in 2020/2021. Maxed a Roth for the first time in 2021. If 2022 hadn't been so astonishingly terrible in the stock market I'd have been steadily gaining ground the entire time though. Now I'm contributing about 21% of my income and since the market is doing better this year I'm back to gaining ground again. I like the rule, even in my "worst case scenario" because it's fairly aggressive and keeps my from spending too frivolously.

So do you use the rule? How closely do you track it? Are you gaining or losing ground? How close to retirement are you?

Edit: Silly me. Set the price options properly and it already does!

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Hello, Does anyone here using Gnucash know how I can take unrealised gains in to account on the net worth linechart?

I know I can manually add an account for unrealised gains and track that way but for assets like stocks that fluctuate over time, id rather not manually enter a price every time.. especially given Gnucash has the data from the price database.

There are other reports like the advance portfolio which calculate this so is there a way to show this data in the net worth chart?

I've heard this is a good way to set your kid up for success and take advantage of compounding. One of the parts I always get caught up on when looking into it, is that your kid needs some form of taxable income, and whatever they contribute, you can match it.

If you have a child that is just a couple years old, how do you accomplish this? I can't just say I pay her $3000 a year for picking a book to read each night..or can I?