Financial Independence Daily FI discussion thread - Friday, October 29, 2021 |
- Daily FI discussion thread - Friday, October 29, 2021
- I have a question to the phrase: "build the life you want, then save for it." How do you build a life when working? How do you have the mental and physical energy to produce a high-level strategy? Seems counterproductive if all you want is to not work.
- Traditional or Roth 401K? (Walmart 401K Plan)
- Weekly FI Frugal Friday thread - October 29, 2021
- Why the resentment towards tech on this sub?
| Daily FI discussion thread - Friday, October 29, 2021 Posted: 29 Oct 2021 02:02 AM PDT Please use this thread to have discussions which you don't feel warrant a new post to the sub. While the Rules for posting questions on the basics of personal finance/investing topics are relaxed a little bit here, the rules against memes/spam/self-promotion/excessive rudeness/politics still apply! Have a look at the FAQ for this subreddit before posting to see if your question is frequently asked. Since this post does tend to get busy, consider sorting the comments by "new" (instead of "best" or "top") to see the newest posts. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 29 Oct 2021 01:29 PM PDT I feel like a lot of people have somewhat decent jobs when seeking FIRE. My job is like getting stung by a nest of bees to collect whatever remaining honey is left after the bears pillaged it. An ideal job would be to not have bees sting me. But an ideal job is no job at all, for me at least. Having a set schedule is somewhat of a credulity. I will quit my jobs to just not do anything now and then. And the difference is immediate. When working, I have 2 hours of quality time if I am lucky and if I had a "good" day. Some bad days are so draining I cannot process anything. Even something basic like eating. So how can you save for retirement if building a life you want is a life without mandatory work? It seems like you have to "FIRE" before FIRE-ing. Anyone else struggle with this concept? [link] [comments]  |
| Traditional or Roth 401K? (Walmart 401K Plan) Posted: 29 Oct 2021 03:55 PM PDT Hello my fine redditors! long time lurker here and I just recently started working at Walmart. It's the only place where it pays the most being $17/hr and for the first time I feel like I may stick around here for a few years (unless I win the lottery or get terminated lol) so I wanna enroll in the Walmart 401K plan. I'm 21 and started working here in late August. I want your advice/help to see in which basket(s) I should put my eggs in. Traditional or Roth 401K?? After being here for 2 months, on average I'm currently making $1,340+ a month but do plan on going full-time probably in Jan. The plan states "Walmart matches what you contribute dollar for dollar, up to 6% of your eligible pay!" so when I went on the site to enroll it automatically puts me at 6% (Which you can increase up to 50% btw) for the 'Pre-Tax Contribution' and there's another option for a 'Roth Contribution'. Now this is why I'm here, I need your help cause I'm a complete noob when it comes to this kind of stuff and I don't wanna screw anything up. I'm looking forward for what you guys have to say and if you have any questions, I'll answer right away! Thanks in advance! 👍 [link] [comments]  |
| Weekly FI Frugal Friday thread - October 29, 2021 Posted: 29 Oct 2021 02:00 AM PDT Please use this thread to discuss how amazingly cheap you are. How do you keep your costs low? How do become frugal without taking it to the extremes of frupidity? What costs have you realized could be cut from your life without pain? Use this weekly post to discuss Frugality in general. While the Rules for posting questions on the basics of personal finance/investing topics are more relaxed here, the rules against memes/spam/self-promotion/excessive rudeness/politics still apply! Since this post does tend to get busy, consider sorting the comments by "new" (instead of "best" or "top") to see the newest posts. [link] [comments]  |
| Why the resentment towards tech on this sub? Posted: 29 Oct 2021 10:59 AM PDT Edit: u/BrassBells pointed out a related post from a couple months ago that I'll post here for those interested. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, but if you've been on this sub for a while, you've almost certainly seen some resentment towards the tech sector. I just saw this post, which, imo, is a good post and even an AMA post. TL;DR: DINK couple working in tech whose FIRE number keeps going up as they hit them. As of now, its score is 0. The #1 comment's score is 72, so it's not that the post is unseen, it's just that it's being downvoated as much as it's being upvoted. That #1 comment reads: > My takeaway from these Bay Area posts is that I need to travel back in time, stop my 18 year old self from joining the military and learn to code instead. Not exactly part of the AMA. It's just resentment towards tech. And it is a very common sentiment here. I've seen many posts do well that if you replaced "job was X" with "job was softare engineer", changing nothing else, I feel very strongly that they would not do as well. Likewise, if the aforementioned post had made their money by starting a really successful business, the top comment wouldn't be "my takewaway is to go back in time and start a successful business." Here are current ideas I've had or seen and why I think they don't make sense on inspection:
This is the attitude I'm extrapolating from the comment above. I think that the flaw in this takes very little inspection to see. Careers tend to be things that take a lot of commitment and many people are locked into their career. So this statement is true of any career that isn't effectively the same as your current one. Or any other life choice. It makes as much sense to say "my takeaway from this is to go back in time and not have kids." Not every post on this sub is a "what you can do right now to get you closer to FIRE." And people only act like it is when they are trying to justify resentment towards someone's post for no reason.
Firstly, I'd hesitate to call this easy. I know for a fact that it's very hard for a lot of people. But even if you do, it makes no sense that the accessibility of the career path should make you resent it more. If anything, it should be the opposite. Tech isn't "my rich dad gave me 500k to invest and I threw it all in bitcoin and now I'm a bazillionaire." It isn't "my uncle gave me a job at his company" or anything. It's generally, from most of what I've seen, more like "I studied hard (in university or by some other means), and did well enough at interviews to get a job." Maybe there's a misconception here about tech interviews, but, just to quickly let people know, they aren't like normal interviews where they just talk to you and try to judge based on how you come off. They're typically as much as a 5-hour series of interviews in which you are given difficult problems and asked to solve them in real time and communicate your thoughts well. To the lay person, think of it as a difficult time-sensitive math exam where you also need communicate your process the whole time (not the best example, because the math exams most people take are much more straightforward, but nothing more apt is immediately coming to mind). I have a ton of criticism about tech, but at least at big companies, it's honestly the field that feels extremely merit-based compared to most (which probably makes sense, since large companies are spending tons of money on engineers and should care a lot about the quality of their work to justify that cost). This point also seems, in a way, opposite to the previous point, in that the previous seems to dislike it for its lack of accessibility while this one dislikes it for its accessibility.
Surely this a straw-man, right? It's not. It's not hard to find. In a reply to the aforementioned comment, one of the replies is just "don't forget bitcoin." It was posted much later, so it only has a few upvotes and we can't, from that itself, extrapolate the idea that this is a widespread view, but I don't think you need to look far to see that it is. In any case, this is clearly a bad point, just like any other assumption you'd make about an individual in a group. I'll put my side-rant on this at the bottom because it's not as necessary, but all too common.
Lmk what you think. Side-rant: The liklihood of a group's association with some property should not impact our judgement or assumptions about an individual from that group. So let's say, for sake of exaggerating, that 80% of tech workers are these crypto-obsessed lottery ticket winners. Does that mean we should make this assumption about their crypto-dependence based on a post about their tech work? No! Lol. That line of thinking, which is essentially justifying prejudice based on probability, pretty clearly causes problems quite fast if you apply it to race, gender, etc. Additionally, there's the simple "correlation does not imply causation." If you get 10,000 people and randomly assign them letters A, B, and C, in all liklihood one group will have higher average strength, for example, than the other two. Or one will have higher test scores. Or just about any property. That's just a property of variance. Lastly, I believe most people doing this are erroneously substituting a probability with certainty. Have you ever expressed a political view and had someone assume an unrelated political view based on that? It's similar, or, at least it makes as little sense to do this. side-rant over. [link] [comments]  |
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