Piracy
For me that was one of the worst financial moves ever made.
Plex server go brrrrr
How so?
Well, for the amount of money I spend on hard drives and other hardware I could subscribe to Netflix for about 30 years.
How much disk space do you need?
I have a simple 500GD HDD ($25) and a 230GB (?).
I also have $120 worth of DVD and CD for ~$60 thanks to Goodwill
Fits nicely.
My current raw capacity is at 160 TB.
Would Tdarr help?
Don’t forget some people run RAID, which means you need duplicates of the HDD. That really adds up.
My only pain is destroying all those VCD/SVCDs and shitload of DVD-Rs full of .avi files.
All garbage when watching from modern high def TVs.
Not having kids.
Get that sweet DINK litestyle
I love the acronym dink. It sounds so insulting but people use it very casually and it’s funny hearing people calling each other dinks.
What does it stand for?
Dual income no kids.
DINKWAD
Dual income no kids with a dog
Ty
Double Income No Kids
I’m a fan of dildo which is dual income, little/large dog owners.
Being born into a rich western country.
Yeah, me too. I pat myself on the back for this one nearly every day. Probably the best financial decision I ever made.
There’s still many nuances people get wrong all the time. Did you pick financially independent parents?
Fuck! No, I fucked that one up too and accidentally picked a crazy Haight-Ashbury 1967 hippie together with a seriously damaged Vietnam vet, the two of them getting involved in weird cultish shit long before I was born.
It was a poor decision on my part. No one to blame but myself.
No one to blame but myself.
Eh, live and learn. Next time!
You need to pull yourself up by your birthstraps.
Underrated answer. Meritocracy is a lie, folks, even within the West. If you do everything perfectly you will climb a little bit, and only on average. All the counterexamples you’re thinking of are people who won a lottery of some kind. And of course, birth is also a lottery.
Bullshitting my way onto a high salary career track and just learning shit as i go.
I think I surprising amount of people are likely just “faking it”. I hope one day we can collectively cut the BS and all admit we don’t know what we’re doing.
I think the main problem is that requiring and checking if someone can learn a skill you need is a lot harder than just making the skill a requirement for the job right out of the bat.
Determining if someone can actually learn certain things on the job is pretty difficult in an interview setting, it’s way easier to just do a technical interview.
The alternative is probably something like a probationary period where you work with no guarantee of continuing but that’s a massive waste of time for everyone involved and not fair to the candidate.
In my experience, if you go with the candidate that seems the most well rounded, you’ll have the most success. Going with someone that’s a technical genius with no people skills makes it harder to fit them in a spot where they’ll shine - at least in a smaller company
The first paragraph was easy for my previous employer. At the start of the interview, my interviewer pointed out the wallpaper of his brand new grandson. During the interview he noticed that I kept looking at his monitor. When he asked why I was doing that I asked why he had it on the lowest resolution. We switched places and I changed the resolution. The wallpaper disappeared and my heart felt like it had stopped.
Thinking quickly, I said that if the picture was on the hard drive that it would have reloaded and it obviously hadn’t been downloaded so it must have been in an email. He smiled and said that I was right and I spent the rest of the interview in his chair and I got a call that day asking if I could come in that day.
I think it’s fair considering companies want 4 plus years for an entry position.
I honestly can’t deal with all the theatrics of securing a job (interview and first months/year included). This was a setback at first since when people asked me stuff I didn’t know I’d just say “I don’t know” or at most “I heard this and that but never worked with it”.
Thankfully I ended up at a place that appreciated that frankness and that gives me room (and incentive) to learn new stuff. Every year so far I end up in a new project with different technologies to use and learn. My ADHD brain is extremely satisfied.
I would love to hear your story if you’re willing to share.
Briefly: phd at Super Prestigious Institution. Fuck it, left science because didn’t want to languish making like $50K/year as a postdoc for like 6-8 years, with no guaranteed path forward. Pivoted toward money & people management. At every step up the ladder, I didn’t know shit. So what? I figured it out. Not that hard. Real talk: I benefitted substantially from elitism. I’m mid forties, salary about $220K, should hit $250K/year in the next 2-5 years.
Thanks for sharing.
Most of the things mentioned in this thread are mostly dumb luck and not necessarily active financial decisions.
Kind of the point. A lot of financial “success” is nothing but dumb luck.
Yeah, half of these comments are just: I bought a house.
If there was an active financial decision you could make and reliably get rich, everyone would do it.
Not necessarily rich, but there are active financial decisions you can make that will set you on the path to longterm prosperity. Buying a house at what happened to be exactly the right time and making a $100,000 in 3 years in the process is not one of them. That’s just dumb luck.
I mean, “consistently save in a diversified portfolio” would be a pretty boring answer, but it would be an answer I guess. I’m not sure what the equivalent for the poor would be; stay away from substances, maybe?
I even specifically said as much in my comment.
damned Reddit immigrants
Leaving Sydney for a cheaper quieter life in Central West NSW!
Nice 4 bedroom home with views, 1200m² block with trees, quiet area, school almost across the road, close to everything else and best of all, a tiny manageable mortgage!
Yes! Particularly if your job is industrial, get a house somewhere else, but not on the city. Try to find a place with good public transport to the city, tho. Cities will be slowly quitting car infrastructure.
Industrial? There a hundreds of everyday jobs that pay the same no matter where you live in Australia.
And I didn’t leave Sydney to spend 4hrs on a train.
Learning about long term index fund investing in my early 20s.
Are there any resources you’d like to recommend?
Bogleheads Guide to Investing - First Edition PDF
Book Summary on Bogleheads Wiki
This is somewhat of a speed run of the book.
The Bogleheads philosophy is basically to buy everything with a 2 or 3 fund portfolio.
- Total Stock Fund
- Total Bond Fund
- Total International Fund
The linked documents will explain those in more detail, but the concept is to buy everything so you always have bought the biggest winners, not to bet on a handful that will all lose or win, but at bigger expense to you.
They’ll tell you how much to buy of each and what type of account to keep it in to max tax effectiveness.
It’s not complicated once you read the source, and anyone should be able to understand it, it’s not written to be cryptic or to sell you something. You can put your money anywhere you choose and it works the same.
I’ve followed it for about 15 years or so and have been very happy. There’s no checking on stock news or any of that BS, you just develop a plan you’re comfortable with, and then stick to it. The more hands off you are, the better honestly.
Wow, thank you!
Of course! The hardest part is usually just getting started, so there’s no need to overcomplicate.
For those also saying “well look at this rich person with money to invest over here,” you can also read this stuff and be a step or two ahead when you do get to invest, because one of the first things it explains is prioritizing where to put money. Fill up one level before moving on to the next, but by reading ahead, you know what to do when you get there so you are prepared.
Money for us non-uber rich folk works best with time, so the sooner you get in the game, the more success you should have overall. They call this “getting rich slowly” which doesn’t sound exciting, but that’s the point. Most people don’t want to be on an emotional roller coaster with their money, they’d rather be on a lazy river ride that gets then where they want to be.
The nice thing is that, physically it’s the easiest thing in the world. The only complicated part is not trying to game it or convince yourself that you need more than the 2 or 3 fund portfolio.
Just buy a Total market index fund, some sort of bond fund and maybe some total market international stock fund
Bogleheads is great. There’s also a book called “common sense on mutual funds”
Thanks
This is primarily a sailing channel but Clark has a series of finance videos that are excellent.
Thank you
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=9XK5ocXPhTg
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
As 2023 was beginning I set a goal that I would have $5k in the bank no matter what.
Up to this year I’ve been living paycheck to paycheck. But resolving to save up $5k pushed me out of that for the first time ever.
I never did hit $5k. But I stopped living paycheck to paycheck. I haven’t checked my balance before paying rent since february of last year. I always have enough, and I just pay the bill.
The amount of stress that immediately goes away when you are able to stop the paycheck to paycheck cycle is priceless. Nice work!
It also helps that I’ve got a little financial system going.
I get paid every two weeks. My rent is about 1200. Each paycheck is about 1200 - 1400. Paid every two weeks. Each paycheck, 1000 goes into my “bills” account, and the remainder into my “spending” account. So each paycheck I get about $300 for groceries, coffee, entertainment, whatever.
All the bills are on auto-pay to draw from that bills account, and the 1000 per paycheck is enough to cover all my bills plus save some. So my savings is accumulating in the bills account.
I also got myself a credit card for the first time in twenty years, and now my phone bill’s being auto-paid from that, with the CC being auto-paid from the bills account.
That structure helps too. But I wouldn’t have been able to start it without a lump of cash on hand
Mined a Bitcoin in college.
Pretty much the same. Bought some Bitcoin in high school in the early 10’s. It was just a novelty and I was a kid, so I didn’t buy much, but if someone was kidnapped or something it would be worth it to go through my old drives.
BTC recently got approved to be traded as an ETF by the SEC, so now’s a good time to find that drive cause the price is only going to go up over the next 5+ years.
Yeah, I’m not going to get rid of any. I was doing everything on thumb drives at the time, though, so it would be a bitch to actually try and find the exact one I used.
Of course, the value of the things will go to 0 whenever Q-day happens, and hopefully sooner when people realise it’s a badly designed cryptocurrency. Maybe I should dig the old wallet up just to move things to an alt coin.
My buddy traded his for rent
Not buying a boat
Working with my SO to start budgeting each month. We now have a system in place that works for us and a habit of getting out in front of expenses.
Budgeting helped us see that increasing your income is far more powerful than reducing spending, so we’re focused on spending to gain skills and increase our top line right now.
Choosing to be child-free.
Same here! Spent about $100 for my vasectomy after insurance. Best $100 I ever spent really, saved me hundreds of thousands.
Paying off my fucking car. New cars are a scam guys, don’t be stupid like me 6 years ago.
Doesn’t have to be if u keep it long enough. The problem is folks usually get upselled long before it sarts being a good deal.
I decided to basically stop buying anything unless I absolutely needed it for about two years. I put everything I had towards paying off my car and student loans. I had holey socks and shirts, torn up shoes, etc. Refused to spend money.
As a result, I was able to invest the money I was paying on my car and loans and eventually worked enough for a down payment on my current house.
God bless those clothes.
Haha, thanks for catching that.
Accidentally buying a modest house in what at the time was a “distressed” neighborhood because it was all we could afford. 15 years later the neighborhood has been gentrified and is highly desirable. The property has tripled in value and the land is now worth more than the house itself.
Anyhow, it was dumb luck on my part and again, mostly had to do with the place being affordable and relatively close to my wife’s parents.
the land is now worth more than the house itself.
This is usually the case. When the value goes up, pretty much all of the increase is due to the land value increasing. Land is a limited resource that’s always in demand, especially in desirable areas. The house itself is actually going down in value over time due to depreciation.
In my area it’s not uncommon for at least 70% of the value of a property to be in the land, and the house itself accounts for less than 30% of the value. There’s a lot of houses built in the 1940s to 70s in highly desirable areas.
I’ve never thought about it like that, but it makes good sense.
