When you say stuff like “little to none should be in anything directly tied to the DOW” that’s just dead wrong you shouldn’t be surprised when you get pushback.
Yeah this was kind of my feeling. My biggest fear is losing out to inflation.
fixed
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20-40% in bonds. GOVERNMENT bonds since you have the option, not those candy ass total bond market funds. And something like TLT (long government bonds) is even better than a general bond fund. TLT has a -.32 correlation with the broad US stock market while BND only has a -.02 correlation. That means that TLT is a much more powerful hedge against falling stocks than a generic total bond market fund.
Play with this to get a better idea what to put together.
This has the potential to be Trump’s Katrina, except much worse in terms of the number of deaths, and much worse politically because it will affect people of all colors. Hopefully we can fade the worst of it, and his and his administration’s incompetence have a minimal effect on it. Hopefully the career folks at CDC, etc, can do a great job and keep him far enough away from it not to mess it all up.
I have very little faith, though.
This is going to make Katrina look like nothing. Literally nothing. It’s going to be a human tragedy on an a colossal scale not seen since… I don’t know. It’s got the chance to kill as many people as WW2.
This is getting off-topic for this thread, but I kind of disagree with a lot of this. The bond component is basically going to beat inflation by a little bit and provide low-but-stable after-inflation returns and a safe home for money that you’d need in the next 1-5 years. That’s still true in a low-inflation environment, it’s just that the nominal (total returns, including inflation) return is so low because overall inflation is so low. I don’t think that the low nominal returns on bonds are a good reason to change your desired stock/bond mix.
Also think the default assumption on buying a lifetime annuity should be LOLNO due to commissions, fees, and lack of liquidity. It’s possible that an annuity could be a good investment for a particular individual, but I’d definitely go in with a skeptical view.
He already had that with hurricane Maria in 2017
Spoke too soon.
Puerto Rico was his Katrina, except more deaths and a worse response from him and the govt. But it didn’t impact him bc he has the cult following that W didn’t have.
This has the capability to be much worse than Katrina but I still doubt it would hurt him half as much as Katrina hurt W
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I agree. About 70-75M died in WWII, that’s less than 1% of the population now.
If you go off of the WHO estimate that has been floating around of 40-60% of the population getting it, let’s go with 30% and be optimistic - that’s 2.37 billion people.
80% of cases are mild, and let’s be very optimistic and assume that the mortality rate is actually much lower than we think because China was failing to count most of the mild cases. So let’s say it’s actually only 2% of 20% of the cases (in reality it’s going to be more like 2% of 30-40% but I’m keeping this super optimistic). So that’s 2% of 474 million, which is about 9.5 million deaths.
But of course the hope is that we can slow it enough to buy time to improve treatments and get a vaccine. Maybe only 5-10% of the global population gets it this year, the warm weather buys us some time, and we get vaccines to everyone over 60, medical workers, and people who are at a high risk of spreading it (teachers, for example) next year or something like that and really take the bite out of it. That gets us down to 1.5 million deaths this year, which still seems almost unfathomable in comparison to stuff like SARS and MERS. It still feels almost crazy to predict over a million deaths from this when we’re only at 3,000.
But I was super optimistic at every turn. Let’s say 60% of the global population gets it this year, that’s 4.75 billion people. Let’s say the mortality rate is actually 2%, that’s 95 million people.
Agreed, but also because probably half the population doesn’t know Puerto Rico is part of the US or that Puerto Ricans are Americans… and even if they did wouldn’t care because they’re brown people who speak Spanish.
This has the potential to kill a lot of white people. If people think he bungled it, it will matter politically.
The mortality rate for people 70-79 is like 8%, and 80+ I think is like 14%. If this goes widespread in the US, a lot of his supporters are going to be personally affected by either dying or knowing somebody who dies, or coming very close to dying/knowing someone who comes close. Meanwhile he’s out there talking about how great a job he’s doing, how it’s no big deal, it’s kind of like the flu, etc… I think death in the family pierces the bubble of his cult of personality…
Hopefully we magically fade this and don’t find out, and manage to beat him anyway.
Except housing, healthcare, gasoline, utilities, education costs, cars, and most of the other stuff you actually spend money on.
Has anyone begun altering their intra US travel plans? Supposed to fly to NY later today for a week and am not feeling great about the timing.
I’m supposed to fly to Myrtle Beach in a few weeks and I’ve started thinking about it, but not much I can do yet anyway so I’m in wait and see mode. Not thrilled with the idea of sharing recycled air with a plane full of mostly old people, but we’ll see. Trying to find some masks, that’s part of the reason right there.
Just went to Target and bought $120 with of pasta, peanut butter, rice, beans, medicine, and tuna. Figured might as well - if we end up not needing it then it will get eaten or donated eventually.
So what are you going to do when you retire - go back into equities?
If you genuinely plan to stick to fixed interest in retirement then fine, move there before retirement, but you will be faced with a very low income and no way to manage longevity risk.
I only brought up annuities as it is a valid option if you are far healthier than your cohort and you are 75+ ie there is a large capital component in the payments.
This is the dumbest thing anyone has ever said.
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