Are you putting in 20k a year to your 401k is the first question
Yeah I do that. Well I let my pop do it for me because he was going on about it so much.
? Your dad gives you 20k in cash while you take 20k in payroll deductions for your 401k?
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This is true of anyone though. Anyone can create a political organization to get turn out and anyone can get a handout from the government.
No - I mean he handles all that stuff for me. I “work” for myself. Think I put in more than $20k though?
True but that’s not a threat anymore imo. WSB stopped being a source of pumps midway through last year. Even if someone wrote a SAVA dd tomorrow and got thousands of upvotes, it would barely do anything to the price.
Someone on the Interwebz did a well-publicized deep dive not long ago into how unhealthy their products are, which I reckon hasn’t helped their stock performance.
Depending on the timing, I-bonds would be perfect for $10K of this if you’re looking to get a zero risk return while waiting to buy a house. But you’d have to keep it in there for a while, iirc it was a year. It’s on the Treasury Direct website. You’re not going to beat that guaranteed rate (7.56% right now) with zero risk.
On that note, if anyone has ever been on the fence about an HSA and not looked into the nitty gritty details, some of the benefits are really awesome. When you have HSA-eligible insurance, as soon as you open your HSA, which you fund with pre-tax dollars, you can withdraw funds from it at any point afterwards to pay for qualified medical expenses incurred after the date you opened it.
Currently, qualified medical expenses include over the counter meds and covid PPE (including sanitizer) on top of all the expenses you’d expect to have covered.
But here’s the fun part. I can max that account out now at $3,600, and save all my medical receipts. If I need to withdraw money from it in 5 years, 10 years, whatever, for any reason, I can just pull out the old receipt and withdraw it for that.
Also while you can only fund it $3,600 per year while you’re on an HSA-eligible plan, you can use receipts for qualified expenses from any time after the date you opened the account, even if they are incurred while you no longer have an HSA insurance plan.
In other words, it’s a tax sheltered account that becomes liquid.
Here’s the key thing I fucked up. While you can open an HSA for the current calendar year’s insurance plan all the way up until 4/15 of the next year, the qualified medical expenses do NOT count retroactive to the start date of the insurance. They only go to the date you open the account. So no matter what, open it on Day 1 and throw a few bucks in it. I incurred like $1,500 of medical expenses I don’t get to use towards getting that liquidity. 
If you had a later end date by a few months I’d take under 30,000. But 29,999 is almost 20% off the all time high and another 13% from here in 5 weeks. It’s possible, but I think a slower drawdown on the DJIA in particular is likely. I wouldn’t be surprised at all if there’s some churn in the Dow and S&P as people shift from tech and growth to large cap value.
If you’re self-employed, you should probably be using a Roth IRA and SEP IRA. The Roth is post-tax dollars but you pay no taxes on the returns, so it’s great at a young age regardless of tax bracket, the older you get the more that matters. The annual limit is $6K. The SEP IRA is pre-tax dollars, and the max ends up being like 22% of your earnings (they say 25% but the way it’s calculated is a bit complicated), there’s a nominal cap but it’s pretty high. I want to say $48K but I could be wrong. (Beat: I haven’t hit it yet.)
Sounds like you’re a poker pro or some other type of self-employed individual, so those would be good. Also if you have an HSA-eligible health insurance plan, open an HSA and put $3,600 in it each year you’re on an HSA-eligible plan.
The first time I tried Halo Top, I raced home to see if they were publicly traded and was devastated that they weren’t. This was when it was only available in Whole Foods and Wegman’s. It tasted 90% as good as real ice cream with 25% of the calories and lot of protein, so it was a slam dunk. This was in late 2015 or early 2016.
Their sales went up 2,500% in 2016. The next year they had the top selling ice cream pints in the US. They sold in 2019 to another private company.
It’s obviously tough to find for a private company in the early phases, but I did some digging and my ballpark guess is that they were probably valued around $25M to $50M when I first discovered them, and Reuters estimated them at $2B in early 2018.
If they were publicly traded I could have gotten rich on ice cream!
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I am now convinced that the (imo) impending stock market crash will trigger a recession through knock-on effects. Or worse.
I think there’s a non-zero chance we make 2008 look like a walk in the park.
People have mentioned the possibility of AirBNB going under. I think they likely get bought up instead in that scenario, but if not, and if they run out of funding, or otherwise have a break in operations, it could lead to hundreds of thousands of foreclosures and/or unpaid rents. Lots of superhosts are absurdly leveraged and need to book their units to pay their mortgages/rents. I met a guy once who had hundreds of units.
That said I think they turned profitable in 2021 so maybe they’re not at serious risk.
But it makes me wonder, how many people are paying their car payments by driving for Uber or DoorDash? Or just doing it for all their income? Those jobs would reshuffle because the service is needed/wanted but it could be a rough time until the dust settles.
If we have a leverage crisis in the stock market and the Fed rate has increased, those are two reasons institutional lenders might tighten up requirements and increase rates for business loans, residential mortgages and consumer loans right?
There’s more downward pressure on the housing market. Oh and foreclosures are starting back up again.
Plus state budget crises if the market crashes enough to smoke their pension plans… And that’s something I didn’t know about a week ago. What’s the thing none of us knew this week that rears its ugly head next week or month or so on?
No chance of stimulus, no chance of free money bailouts for major companies imo, and little/no wiggle room from here.
The supply chain is stretched thin, the labor market is stretched thin, the workforce is weakened by Omicron absences, the Fed emptied it’s clip for the markets in 2020-21, Congress is disfunctional.
Just about anything could be the straw the breaks the camel’s back in some way, shape, or form, setting off a chain of events.
And no matter how bad it gets there’s ~0 chance of raising taxes on the wealthy to fund stimulus and ~0 chance of passing any unfunded spending. So if we get a recession or worse, look the fuck out.
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Pre-market quotes not looking great. Looks like NFLX, TSLA, MRNA, etc are going to lead the slide again and AMZN, AAPL, MSFT are in the red too - so is QQQ of course. The S&P down a tad as well.
Why is there an impending stock market crash?
The real worrying outcome is what if all these people have moved into these jobs but the only way they can work them is if the parent companies are subsiding them by burning through investor capital? Like what if there is no demand for bespoke food delivery at a price that makes profit and provides a livable wage to the driver and doesn’t leave the restaurants thinking why do I bother with this annoyance? Has Uber made a profit yet or are the still burning billions a year? Drivers are already on subsistence wages. If that investor capital dries up during a large economic retraction it could really exacerbate things.
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The unemployment rate in the US is 3.9%. Isn’t the bad thing if workers are lured into value-destroying tasks by misallocated capital rather than working in Intel’s semiconductor fabs and doing something useful?
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There’s always an impending stock market crash. That’s just part of being invested in stocks. The question is never “if”, it is just a matter of “when” and “how much”.
At the moment there are some trends that are a bit worrying. Any period of sustained high returns can make people forgetful of the risks which ironically makes the risk of a big crash increase.
But no one knows. If you’re a regular retail investor just trying to create a healthy saving and investing habit then focus on taxes and fees and ignore prognosticators.
Well yes, that seems to be what has happened and I believe it is a very bad thing.
Stocks have been on an incredible run while the fundamental life experience of most Americans has deteriorated. Like, stocks have to go down because (gestures widely).
People also look around and see terrible companies with no profits “worth” tens of billions of dollars and rightly conclude something is fucked up. Never mind all the crypto nonsense.
I mean they have access to an infinite money machine and can essentially funnel that free money directly into the stock market. Perhaps it still won’t be enough but it’s a pretty powerful tool.
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Service workers are unionizing and striking and that makes markets unhappy. Also there’s potentially a war in Europe about to kick off.