Elite for poker/gambling, that’s gotta be a decent chunk.
Sex work runs in normal cash. I’ve only seen a couple examples ever that used crypto.
Pretty sure he meant more the wholesale end of human trafficking. But crypto isn’t even as good as diamonds for doing illegal transactions at this point. Far too traceable.
Yeah. Like many things. Crypto doesnt do better than a conventional system
Moving dirty, untraceable money is super easy. You can trade millions over whatsapp to any location in the word in an hour.
Making money usuable is a little harder.
Crypto does a not very good job of the former and even worse job at the latter.
I don’t find crypto to be useful for any gambling or any other transactions I do, cash is almost always better. Cash doesn’t wildly swing its value on me, doesn’t rape me with fees whenever I try to move it around, there isn’t a distributed ledger recording every transaction, etc.
Interesting, I find crypto super helpful for betting offshore books. Its my one actual use for it. I don’t keep anything long in crypto often, but as a mechanism for moving money to offshores way better than prior alternatives for me.
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My parents retired this year. Dad has taken “all” their money out of the stock market the last few months. I believe they also have pensions. I told him to just allocate mostly towards bonds, but had no idea the bond market is down too. What do I tell them to do?
My standard answer applies to almost all situations:
Buy monkey jpgs.
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Load up on I bonds and treasuries?
bond market is down because of rising interest rates, so bonds at lower interest rates are worth less. When interest rates go back down next year they will go back up
I bonds 10K max? I said treasury bonds. I didn’t really know what else to say.
In a statement, Chipotle said it offers its employees industry-leading benefits, such as competitive wages, debt-free degrees, health benefits and bonuses that last year totaled $37 million for its nearly 100,000 employees.
So… $370 bonus per employee and that doesn’t even take into account that the blue collar employees are probably getting disproportionate bonuses.
Hi. I know a lot about retirement planning in Canada but not the US, so take this information with a little grain of salt. But I think the broad concepts apply equally.
It really sounds to me like your dad is making a mistake by pulling all their money out of the stock market in the year that they retired. The right retirement planning decisions always depend on personal circumstances, but there are hardly any circumstances where that decision is going to be an optimal decision.
On a pure investment allocation basis, if they do in fact have good pensions (a reliable guaranteed monthly income payment paid for their entire lives, guaranteed by an employer or an insurance company) then they really should be MORE comfortable investing their other assets in the stock market. Traditional pensions (a monthly income guaranteed for life) are basically a super bond - if provides what a bond portfolio is supposed to provide (income) but without the market risk and with the mega bonus that it is guaranteed to be paid for as long as you live.
Finally, my biggest concern is looking at their investment portfolio in a silo and trying to decide when that pool of capital should be moved into and out of markets. The best way to make an investment plan for retirement is to weave that decision into a true retirement plan. Of course I don’t know what they have done or have not done, but a real retirement plan means gathering all your information about your retirement income sources (pensions, investments, social security, future home equity if they are going to sell the home) into one comprehensive model, and then you need to forecast out how much money you are going to want/need after tax for the rest of your life and have a plan on exactly how to draw money out of all of these sources. You need all of those pieces working harmoniously, i.e. households should plan the best date to start social security and pensions and plan to draw down investments around those pillars in an optimal way. They should integrate decisions about when to start taking their social security into decisions about how quickly to draw down on their savings. And they need to take into account how all of these things are taxed.
99% of people can’t do this themselves, so they might need an advisor. They should look for a “Fee Only” advisor that will charge them an upfront fee to put together a plan for them, but that doesn’t sell investment products. The plan will cost a couple of thousand dollars, but they will probably recoup at least that much in the long run on just taxes if they put together the pieces in the best way.
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If their pensions cover their cost they should be mostly in equities.
Probably but not definitely. There is a really, really important distinction between behaviors up to retirement and behaviors in retirement.
Before retirement (the “accumulation” phase) the analysis is really very easy because the vast, vast majority of people are well served by one simple and easy to execute approach: live within your means, invest the residual (hopefully in the ballpark of 10% of income) in low cost index funds, and set it and forget it. This is very easy to understand and implement and probably achieves like 80%-90% of the optimal solution for almost everybody.
After retirement (the “decumulation” phase) the one-size-mostly-fits-almost-all approach does not work at all. There is really no way to know what is optimal for you in retirement without a detailed personalized plan - you need to clearly state your goals in retirement, pull together your own personal assets and income sources into one model, you need to start accounting for taxes which will depend on your own personal location and personal tax bracket, etc. etc. The accumulation phase is general, the decumulation phase is specific. Your observation is generally correct, but specifically it could be wrong. For example if they want to go on a lot of vacations in the first few years of their retirement then the answer will be different than if they want to live on their pensions and pass on their investments to their estate.
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Kinda seems to me that if you have to be that specific in your retirement planning then your finances are likely to be precarious. Like you’re micromanaging individual outcomes to a degree that is only a fraction of expected systemic variance.
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No, definitely not. Actually the more assets you have the more attention you have to pay to tax optimization and being clear about how you want to get the most out of your money.
I think Zikzak’s point is something like if you have a lot of money, then who cares if your tax strategy is suboptimal. You’re still going to be fine.
Lots of families have an intermediate amount where bad decisions won’t make them destitute, but bad decisions are still a major leak that foolishly throws away 10s or 100s of thousands of dollars in retirement. This is absolutely “worth it” to manage for most households in that situation.