I'm a lot more worried about unforeseen expenses than about prolonged market conditions that might cause issues with a 4% withdrawal rate. If your budget includes a healthy dose of discretionary spending and generous budgets for things like groceries, you can temporarily cut spending if there's a m...

Maybe the mods can split off the last page or so into a separate SWR thread since it relates only very loosely to the thread topic of “Milestones to Financial Freedom”? Which post do you want the new thread to start with? Thanks for forking this, dualstow . I should have just started/linked another...

BTW, if you're running a PP the equivalent SWR is closer to 5% than the 4% the classic studies found by only looking at stocks and bonds. So you may be even farther along than you realize. Congrats! Does everyone here think these SWRs still hold true in the current climate? My SO and I are on the g...

Right at 15% here, but I don't bother doing the actual math to deal with contributions during the year as they're small compared to the overall portfolio size.

Wow, what's happened to this forum? It used to be a place filled with intelligent, well thought out discussions on a wide range of topics. Now it's an echo chamber where the crazies reign supreme. I've gotten the same impression, and honestly stopped reading here for the past few weeks. The folks e...

pugchief wrote: ↑

Tue Oct 13, 2020 8:35 pm

ctest.jpg

Who knew I've been administering self-testing protocol during the entire pandemic!

Imagine if everyone refused to vote for the lesser of two evils and only 1% of the country voted. Wouldn’t that send a strong message the system is screwed and needs change? It may send a message, but it's a "someone aught'ta do something" message, which of course no one will. The political class w...

Technically, they are more important than us. If that wasn't just shoved in my face all the time, though, I'd probably be ok with it. Sincerely trying to understand here, since you didn't respond to my previous question..... You're upset with the people who are making personal choices and going abo...

Again, I look at the "normalcy" portrayed by these pictures, and not afforded to the rest of us peons and that more than anything is what upsets me. I believe the point was made earlier, but it's not the president nor the federal government who is denying you such "normalcy". It's your governor/loc...

tomfoolery wrote: ↑

Sun Oct 04, 2020 12:37 am

Whereas the people who hate guns or are afraid of them are the ones in favor of gun control and make comments like a woman's breasts feel like a bag of sand

Nice, subtle movie reference!

Smith1776 wrote: ↑

Tue Sep 29, 2020 10:37 am

Here's the ring and us holding hands.

IMG_7036-1.jpg

Smith, trust me...I've dated my share of unstable women and let me tell you...from the pic I can tell that's definitely a crazy woman's hand

Someday soon you'll realize you dodged a bullet there!

Appreciate all the insights offered in this thread. I don't have anything of substance to contribute to the discussion here other than to share that over the course of the past few years I've invested in Wellesley in addition to the PP, mainly for a bit more diversification (strategy and institution...

This year I’ll have to stay up and watch the returns. Last time I didn’t want to see Hillary’s win so I just went to bed. I guess I missed some fun TV. Last time I was up until at least 4 AM. I don't think Trump came out until about 3:30 AM? It was all somewhat surreal. I think Trump felt the same ...

Kriegsspiel wrote: ↑

Sun Sep 13, 2020 6:37 pm

I'm thinking about getting a mortgage.

Isn't that basically shorting the dollar, with leverage?

So my home internet has been down for about a week and I've been tethering off my phone for an internet connection. I have an LTE speed data cap of 8GB and I get throttled down to 3G for anything past that. So, basically, I've been living in the year 2008 for the past couple days. You're living the...

Would it be so hard for the 99 percent, if they really cared, to stop buying from Amazon? Problem solved. Exactly. IMO it's consumers who killed all the small-town, mom-and-pop stores, as they chose to stop spending money there. The market "spoke". Jeff Bezos and Sam Walton didn't do that. Whether ...

There's an additional explanation. A much simpler one. As someone who lived in Kenya as a child, I can speak from firsthand experience that most of the rural tribes run as a basic mode of transportation. Seriously, the idea of getting somewhere in a jeep or a car is not an option, so if you have to...

As for the DACA recipients, that is on their parents and those who encouraged them to come here illegally. Giving them amnesty will just make the problem worse. Here's the problem with anything other than deportation: I would be okay with giving them permanent residency and no path to citizenship, ...

But the only President in my lifetime who has not tried to expand his own powers but has instead told Congress and state/city executives to do their jobs is... Donald Trump. This includes but is not limited to DACA, handling the riots, and pandemic response, none of which is the job of the executiv...

Humanely speaking can you really bear to pack them all back off to a home country they can't even remember? "Humanely speaking" sets up a very slippery slope. Humanely speaking, can you really bear to let people sleep out in the cold? Humanely speaking, can you really bear to let people starve to d...

Problem is, when I did that, what freaked me out was the recent overvalued price level of TLT and SPY. This just makes me very hesitant to keep going and ignore the market noise. How do you know what's overvalued and what's not? Are you smarter than the broad market? If you think you know better th...

Do people making these statements know how insurance works - the concept of deductibles and premiums?

I heard the same thing when the looting/riots happened in the Seattle area. Like somehow no harm is done because the business owners may have insurance.

Smith1776 wrote: ↑

Wed Aug 12, 2020 8:08 pm

What's even more gross is how eager some people are to just eat up the giant pile of bullshit Biden has served up.

Clearly you too have logged into LinkedIn in the past day!

Cortopassi wrote: ↑

Tue Aug 11, 2020 3:49 pm

I don't think my PP has seen such a large one day swing %-wise ever?

Same. I manually updated my spreadsheet today as a forcing function to keep myself humble next time things are going gangbusters

My big concern with the metals run up is that this could be the aftermath of the 2008/2009 banking crisis all over again. It seems to me that the last time there was this kind price action it was due to a fear of inflation stemming from all the QE and stimulus. When consumer price levels didn't sur...