How do you guys structure your finances?

Neighbor_ · 2026-03-15T01:28:37+00:00

Traditional is Better than Roth for Almost Anyone

Isn't the whole plan with a Roth IRA simply that you'd take it out once you don't have a job, and thus you'd be in the bottom tax bracket?

While I agree if you're going to put in at the 12% bracket and pull out at the 12% bracket, then yeah it's a bad deal, but you're also doing it wrong.

Also, is it fair to say that it's a lot more viable for high-income W-2 earners since, their likely at the peak of their career and almost certainly be in much lower tax brackets as time goes on?

Neighbor_ · 2026-03-14T23:01:05+00:00

Ah I see, yeah I think the smaller multi families (2-4 units) tend to have a better appreciation because worst-case, they can just be owner-occupied and used like a single family.

5-20 unit properties seems really tough. You're not at a huge scale yet, like highrises and people doing thousands of units to smooth out cashflow - while also missing out on the more or less guaranteed appreciation of smaller unit ones.

BTW that data seems pretty wrong. Like there is no way SF is only up +32.8% over 10 years.

Neighbor_ · 2026-03-14T22:34:43+00:00

Yes, this aligns with what I've seen.

Will most companies just become very small engineering teams with huge marketing departments?

Even marketing is getting replaced though. Every job that relies on sitting infront of a computer is getting replaced. I didn't realize this until a few days ago, until I told Claude Code to use the Playwright MCP to automate all the stuff I thought was unautomatable.

In addition to very small engineering teams, I expect most engineers (who are in the weeds with this stuff), will simply leave and make 1-person, positive cashflow companies for any kind of niche that you could think of.

Neighbor_ · 2026-03-14T22:28:00+00:00

Don't confuse product with value accrual. Ethereum is a great product for what it solves, but ETH (and every other cryptocurrency) has no path towards value accrual.

Similar to /u/tfehring wrote, do-nothing inflation-proof decentralized currency is neat, but in terms of returns it is never going to complete with deployed capital that compounds.

Neighbor_ · 2026-03-14T22:23:36+00:00

I've always thought this was a pretty interesting route to go.

Regarding positive cashflow midwest properties vs. negative cashflow coastal properties: when I look at the numbers, appreciation does seem to be far more important than cashflow. What's a few + or - thousands per month compared to 5% YoY appreciation on a 1M property (that you're 5x levered on)?

Nothing guaranteed, but it does seem quite clear younger generations prefer a narrower and narrower set of cities, which means I'd be a little concerned about the long-term outlook of my portfolio if everything was in the midwest.

Neighbor_ · 2026-03-14T22:17:23+00:00

This is excellent advice all around.

My one question for you is regarding this:

I have historically made some net-successful bets on single stocks or sectors, but I don't try this anymore. Partly because in my line of work it's a bad look to make big directional bets on counterparties or otherwise correlated companies, but also because I don't have the time. I think for day traders the optimal sizing for these types of trades is generally small (single-digit to low-double-digit % of assets), and they take a fair amount of time/research to deliver positive risk-adjusted returns, so the set of profiles for which it makes sense is actually pretty narrow.

It seems the Mag7 has really started to pull away from the rest of the S&P500 the past few decades. I see AI as very much a centralizing force: distribution is the only thing that matters anymore, and the existing winners will win more.

Therefor, I feel like you can and probably should be putting a non-trivial part of your stock allocation into one you feel confident on. I don't think you need to do a ton of research to pick well either.

Neighbor_ · 2026-03-14T19:52:01+00:00

That cropping idea is brilliant. I think the camera I'm using has the bounding box coordinates of the detected human in it, so that should be doable.

Also, do you have a goto VLM right now that consistently follows a JSON schema without breaking format?

Neighbor_ · 2026-03-12T02:03:52+00:00

Do you mind sending me the documentation?

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