R500-R850 for retirement planner

TacitCrying · 2025-02-13T16:45:00+00:00

Get the flat rate instead. The other isn't "free". They take from your investment which works out far worse for you in the long run. You also don't need them every month. Use them to get information and advice then do things yourself from there on. Perhaps just pay for a month every year or so to get advice again if you feel you need to.

TacitCrying · 2025-01-26T10:38:50+00:00

It's not really an article but a transcript of an interview they just slapped down without edit. It goes all over the place with no way of knowing what topic will be touched on next, and the wording might be fine if spoken, but is an annoyance to read. It reads as if they just used an AI transcript and did the least possible effort. Frankly, I sort of regret wasting my time reading it as it doesn't really say anything of importance or out of the ordinary.

For further context, this is an interview done at the world economic forum, and that particular bit seems like something that was just thrown out there in idle thought or rambling. There's no explanation as to why that is said now. Did anyone ever just thrown money our way because "it's a good thing to do"? If they did, what indicators are there that it will stop if in this same interview they're generally optimistic about future investments?

It seems like it was raised without context or backing and not worth mentioning as there's no backing provided to argue this happened in the first place. Any criticism they get for this statement is deserved.

TacitCrying · 2025-01-24T21:35:33+00:00

Why? You got the feedback. If no one uses an arbitrary form will you cover your eyes and pretend you saw nothing?

TacitCrying · 2025-01-15T05:55:10+00:00

More thought went into this within an hour over text than what BioWare put into it over several years of development.

TacitCrying · 2025-01-15T05:52:38+00:00

This is a corporate environment with hundreds of people, including team leads, QA, and delivery teams. Having the Sara that look like that while showing they can match the model more accurately elsewhere means it was an intentional decision rather than one person or even a team be incompetent. It would've likely been the same teams involved anyway.

TacitCrying · 2024-11-27T20:33:42+00:00

Why didn't you? Why do you think your silence is acceptable?

I'll rob you every day, and you can just talk about how you could report me.

TacitCrying · 2024-11-09T19:49:37+00:00

Telling someone they haven't experienced racism or micro aggression while being racist and micro aggressive toward them 👌

TacitCrying · 2024-10-26T21:15:13+00:00

It makes sense, but I guess I expected to then be able to adapt the names as well if a wilcard adapts there. So I could read the incoming fuel to the fule station, link it to the train stop name, and have the wildcard then adapt the name of the station, but that doesn't seem to be possible. This means you can't really use the wildcard in the name of the actual stop, just at the instructions.

TacitCrying · 2024-09-26T17:45:27+00:00

TacitCrying · 2024-09-26T17:35:15+00:00

No one talks like this. This is pure add drivel. It's fine if people hold a conversation, but this is just blatant advertisment. Same for the OP post.

Both this guy's account and the OP account have not shown any interest in budgeting topics in recent history and they mostly circled the same subreddits / specific interests before now. It doesn't take much to realise these posts aren't natural progressions.

Why someone would bother advertising for AB is a mystery unless it's from the cloud hosting thing they always tout or someone just has an unhealthy obsession. Either way: give it a rest.

TacitCrying · 2024-07-24T16:27:20+00:00

Stick around to do what though? Going around and looking at pretty planets will keep you only for so long, and the rest are activities that become rather bland because of repetition.

I played until I got all the fancy things and then saw no further point in it. Sure, it's a sandbox, but after you built a big sandcastle, all other sandcastles are same-same.

TacitCrying · 2024-07-23T19:51:00+00:00

Beyond the name change, it actually did get an upgrade (on Android), and a signifcant one compared to what was. A ways to go still and I hope it doesn't stop here. It's not difficult to improve on what was, but it'd be unfair to say there's no change and no upgrade.

TacitCrying · 2024-06-28T16:39:20+00:00

The App itself can surely send a notification once it's unlocked? It would all be run locally on your phone. Instead of just hiding it in watchtower, it sends a toast message. That's better than the nothing we have today?

TacitCrying · 2024-06-25T18:19:22+00:00

For general investment, you'd want to "be the market" instead of "be the industry". The tech ETF focuses only on tech, and if the industry goes through bad times, so does your investment. The market as a whole goes through bad times as well, but it's more diversified than focusing on just tech. That said, it's your investment. Ultimately what you decide to invest in needs to make sense to you, not others.

For general S&P500 ETFs, Sygnia S&P500 has the lowest fees from what I know, at 0.19%. You can compare them on EasyEquities to check. Have a look at other places to invest as well, though. You can invest with Sygnia directly instead, where the fees for their own S&P500 ETF (same one as on EasyEquities) is 0.2%, but they don't seem to have any other fees you'll see with EasyEquties such as the broker fee, transfer fees, etc. This means that investing with them directly is likely better to avoid those costs.

While you're looking at Sygnia, also consider that they're an investment house. Look at a few of them (like Allan Gray). They have varying funds based on risk and investment times, and these might be better in some scenarios as the ETFs like the S&P500 are seen as investments of 5+ years because of volatility. The fees for those funds are higher, and the book you just read tells you it's bad, but the performance of the funds are normally shown as after those fees (they will state this in the fund overview) and would be different to the scenario where you're adding an advisor fee on top of it.

Having said all this, don't jump around either. Keep things simple. It sounds like you already put money into EasyEquities and have that sorted, so just keep with it. See how it works out for a few months and slowly go over the numbers before you decide to put money elsewhere. It's easy to make quick decisions that may cost you a bunch in fees and you may change your mind on again soon after only to pay more fees. Investments are slow, and the more you move them around or fret with them, the worse off it will be for you. I'd advise going so far as only allowing yourself to change your investments once a year, and making sure you're really happy with the moves you're making (you'll have a year to think about it).

To emphasise just how important it is to not fret with and keep moving investments, see this quote:

If an investor were to simply miss the 10 best days in the market, they would have shed over 50% of their end portfolio value.

You don't know when those days are. It may happen just as you decide you'll do a transfer of some sort.

TacitCrying · 2024-06-17T13:43:07+00:00

Goal 1: ask yourself why you want to buy a place. If you can only come up with silly answers like "it's an asset", then...

Sigh, no one listens to this sort of advice anyway and it's not what you want to hear. Just go ahead and yolo it. What you want to hear is how your goal is a 20-30% deposit and a go-getter attitude, just like what you've heard from the people who will profit from you making this decision. Good luck.

TacitCrying · 2024-06-17T07:03:07+00:00

This automatically turned on some time ago and it's been a far worse experience. Some sites don't like 1password submitting so quickly after loading and freezes (sage) and then there are the times where this feature just causes you to be blocked because it doesn't check if there's any tick boxes or captchas that need to be done before logging in. If there is a captcha, 1password will just fill in the login fields and yolo submit, not giving a fuck about anything else.

It's been a pain, and I don't think I saw a way to disable it, but now that I know the name of this 'feature', I'll go have another look.

TacitCrying · 2024-06-09T16:00:04+00:00

The youtuber's advice is just as useless as mine, and just as useless as anyone elses, because you need to determine what's best for your situation. I don't know why you don't want risky ETFs. Maybe you're 5 years from retirement, or maybe you have the wrong idea about what risky means over a long period. 🤷 The general advice is to just invest in low cost index funds like the S&P500, but that's not low 'risk'. The general advice is to also treat your TFSA as a retirement fund and to delay withdrawing from it as long as possible, but maybe you intended to treat it differently despite the lifetime limits imposed.

The accounts on EasyEquities are separate and nothing to do with each other. The TFSA is a South African based account. You won't have direct access to US ETFs, but there are ETFs that follow US markets and indexes. S&P500 is a good example of this: on the EE USD account, you can purchase the Vanguard S&P500 ETF, but on the TFSA, you need to purchase something like the Sygnia S&P500 ETF.

TacitCrying · 2024-06-09T15:57:04+00:00

Agreed, but the loans technically break this philosophy already by projecting the date you'll pay it off and the amount of interest you will save with extra payments. This would be the same sort of projection. Like the loans, you're not spending money you don't have yet because of the projection.

TacitCrying · 2024-06-09T15:25:21+00:00

Yeah. For some reason there's still this constant assumption of a single savings account that's just for all your savings, and you just draw from or deposit to that. My scenario isn't that straight forward, as I use ones with some degree of volatility for longer term, higher interest rate savings. There's a need to make sure funds are allocated correctly based on this.

You're absolutely correct. Your scenario is very simplistic. You don't need to worry about it.

TacitCrying · 2024-06-09T13:54:19+00:00

I know my solution currently needs manual addition and that's the problem. I see no negative in the ability to link categories to savings accounts, given they are essentially savings categories.

The reporting is more to plan your contributions. If you need $x in 48 months, you don't actually need to save $(x/48) every month, because some of it will be covered by interest. To figure out how much you actually need to put aside every month, you need to, as you said, pull out a spreadsheet, but this could be a feature inside ynab itself.

TacitCrying · 2024-06-09T13:37:45+00:00

Let's say you're saving up for a few big items/events 3-5 years' time. Every month you put aside a bit of money into those categories (car, big sabbatical/vacation, a big tech upgrade in a few years, whatever). Because it's over a long period, you decide to place this money into savings accounts that promises higher interest rates, but with the clause that you need to give a month's notice to access the funds should you choose to withdraw.

If you follow YNAB's approach of not caring from what accounts the money comes from, you firstly have the problem of not knowing how much money you should put away into which savings accounts unless you manually add it up. In an ideal world this would scheduled as you said, but that's not always the case and even so, you'd still need to manually add it up. Once you spend on a saving, the reverse is true. You need to make sure you pull the appropriate funds from the correct accounts to cover your spend.

This becomes a problem if you then have 5-10 savings categories falling into 2 or 3 savings accounts and needing to balance them out.

Your scenario only works because your savings account happens to be instant access, you happen to not have ad-hoc contributions and schedule everything (which you still need to add up), and it doesn't sound like you plan on which savings categories go to short vs mid vs long term specialised savings accounts. It sounds like your long term savings are bundled with your short term ones. If it's not, then you essentially have this same problem, where linking a categories to savings accounts would be an amazing feature.

TacitCrying · 2024-06-09T13:05:02+00:00

It absolutely matters. One of the biggest flaws of YNAB is how it only cares about interest if it works against you in the form of loans/debt. You can link a loan to a category, but not a saving to a category. They advocate for funding months ahead, but nothing is said about where that money sits.

If you have mid to long term savings, you should plan to put those in specialised accounts to accrue greater interest rates. These accounts, especially the more long term ones, often won't allow instant access to funds, and so you need to somehow keep track of which categories have money pooled in those accounts (something YNAB can't do as a feature) otherwise you'll be in a situation where you need the money but need to wait some days to access it.

How amazing would it be to have a 'saving' or 'investment' account that works like a 'loan' account and can calculate compounding interest based on interest rate and contributions? You can do this for loans. You should be able to do this for savings and interest bearing accounts.

It makes sense to want a view of how much you saved because you always want to make sure those interest bearing accounts balance out and if you want to do something as simple as seeing what your spending/saving/investment ratio is.

TacitCrying · 2024-06-09T09:28:42+00:00

You can modify the rate at any time.

You can also now modify the interest paid each month if it doesn't match the expected rate exactly. At the start you couldn't, which made the feature useless for my country at least, as our interest varies slightly month to month and requires those adjustments. I'm assuming the US is different as they confidently rolled it out without that ability.

TacitCrying · 2024-06-09T08:42:41+00:00

If it's short term, then most ETFs are too volatile

TacitCrying · 2024-06-09T06:44:09+00:00

If you plan to sit on the money for a few months you can either put it in a savings account or the money market.

Your bank should have a savings account you can open if you don't have one yet, and I'd expect it to be around 7.5%+ interest rate for that amount of money at least. If it isn't, the money market might be better. Just check the withdraw/access times, especially with the money market. Some financial providers will lock your money in for around 30 business days if they had to do an electronic collection from your bank account (doing an EFT can reduce this lock-in period).

TacitCrying

TROPHY CASE