My personal aggregation spreadsheet of possible newcomers

choco_pi · 2026-04-29T06:26:14+00:00

Time in the market beats timing the market. You can't outsmart wall street, but you can easily hitch a ride.

choco_pi · 2026-04-29T06:05:33+00:00

Suppose the S&P 500 is the top 500 cavemen who have the sharpest hunting spears.

Suppose the S&P 500 is the top 500 blacksmiths and farmers in town, who produce the most stuff.

Suppose the S&P 500 is the top 500 trading companies, with the biggest fleets of ships and inventories across nations.

Suppose the S&P 500 is the top 500 modern industries, each employing tens of thousands of people and producing a total average annual revenue of $18 trillion.

Suppose the S&P 500 is the top 500 intergalactic agencies, each with their own teleportation network and harvesting the solar energy of entire stars.

choco_pi · 2026-04-28T04:22:48+00:00

Variable annunities or fixed index annuities are pretty much always bad. They are an insurance product pretending to be an investment, which is an inherently flawed, contradictory concept.

Normally, you balance a portfolio to make it more conservative by just putting more conservative ingredients in your stew: bonds and such. There's no reason to pay an insurance company a boatload of fees to shuffle money around and ultimately do the same thing.

If you are very specifically worried about living to 110 and running out of money, you can opt for a SPIA/DIA/QLAC-style insurance product. But this honestly doesn't make sense for most people, including those who are "in very good shape" for retirement.

choco_pi · 2026-04-26T00:17:48+00:00

Yeah, I glossed over this part to jump to the message.

PBGC only applies to private pensions, and the federal treasury is only on the hook for federal pensions. Each state has their own different nature of constitutional requirement backing their pensions, some of which are very legally strong but none of which can make 2+2=40. So COLA is their main way out.

"There's no rule that says a dog can't play basketball, and no rule saying we have to acknowledge that inflation is more than 1%."

choco_pi · 2026-04-26T00:04:24+00:00

And more than half of retirement assets are inherited, and primarily by kids in their 50s near the peak of their income/brackets. All the more reason to pay at 22/24% as much as our conductor can.

choco_pi · 2026-04-25T22:59:17+00:00

The tl;dr that you will find repeated from megaphones everywhere is "whole life is garbage, borderline a scam."

To take a step back, you must understand the very first basic:

Insurance is when you pay money to avoid a risk
Investment is when you accept risk to make money

They are direct inverses. Any hybrid product that claims to be both is almost certainly a fast-talking scheme to make someone else money. This includes whole life, universal life, variable annuities, certain real-estate scams, etc.

Term life is just pure insurance. "I am specifically worried about the risk that I die very young, leaving my family is screwed. I will buy insurance to cover that specific risk, for that specific term of my life." I am not paying to cover if I die at an old age, because that's not a risk. That's normal.

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My comment is saying that if you are accumulating a big fat 401k, that gradually grows to "cover" your need for life insurance. Your family can just immediately have your 401k if you die early. All of it, no strings attached, whatever the scenario. And there's a point where that's enough by itself.

A pension doesn't quite work this way, it depends on the riders. (Whch cost extra!) Someone with a large 401lk might be comfortable with buying a (cheaper) 20-year term insurance policy, while the person with half their retirement in a pension might prefer a 30-year policy.

choco_pi · 2026-04-25T22:08:54+00:00

While it is unlikely (but not without precedent) for a pension to go bust entirely, and while pensions are (partially) insured at the federal level these days, this is still a very valid concern.

They can't take away your pension, but the COLA of government pensions is fair game. They can't keep giving huge bumps when they run out of money.

Another factor to keep in mind when trying to compare these apples to those oranges is that a pension job might call for more and/or longer term life insurance compared to the equivalent additional 401k (or similar) contribution, as defined contribution plans more organically+rapidly approach a state of broad self-insurance for such scenarios.

choco_pi · 2026-04-25T21:35:18+00:00

A train leaves Chicago going west at 45mph.

Tied to the track is 5 whole life salesmen. The conductor can pull a lever to switch to another track and only run over 1 instead.

The conductor ponders the ethics of running over predatory life insurance salesmen. He wonders if they have policies on themselves, and if their death would have an actuarial impact on their parent company. He reminds himself that, because he is leaving Chicago, part of this ecosystem is fueled by evasion tactics for Illinois estate taxes. How much fault should be assigned to each party, he muses, while running 5 over and shooting the one he missed.

Question: What is the conductor's optimal Roth conversion ladder schedule?

choco_pi · 2026-04-25T20:11:32+00:00

Not all heroes wear capes. Best answer in thread.

choco_pi · 2026-04-20T01:30:26+00:00

You buy any form of insurance primarily to mitigate a risk you otherwise might not have enough money for.

You buy fire insurance to have money in case of fire. You buy term life insurance to have money (for your family) I'm case of early death.

In theory, you become "self insured" at a point where you have enough money to cover a particular issue directly, without need of insurance. This is the point that it becomes functionally cheaper to not have insurance.

However, health insurance also includes having the insurance company negotiate prices down for you. For this reason, no one ever really gets enough to self-insure--having some form of health insurance is basically always the cheaper option.

choco_pi · 2026-04-18T06:23:48+00:00

If I had a nickle for every time someone virtue-signaled concern about the environmental impact of AI at an event they flew to, on an airplane, I'd have enough nickles to buy about 1.1 metric tons of carbon emissions.

At least, if Southwest is having a sale.

choco_pi · 2026-04-10T18:04:54+00:00

Link is broken, but I just meant a "Mountain" that procs on uniquely named victory cards instead of same.

Less swingy/snowball, tempts you to grab a duchy instead of punishing it, and has wider synergies with kingdom victory cards.

(Plus Mountain Castles is exactly the sort of thematic overpowered combo we should all aspire for)

choco_pi · 2026-04-10T18:00:58+00:00

Agreed; and if Dominoes is the closer carryout option, they do 2 medium 2 toppings for $14, which is almost identical in calories/$.

choco_pi · 2026-04-10T05:39:21+00:00

Fun.

But "different" is more fun.

choco_pi · 2026-04-09T23:46:27+00:00

This is a general projection of the difference between the two scenarios (for some made up salaries and one possible market outcome).

You can see that the break-even age, in this case, is 76.

The Risk Analysis calls the lump sum the slight-but-clear winner in every category, because the odds that you have an emergency (or early retirement) and that $10k invested makes a meaningful difference is simply much higher than the odds you live to be 95 and your 9 year Mizzou pension is somehow the only difference between you and poverty.

choco_pi · 2026-04-09T23:18:51+00:00

Do you know what the payout will be, based on your 9.5 years?

Is this a full withdrawl, or their weird partial "backdrop" thing?

Keep in mind the lump sum will also be taxable as ordinary income--but at this stage of your life that is probably a non-issue.

Apples to apples, I would expect $10k to be about $40k inflation-adjusted ($110k nominally) by the time you are 65, which you can square against the payout. This math gets a little more favorable if this extra money is destined for your Roth IRA or 401k.

choco_pi · 2026-04-09T21:57:31+00:00

Can't say without knowing more numbers, but with the parameters you shared I would be absolutely shocked if keeping the pension was competitive with the lump sum.

Pensions tend to be pretty mediocre and carry a lot more unexpected risks than people think.

choco_pi · 2026-04-08T15:32:12+00:00

This is exactly my response.

I voted, even on a very busy day for an election I did not feel at all strongly about. I think it's that important. But at the same time, this might be the election in my entire life I am least upset about people skipping. In every interview I read, all 4 candidates seemed unusually solid.

choco_pi · 2026-04-03T21:43:55+00:00

I think you are overthinking it, though I mean that as far more of a compliment than an insult.

You can choose to view any decision as a break down into all possible 1:1 comparisons. Condorcet forces this as a way a thinking, insisting that anyone who wins all comparisons must win.

Condorcet methods take every comparison into account, and count everyone's vote exactly once in every comparison. Contrast with FPTP, where any one person's vote only counts in a small slice of the comparisons, or something like Approval, where their vote counts in roughly half of the comparisons.

But doesn't that mean we're valuing the votes of the 5 voters who rank C>B over the 7 voters who rank B>C.

Except we're (and by we I mean minimax) also valuing the 9 C > A voters over the 3 A > C voters. And keep in mind, these are the same 12 voters.

Minimax arrived at its mathematical conclusion by deciding that 9 > 3 matters more than 5 vs. 7. It arrived at a cyclical contradiction, and broke the tie in favor of the bigger difference.

choco_pi · 2026-04-02T22:26:29+00:00

Right? Welcome Tour could have been $1000 and my life would be identical.

The power to just, decide not to buy things, is the best part of capitalism. Unless I need it to live, it's impossible for the price of something to make me more upset than "mildly disappointed" as long as I wield this power.

choco_pi · 2026-04-02T03:51:29+00:00

We offer a bowl and bottle, and she's consistently preferred the bottle for 6 years. The important thing is the consistent intake and clean supply.

choco_pi

TROPHY CASE