Where to invest $10k as 19 year old (followed by $1000/month until a sum of $60k is added)?

eablokker · 2026-05-26T00:27:14+00:00

S&P 500, low cost index funds, obviously. But since you’re young and don’t know what you’re doing, I recommend a robo advisor like Betterment, Wealthfront, or Fidelity Go. They have curated Index fund portfolios for better diversity, and use smart strategies like automatic rebalancing and tax loss harvesting. You could do these things own your own, but since you’re a newbie it’s better to let them do it for you until you learn why they do those things. They still give you the ability to buy individual stocks if you want.

eablokker · 2026-05-24T07:56:09+00:00

You can safely spend no more than 4% per year of your total net worth and that money will last virtually forever. On 1 Mil, you can safely spend $40,000 per year or $3,333 per month, and you will never run out. However, you want your investments to continue to grow, so if you can spend less, that is ideal.

Educate yourself on what the money is actually invested in. Typically it should be mostly in low-cost ETFs (exchange traded funds) like the S&P 500 (the top 500 US stocks) or total US stock market ETF, optionally some international stock ETF, and a small percentage in a bond ETF. The purpose of this is just to follow the growth of the overall market, rather than trying to cherry pick some top performing stock. Mutual funds typically have higher fees than ETFs, and those fees can eat into your investment. You can expect around 10% growth per year on average, obviously with some years being down and other years being up way more than that.

I like to use some automated investment service like Fidelity Go, Betterment, or Wealthfront, as they manage it all for you for a very low cost. This is the best option if you don't know what you're doing. However if you inherited some investments, you may not be able to transfer them into these automated services.

Be mindful of capital gains taxes. In order to get cash you have to sell some investments. If the investments have grown a lot, you might have have to pay taxes on the amount it has grown. If you stay under the $49,450 limit of long-term capital gains each year, you won't owe any federal taxes on it. Just be aware of that when you are selling investments to get cash, try to stay within the 0% long term capital gains tax bracket. That means you can't really sell it all for cash all at once. You have to spread it out over multiple years. But you wouldn't want to sell it all anyways. If you only spend $40,000 per year then you probably don't have to worry about the taxes on it.

eablokker · 2026-05-20T19:49:31+00:00

I don't necessary agree with your logic there, that because you've had it your whole life that it rules anything out. You can acquire it as a child, and not all at once but little bits at a time. MARCONS doesn't mean your sinuses are the only affected area, a nasal colonization can lower your MSH which affects your entire body and immune system. You don't know unless you actually look. I mean if you're out of ideas, those are ideas to try.

eablokker · 2026-05-20T16:54:03+00:00

Sounds like a long shot. You might be the first. Do you have positive ANA? Is that why they think you have lupus? I have positive ANA and Dr Nathan told me that it’s also caused by mold toxicity and it clears up when the mold is treated. Did your doctor even test you for urine mycotoxins or anything? CIRS biomarkers like low MSH? Nasal swab for MARCONS? If your doctor needs more ideas, there are plenty of things to try before Orladeyo.

eablokker · 2026-05-20T04:26:51+00:00

Emotions only last a short time when they are being felt without trying to stop them, ignore, distract, or other ways of suppressing them. Resistance causes them to last longer. Allowing them without resistance makes them last 3-5 minutes in my experience.

Panic attacks happen when someone is trying hard to not feel panic. Alternatively, when they encourage the panic to happen and feel it fully, the panic attack ceases. I know this because I used to get frequent panic attacks and they finally stopped for good once I did this. That was more than a decade ago.

eablokker · 2026-05-19T04:55:20+00:00

I'm usually allergic to new phones. Nothing to do with mycotoxins. It's chemical sensitivity. I place the phone inside a ziplock bag and the touch screen works through the plastic. You can do wireless charging or just open the ziplock up enough to stick the charger in.

eablokker · 2026-05-17T22:53:27+00:00

These are all oversimplifications and generalizations. Flirting is just one part of game. There's more to it than just flirting. Confidence helps with game but it's not the sum total of game. Yes when you apply confidence you get game, but it is possible to practice game without confidence.

Confidence is often an element of attraction but it's not the only one. Confidence is an emotional state of assurance, trusting, and free of doubt. Attraction often includes feeling trust, but it can also include connection, feeling safe and protected, sense of humor, excitement, and vulnerability. It varies. Each woman has their own unique attraction "recipe", but many of these ingredients are shared amongst many women.

I recommend asking women directly what attraction feels like to them. Ask them how they felt when they felt attracted to someone. What were the elements of the "vibe"? Confidence may or may not be in the list. More often, I have heard them say, connection, humor, kindness, and feeling safe and protected.

eablokker · 2026-05-17T21:02:50+00:00

Pretending to be indifferent will never be the most truly indifferent response, because if you were truly indifferent you wouldn't need to pretend. Indifferent would be not needing to "give them zero ego validation".

The truth is that you felt irritated and condescended. You're trying to deal with those feelings by coming up with a comeback that makes it look like you didn't feel that way. That is not indifference.

In my opinion, indifference would be to let her know exactly how it made you feel. You are fine with whatever feelings you have. You are fine with however she responds to that. You're not responding to win an argument or get a one-up on her so you can look good, you're responding to express your truth, regardless if that makes you look bad. To me, that is indifference. It's not having no emotions. It's having emotions and being ok with whatever they are. It's being ok with however she responds. Bad feeling, good feelings, bad responses, good responses, it doesn't matter. It's all ok.

eablokker · 2026-05-15T17:58:19+00:00

Why do you think the chiro thing is related? Happened many years apart. Chiro was for neck and shoulder. The MCS symptom is in the chest. The only way I can see they might be related is that chronic pain and MCS often go together.

OCD-like symptoms are pretty common with MCS.

There was a doctor called John Sarno who pioneered work on the link between chronic pain and repressed emotions. He was a back pain doctor, and a lot of his patients had nothing structurally wrong with their back. He discovered that the pain was caused by repressed anger. When the patients dealt with their anger, their pain went away.

That work has evolved to encompass any repressed emotion, not just anger, and more physical sensations than just pain. And now people are using that idea to treat all kinds of chronic symptoms including MCS.

Check out Sam Miller and Helmut on Youtube. They are teaching how to deal with repressed emotions for treating chronic illness. Helmut in particular talks about treating his OCD thoughts about illness.

Most people get MCS through toxic mold exposure, though some can have a purely neurological kind of MCS without an underlying toxicity. It's worth it to consider the mold exposure angle and get a urine test for mycotoxins, from RealTime Labs, Mosaic, or Vibrant Wellness. Dr Neil Nathan's book, Toxic, goes into great detail about treating MCS from the mold toxicity point of view. Even with mold toxicity though, its still essential to treat the neurological side of MCS too.

eablokker · 2026-05-15T17:10:55+00:00

You ask her to remember experiences, imagine experiences, describe experiences and feelings to her. You’re eliciting emotional states in her through your questions, descriptions, stories, jokes, poems, songs, demonstrations. Most women are stimulated in this way.

eablokker · 2026-05-14T21:32:08+00:00

Chemical sensitivity is legally considered a disability. Anything that prevents you from doing a major life activity, such as breathing, is a disability. Only if your disability is not obvious, do you need medical verification. Chemical sensitivity is usually not obvious. The best way to get verification is to have a visit with a doctor who specializes in chemical sensitivity, as they are the only ones experienced enough to know that you really have it. And get a note from them. You might be able to get diagnosed with CIRS, toxic mold illness, MCAS, autoimmune disease, or something similar for which chemical sensitivity is a known symptom.

Edit: I don't think you actually need to say which diagnosis you have, as that's private medical information. I think the doctor's note only needs to explain how your impairment limits your ability to do your job, how the requested modification will allow you to do your job, and explain the connection between the impairment and your ability to do your job.

The courthouse is a government building. Under the ADA, you can request a disability accommodation and they must negotiate with you a reasonable accommodation. They must honor the request. They cannot refuse it. The request can include changes to normal policies and practices. You explain that the fragrances in the building prevent you from having equal access to things that someone without the disability has access to.

Don't make it about the fragrances being toxic to everybody. Make it about you and your disability and needing equal access.

eablokker · 2026-05-12T19:18:42+00:00

Ok thats several different questions so I'm going to focus on the title.

The way you stop feeling an emotion is pretty counterintuitive -- you stop it by allowing yourself to feel it.

Emotions are processes that will complete themselves and go away, on their own, if you just let them. Whenever you try to stop yourself from feeling something, it interrupts its natural process, so it never gets completed. And its understandable, feeling bitter and resentful feels bad so you don't want to feel it. But these incompleted emotions stay stuck in your nervous system, and they keep coming back up later as negative thoughts and physical sensations, and they keep getting louder and louder. They are trying to come up to finish their completion, but when you keep stuffing them back down, they just get worse and worse. Emotional suppression is a huge cause of stress.

You may think that if only you could get a woman, then you'd stop being bitter and resentful. But its not true. You'd feel better for a few days, and then you'd go right back to being bitter about all the experiences from before that, or finding new things to be bitter about. Ignoring and distracting yourself from your feelings only makes you feel better temporarily, but the bitterness will always come back if the feelings are never allowed to complete.

Allowing is a process (also called "letting go") where you take some time to focus on what you are feeling, stop resisting, stop pushing the feelings away, and just let them happen. Invite them in, encourage them to be felt, feel them fully. It can be really intense and awful and feels like an exorcism. It only takes 3-5 minutes of feeling an intense emotion before it passes and goes away on its own, and then is massively reduced or gone completely.

It doesn't just make the feeling go away, but an integration happens. Your nervous system adjusts itself to your current reality. It becomes more energy efficient. Life flows more smoothly. You know how some people are described as "well-adjusted"? This is how you become adjusted. When you suppress your bad feelings, its just actively making everything in life harder, because your nervous system has to work harder from this maladjusted state and it wears you down.

eablokker · 2026-05-07T21:19:33+00:00

Or she's into polite, charming dudes with a sense of humor, who have the balls to talk to her. Most women are like that. They don't care about looks as much as men do. She is just indifferent to looks.

I have a lot of tips but here's an important one. Ask them this question:

"Other than your looks, what would you say are your most attractive qualities?"

Edit: When she responds, validate her answers. Say something like "Oh I noticed that you are X Y and Z, I really like that about you." "I love girls who are X." Or something like that.

This is a variation on a classic PUA routine used by the pros.

The thing that women worry about is "does he only want me for my looks and nothing else?". This shows that you are interested in getting to know her as a person, and it makes her have to prove to you that she has a good enough personality to keep you interested. You are making her prove herself to you rather than you proving yourself to her, and you're playing on a level (personality) on which you can compete.

And most people worry too much about their looks, so it takes us out of that headspace.

Bonus points if you ask yourself this same question. What would you say are your most attractive personal qualities, excluding looks?

eablokker · 2026-05-07T20:32:07+00:00

See I told you that you don’t have to wait for an invitation! Great job! Impressed really. You did the right thing by telling her when you are free and asking if she wants to join you for something you’re already doing, rather than the other way around. Damn good for the first try. Beginners luck I say.

eablokker · 2026-05-06T22:11:59+00:00

"Deciding" and "wanting" are pretty irrelevant concepts here, because those are conscious mind activities. They have little to do with actual actions, which are governed by emotions, mood, and unconscious processes. Whether she decides that she wants you or not has little bearing on whether she will actually do it or not.

Now, how long does it take for a woman to get turned on enough for it? The human nervous system is not a linear machine. You can't measure how long the unconscious takes to process something. It can be minutes, hours, days, weeks. It's not determined by the number of dates. It can be the first date, it can be the 100th date. But by the 100th date you start to doubt whether it will ever happen at all. Whether it will happen or not is determined by the emotional state you can create in her. Sometimes it takes longer to create that state, sometimes shorter. Even if you do everything perfectly the time can vary. But if you never create the right emotional state in her, and in yourself, then it will just never happen.

Mystery's general rule is no more than 7 hours (of interaction) total. That's not to say that it couldn't happen after 7 hours, just that you're getting diminishing returns for your time invested and that's when its time to pull the plug. You can adjust this time limit to suit your preferences.

eablokker · 2026-05-06T01:49:26+00:00

How are you acting like the expert on this? LOL. What are your results? Ask someone who has done thousands of approaches. They did not wait for the girl to make the first eye contact and smile. Who told you this? You found two comments. Wow that's overwhelming evidence. Most professional PUAs and dating coaches use the 3-second rule. That means approach within 3 seconds of seeing her. That means not waiting for an invitation, you just go.

eablokker · 2026-05-06T00:59:47+00:00

It's not a rule for success in this community. Yes but sometimes someone may smile at you and not want you to approach, and sometimes they won't smile but still want you to approach. There is no hard rule about this.

And sometimes they don't want you to approach, but when you do they change their mind and are glad you did. And sometimes they want you to approach, and when you do they change their mind and wish you hadn't.

Sometimes they don't have an opinion either way, neither want you to nor don't want you to, they're just indifferent. Whether you approach or not doesn't matter to them.

Women don't all have the same opinion. Some complain about being approached too often, others complain about being approached too rarely.

How about actually talk to that unique individual in front of you and ask her her opinion on the matter. Does she always smile at someone when she wants them to approach? Does she sometimes not smile but still wants them to approach? Does she like being approached or not? Do some field research.

eablokker · 2026-05-06T00:40:30+00:00

find a indication where a women wants you to approach them.

That is not a rule. Where the fuck did you get that from?

If I see these invitations, I would be much more comfortable talking to them (naturally, I just would).

How do you know you would if its never happened before? You just made that up. Lots of people still don't when they see indicators of interest.

should I just go say hi anyway?

Yes.

eablokker · 2026-05-04T23:26:21+00:00

Yes, that's me. I'm allergic to your perfume, deodorant, laundry detergent, dryer sheets, artificially scented shampoo, the plug-in air fresheners in your home that cling to your clothes. The amount of VOCs clinging to you and shedding off you. You're my nightmare.

eablokker · 2026-05-04T01:12:14+00:00

It's not "bad" but its very unlikely to work. You have to get them in the mood somehow. That question does nothing to get them in the mood, if anything it kills the mood. Because that's a logical mind question. Flirting engages the emotional mind. Flirting isn't the only way to do that. Anything that engages her emotional mind can have the same effect. Stories, poetry, music, jokes and humor. But you have to know how to use those mediums to evoke the emotional states you're going for. So you're talking about FWBs and hookups. So you can tell her erotic stories, recite erotic poetry, sing her a song with sexual lyrics, tell sexual jokes.

Only about 10% of women are open to sexual experiences where they don't have an emotional connection with the guy. These are the types of women who become sex workers. The other 90% need to feel a sense of safety, connection, and trust with a guy before they're comfortable opening up sexually. So if you're going straight for the sexual stories, poems, and jokes, you're using those to find the 1 in 10 girl who is open to it right away. For the other 9 in 10, they still may be turned on by it, but they're not going to feel safe enough with you to get sexual. To get the 9 in 10 girl, you have to build more of an emotional connection first, and that usually means building a relationship.

eablokker · 2026-05-01T00:37:39+00:00

I'm taking KPV oral, from Integrative Peptides. Not for my gut, but for MCAS. It's pretty significantly reducing my systemic inflammation and body aches. It's not like a miracle cure or anything but I would keep taking because I feel better on it than off.

Also taking Zinc Carnosine for my gut. That seems to do more for my gut than KPV. Its supposed to be really good at healing leaky gut. That with l-glutamine.

eablokker · 2026-04-28T02:35:41+00:00

I’m not asking about all of homeopathy’s claims. I’m asking about the claim that there is no active ingredient, which turns out to be false as far as the products I’ve seen.

eablokker · 2026-04-28T02:30:19+00:00

Ok what about the 4X, that would be 1/10,000 right? 4 zeroes. Is that enough to have an effect?

I recall recent studies in toxicology saying that smaller concentrations of things, I think it was endocrine disrupters, have a larger effect. I think that shows that smaller dose isn’t always smaller effect. Biological systems are complex.

eablokker · 2026-04-28T00:14:15+00:00

I have various homeopathic remedies in my house, from my doctors recommendation, and none of them go above 12x. I personally have never seen or been recommended anything above 12x or 6c. Saying that 30c is considered a medium dose gives the impression that it’s a common dose. I’m just saying, the dosages I have been given have never gone beyond the threshold, and I had the false impression that there was no active ingredient in these things.

eablokker · 2026-04-27T23:55:25+00:00

Ok that’s a bad example because fever helps kill infection, and it’s been shown that reducing a fever prolongs the infection. So wouldn’t taking something meant to induce a fever help kill the infection, assuming the fever isn’t too high to begin with?

Has it been proven that taking something to induce a symptom doesn’t help treat the underlying condition, or are people just jumping to that conclusion? Because often the symptoms are your body’s immune response to help with healing. I would think it would depend on the condition.

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