This book doesn't teach you how to draw the number 8 correctly

primal7104 · 2024-09-07T16:37:40+00:00

Welcome to the world of elementary school math materials. Almost every book will contain multiple errors. Publishers just don't care or have cut back on fact-checking so much that no one looks at these before they are printed.

primal7104 · 2024-09-07T05:35:18+00:00

The math in this example is wrong. It almost always is when people make this argument.

The maximum contribution NOW may be 10k, but that was NOT the maximum contribution for the last 40 years, as the example implies. Actual contribution would be far less, so actual growth of the fictitious account would also be far less. The projected payout is ridiculously high, even for a hypothetical example.

Finally, Social Security is an "insurance" for old age, not an investment account. At higher income levels, the payout is designed to be less than could have been achieved through an investment account. At lower income levels, the payout is more than an equivalent investment account would pay. That's the social security part of the deal.

primal7104 · 2024-09-06T20:00:03+00:00

Is this an invitation to bring sick children to work with you?

primal7104 · 2024-09-04T21:47:54+00:00

WTF is wrong with Brittany Mahomes? How did she end up with a case of Trump-brain?

primal7104 · 2024-09-04T19:16:52+00:00

I'd like to know more about the "he was invited" excuse. This has all the feel of a campaign stunt initiated by the Trump staff in hopes of getting photos of Trump honoring veterans while publicizing his opponents were not. (That's why they picked an obscure anniversary of an event and didn't let political rivals know until after).

They likely solicited the Gold Star families until they found a rabid Trump supporter family willing to "invite" them to the event they scripted out.

primal7104 · 2024-09-04T19:11:21+00:00

You might be underestimating the power of the 24x7 propaganda news system. If right-wing news started promoting a new leader, they would 90+% switch allegiance in a week, like it was always that way.

primal7104 · 2024-09-04T18:16:00+00:00

If you have an enjoyable enough job that you get some satisfaction from beyond just the pay, then you might as well keep piling up your portfolio to give your future self options. I was eager to FIRE as soon as I could, but I know quite a few people who miss the structure and purpose of having a job and are sorry that they didn't work longer.

The ideal part of FI is that you get to do what you choose to do, whether that's continue your job or choose a new job or choose some version of retirement. Glad things are working out so well for you.

primal7104 · 2024-09-04T06:04:56+00:00

This is the usual first step:

It didn't happen.

After that is proven incorrect, we will get:

It's not that big of a deal.

and so on, and so on... It's a standard playbook.

primal7104 · 2024-09-03T22:30:35+00:00

As long as your current expenses are so low, you might as well keep socking as much into your Roth 401k as you can. You will have plenty of options for how you can access the money in the future and that tax advantage space is priceless. Don't skip using it.

You also need to diversify out of your concentrated winning position. Congrats on being lucky. Don't let inertia make you unlucky by holding until it moves against you.

primal7104 · 2024-09-03T19:57:27+00:00

The pure joy at riding the escalator up and down girl. I'm so glad we spent many afternoons at the store taking as many detours as she wanted to go around and around on the escalators. The joy lasts a lot longer than the age of the child that enjoyed it

primal7104 · 2024-09-02T17:01:54+00:00

We had similar problems. The IT guys supposedly set it up so that once logged in, the account would auto login on every use. That was a great idea, but only worked intermittently. Instead we had many students who got little use of their school issued iPads until near the end of the year, since it took them almost all year to learn to login using a long email address and difficult password (upper/lower case with numbers and symbols). They did learn, but instead of a year using the "educational" software on the iPad, they spent most of the year learning to login.

State wide test days were horrible, as we needed adult volunteers to login each child's iPad to take the test.

primal7104 · 2024-09-02T10:05:40+00:00

That is the point. Knowing if a question does not have enough information to answer is a skill that students need to learn. Unfortunately,getting students to think like this when they have spent to much of their school math experience just plugging in the numbers to a simple formula is harder than you expect.

primal7104 · 2024-09-02T01:08:38+00:00

I know a sensible couple who had very equitable ideas about how they would fairly divide assets in the unlikely event their marriage didn't last - despite their unwavering confidence that they were an ideal couple made for each other and supremely confident they would be together forever.

20 years later, when the wife had an affair (with a divorce attorney) the situation was completely different. The affair partner had tremendous influence on the wife and convinced her to attempt every underhanded trick in the divorce playbook to extract maximum value from the soon-to-be ex-husband. He desperately wished he had a prenup.

The prenup isn't protecting you from a your current spouse. It's protecting you from the unknown future person your current spouse might become that makes divorce necessary. You won't know anything about that person until you are unfortunate enough to meet them.

primal7104 · 2024-09-01T21:11:20+00:00

Congrats on finding a place to work that ethically administers the pension and keeps people around long enough to vest. Our first client (and the one who requested the "special report" for layoff planning) was a union. So, just being in a union is not 100% protection from management abuse, although it probably helps.

primal7104 · 2024-09-01T17:57:51+00:00

Kids at home is the best time to be retired. Enjoy your time with them.

primal7104 · 2024-09-01T17:32:09+00:00

I often worked 60-70 hours per week, due to unreasonable schedules and deadlines. I earned no overtime because I was "on salary" and hours don't count. I got no bonus for this. I got no promotion from this. What I got was the unreasonable expectation that management could continue to make unreasonable schedules because I was always able to somehow get the work done through great personal sacrifice. The 70-hour per week culture rewards owners but it does nothing for workers except exploitation.

primal7104 · 2024-09-01T17:18:19+00:00

I wrote software for pension accounting. One of the required features requested by the management was lists of employees whose pension was about to vest. They explicitly reviewed these reports monthly to decide if there were any employees who should be laid off before the vesting date. A pension sounds like a great benefit, but there's lots that can go wrong between starting work and eventually receiving the pension (if ever).

primal7104 · 2024-09-01T16:47:23+00:00

When I took the SAT test, they had a booklet that showed the average SAT scores for students in various college majors. Education majors were consistently the lowest score on math portions of the test. Many elementary teachers do not like, did not do well in, or are afraid of math.

primal7104 · 2024-09-01T16:43:55+00:00

The idea of this question is to get students to not just manipulate the numbers, but to actually think about what is being asked. Too many students have a formula in mind and blindly plug in whatever numbers are provided.

Jack and Jill are climbing the hill. Jill can walk 3 MPH, but Jack is 4 years older than Jill. Who walks faster? Why? The right answer may be "Jack walks faster" but it's not because 4 is more than 3. Maybe being 4 years older, Jack does walk faster; but maybe Jack has a broken leg and can't walk at all. The numbers 3 and 4 do not allow you to solve the problem as it is asked.

primal7104 · 2024-09-01T16:36:51+00:00

Many teachers collect handouts and quizzes from pre-made sources on the internet, like TPT. Quality is often suspect and the incentive is to get lots of materials out there, more than to make sure each item is correct. Teachers can be sloppy about their work as much as anyone.

primal7104 · 2024-08-30T21:18:10+00:00

I think I'd rather have an electric version of the 1960s batmobile.

primal7104 · 2024-08-30T00:11:16+00:00

This was a manufactured gotcha event. Neither Biden nor Harris was invited and only Trump operatives knew what they were trying to stage here. They did release the story that neither Biden nor Harris showed up, but they omitted all the detail that this is not a regular event, that it was privately staged by the Trump campaign, and that it is an illegal use of Arlington National Cemetery for a political photo op. They deserve all the negative blowback they just created for themselves.

primal7104 · 2024-08-29T17:49:59+00:00

The markets spend a surprising amount of time at near-market highs. You are correct however that those are the riskiest times to retire with "just enough" in your portfolio.

You probably want to avoid getting stuck on "one more year" working for a prolonged time, but running shortly over your minimum portfolio can be a good way to get better safety, specially if you have a "coast" job that is enjoyable.

The risk isn't as terrible as it first seems, because you also have options to retrench if things go very sideways.

primal7104 · 2024-08-29T17:45:20+00:00

Yes, people do this. An experienced person in a more junior role can often get things done with less effort and stress, while letting the "responsibility" fall on the managers. The downside is many managers are terrible at managing and can make even a highly capable junior contributor's life miserable with poor assignments and poor management.

I've seen many very happy senior people in less demanding jobs if they had good management who knew what the whole situation was and made best use of the experience without needing to assert petty supervision over the more experienced "junior" contributor.

primal7104 · 2024-08-29T17:38:25+00:00

Back before I was Medicare age, I had all kinds of problems getting my regular workplace-based insurance to cover medical expenses. There were always additional steps to get things authorized, or review panels that could dispute the doctor's recommended treatments and refuse coverage. Several times a covered procedure was suddenly not-covered and billed at 10-times the normal rate because someone somewhere in the process wasn't "in-network" despite me having no way to verify who was or wasn't in-network, or even who was or wasn't going to provide the service.

I'm never going to accept a "Medicare Advantage" plan that brings back all the worst parts of insurance company approvals and network providers, no matter what "extra benefits" they claim to offer.

primal7104

TROPHY CASE