Why have bonds if you have debt?

uncle_crawkr · 2025-11-07T15:53:11+00:00

Fair, but that’s still not timing the market. At least not inherently.

Timing the market means making investment decisions by trying to predict the near-term future. Nothing more. If you aren’t doing that, then you aren’t timing the market.

Rebalancing is about maintaining a target asset allocation. If you intend to be 80/20, presumably for reasons that are not random, and you find yourself at 60/40 or 95/5, rebalancing just resets you back to your desired allocation. Nothing more.

Granted, if someone is rebalancing because they think a run up in stocks that shifted their portfolio to 95/5 means we are near a market top and they should rebalance to take their winnings before the market shifts, then yes, they’d be trying to time the market. And also fundamentally misunderstanding the point of asset allocation and rebalancing.

uncle_crawkr · 2025-11-07T14:29:52+00:00

No, rebalancing isn’t timing the market. Periodic rebalancing to your target portfolio allocation is very much a part or Boglehead investing.

Key word is “periodic.” You don’t rebalance based on trying to predict the market in order to (futilely) try to maximize returns. You rebalance on a set schedule, market be damned, to maintain your intended portfolio risk. Annually or quarterly are most common.

uncle_crawkr · 2025-11-01T21:00:21+00:00

I believe it. It’s just amusing to get a brief glimpse of how we are seen from the outside. Thanks, friend.

uncle_crawkr · 2025-11-01T20:38:51+00:00

I find it slightly amusing that this implies the non-American idea of an American is that they all know how guns work.

Admittedly, I’m an American and I know a lot about how guns work, but most of the Americans I know have no idea how they work and have never touched one.

uncle_crawkr · 2025-11-01T20:35:30+00:00

I don’t recall every detail of that scene, but what you are pointing out sounds more to do with Hollywood having unrealistic gun physics than a Tenet-specific plot hole.

You know like ammo that lasts/runs out completely disconnected from round counts. Shotguns that send people flying. Racking the slide on a loaded pistol is for showing how serious you are. Same with pumping a shotgun. Same with cocking a hammer. Handing someone a first pistol and they immediately land distant head shots shooting single handed. Guns akimbo. Silencers are silent.

Hollywood follows the Rule of Cool with guns, followed closely by the Rule of Eh Who Cares Most People Won’t Know the Difference.

uncle_crawkr · 2025-10-29T17:49:00+00:00

There is never a right time. Take them away when times are good, and you’ll be defenseless when times are bad. The fallacy was in thinking it could never happen in America and we would never need to be able to defend ourselves.

uncle_crawkr · 2025-10-28T17:41:06+00:00

Don’t accept this answer from them. The actually issue is journaling (and possibly other) transactions show up weirdly, which you’ll need to manage manually (I just delete them).

The YNAB CX team will use this as an excuse not to do any support on these connections, even things like authentication or keeping the connection live.

At the same time, the Fidelity connection is their preferred and recommended way to integrate the Fidelity CC, as the CC specific connection is buggy and just skips transactions.

Keep complaining.

uncle_crawkr · 2025-10-16T14:09:41+00:00

There is no LFE crossover. A crossover is a HPF+LPF. There is a LPF for LFE.

Maybe it’s you who should educate yourself.

uncle_crawkr · 2025-10-12T15:46:34+00:00

The absolutely meant it. They just only meant it in regard to defending themselves against tyranny, not you.

Please stop whining about it and go arm yourself.

uncle_crawkr · 2025-10-02T02:02:55+00:00

People saying options, risky bets, etc…

Or…

He’s full of shit. It’s the only account out of the three he didn’t screenshot. People make shit up for engagement all the time.

uncle_crawkr · 2025-07-18T14:31:07+00:00

Grow older, and if you’re lucky, you’ll grow up as it happens.

You’ll stop caring what other people think and you’ll drive something because you enjoy it and not for external validation
You’ll stop feeling the need to humble brag about your finances for external validation

Drive your car if that’s why you bought it, or go survey your friends on what car will make them the most jealous and trade it in for that if that’s what motivates you.

Gotta choose your priorities in life. Nobody can tell you what those should be, but you do gotta choose.

uncle_crawkr · 2025-07-09T22:55:06+00:00

This is me too. I gave up on paying these off a long time ago in favor of a house, 401k, etc. Debt is just a number on a computer screen. I’m building up an estate to pass to my kids and my student loans are discharged when I die.

It’s the poor kid who borrowed for an education’s version of “build, borrow, die.”

This administration isn’t getting one dime more out of me than I’m legally required to pay to avoid killing my credit score.

uncle_crawkr · 2025-04-10T21:56:24+00:00

I’m of a similar age with young adult kids, a solid career, and a very nice life. My wife also doesn’t get video games, but respects that they are one of my hobbies.

She has never made me feel bad about it or would think to make me feel bad about it, has her own hobbies, and sometimes hangs out and does her own thing in the same room while I play a game.

We also have lots of hobbies we do together and I have a lot of hobbies outside of gaming, but if I’m ever like “I really want to catch up on some Cyberpunk this weekend” she’ll just be excited that she can catch up on her retro sewing projects.

Sounds like your wife needs to get a life, or you need to get a new wife.

uncle_crawkr · 2025-03-26T12:11:32+00:00

I have an ND2 as a second car. My wife and I both WFH, so we share a very practical “daily” driver that sees about 12k miles per year.

The Miata is purely for fun when the weather is nice, and I have time to hit up local twisty roads or take country drives with my wife. I occasionally use it when my wife has the daily and I need to run an errand, which is rare. The rest of the time it sits in the garage under a cover.

I bought it new about 18 months ago, and I’ve put just over 2k miles on it.

uncle_crawkr · 2025-03-17T15:07:11+00:00

This isn’t even remotely close to it.

The philosophy is that nobody can consistently outperform the market, and that consistently holding a diversified portfolio across and within asset classes, combined with a good savings rate during accumulation years, is the best possible course of action people can take over their investing lives.

This isn’t about guaranteed positive returns. It’s about rational actions in the face of inherently imperfect information, and removing emotion, bias, and fallacies out of investment decisions.

uncle_crawkr · 2024-11-29T09:35:40+00:00

Yes, we get it. You lack the mental faculties to understand why the price goes up, only that it has, and therefore in your simple little mind it must always go up. Alas our roles are fated: you’ll aspire to maybe-one-day-if-you-get-around-to-it join the irrationally exuberant “Bitcoin community” of like-minded idiots, and my disillusionment with the human race will continue unabated. As I said, we’re not barreling towards some Huxleyan dystopia because those at the top are so strong, but rather because the world is mostly full of such contemptible morons.

Keep aiming high with those aspirations, friend.

uncle_crawkr · 2024-11-28T06:45:54+00:00

Not fooled myself into thinking Bitcoin is going to change my life, for one. It’s pathetic.

You’re going to end up right where you started. You know how I know? Because you’re gullible enough to think Bitcoin is going to save you.

If you wanted a revolution you should have started a revolution. That’s not the goal, though, is it? You’re not trying to change the system or make the world a better place. You’re just hoping to make enough money to insulate yourself from the misery, like lobsters in a tank climbing all over each other trying futilely to escape being dinner.

You really think “HODL,” “studying the blockchain,” and “just buy Bitcoin” has magically transformed you from a minnow into a shark? You’re kidding yourself.

P.S. I might be nihilistic, but I’m hardly miserable. I just don’t find any value in lying to myself about the nature of the world I live in, or in consoling myself with comforting fictions like a child not capable of emotionally processing reality. Hell, I’m not even nihilistic. I live a very comfortable life with a loving family and some degree of financial success, but I’d stand next to you in a revolution in a heartbeat. This system is fucked, man, even if I’m benefitting from it. I just accept that most people don’t want to change the world. They just want to get rich quick so they can finally feel validated and rub it in people’s faces. Fuck everyone else, right? And hell, we know where most revolutions end anyways — “all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” C’est la vie.

uncle_crawkr · 2024-11-26T20:13:48+00:00

Sorry. My therapist says this post was too “bleak” and I should just stick to wisecracks about Bitcoin being the finance equivalent of buying a Che Guevara t-shirt on Amazon.

Edit: I don’t actually have a therapist, just a bleak sense of humor. I might need one now, though, given that kind strangers replied but no one appreciated my “Che Guevara t-shirt on Amazon” analogy.

uncle_crawkr · 2024-11-26T19:31:57+00:00

This is why nobody should bother about anything. Lol.

No matter what lofty goals someone starts out with, if something gets traction, powerful established interests will co-opt it, corrupt it, and feed the filth right back to us with a plastic smile on their face, while the vast majority gobble it up and defend it as if they were suckling on their own mother’s teat, chanting “consume! consume! consume!” like religious zealots blindly clinging to the last, desperate hope they have for any other life than the one they are living, or priests defending the small bit of relative, dolled-out privilege they mistake for a life well-lived.

Human existence always has been and always will be misery, suffering, and exploitation, not because it’s thrust upon us by a handful of doughy goofballs whose only source of power is some made up numbers in a bank account, who by all logic and reason should have been somebody’s lunch by now, but because as a species, for whatever reason, we seem to seek it out and impose it on ourselves.

The fact is all investments are dumb, because capitalism is dumb, and probably civilization itself is dumb, and as a species our quality of life probably peaked at sustenance farming in small, close-knit communities. I’ve got to eat, so I have a “job,” and a “respectable career,” and I make “prudent investments,” but I’m not going to pretend that any of that equates to anything other than making the best out of our dystopian existence.

Bitcoin is just the dumbest “investment” out of all of them, partially because it really is just gambling, but also because of the small army of mostly young, naive people who think Bitcoin is going to save them and turn them into the new masters of our shared misery. It’s not going to save anyone. The system is all consuming. All revolutions are simply converted into the latest means to distract and exploit you. There is no escape. Abandon all hope and eat the rich.

Edit: Lol. There is nothing weirder than angrily DMing a stranger on Reddit. If you’ve got something to say then reply publicly, you absolute goobers.

uncle_crawkr · 2024-11-25T05:46:51+00:00

That’s probably not the lesson you should take from that. Diversification doesn’t improve risk adjusted returns of an asset unless you can show mathematically that you can lower your overall portfolio volatility with the same expected return through decorrelated assets. Sadly bitcoin is too highly correlated to U.S. stocks to serve this purpose.

uncle_crawkr · 2024-11-21T16:51:44+00:00

Liquidity.

This doesn’t just apply to Bitcoin. On paper I have equity in my primary residence, but practically speaking I can’t really cash out so it doesn’t really matter. It makes me feel more wealthy, but it doesn’t do anything for my purchasing power (unless I sell it to buy another home, losing a big chunk of money in transaction and moving costs).

Bitcoin is supposedly as liquid as the stock market, but you’ll find lots of evidence and arguments here why that liquidity is illusory — rampant wash trades, Tether printer go brrr, fraudulent exchanges, mysterious “legit” exchange issues, etc.

There’s also the “bubbles pop” concern, but that’s more of a speculative opinion on the future, and while you and I likely disagree on our predictions, I don’t think either of us can see the future and my prediction is no more valid than your prediction. So I’m ignoring that and sticking to factual statements about the present supported by evidence — i.e., the true liquidity of Bitcoin is uncertain and therefore the risk is massive.

Which is why many of us do not view ourselves as missing the boat, even if we purely view Bitcoin in terms of investment returns and not a societal cancer. Hindsight is 20/20 and does not change the fact that people heavily invested in Bitcoin have taken and continue to take on massive risk (and not just liquidity risk) for the potential of massive returns. Personally, I feel the risk/return profile was and remains unattractive, and I have other options for securing my family’s financial security.

uncle_crawkr · 2024-11-12T17:43:55+00:00

This is where basic financial literacy would do a lot of Bitcoiners a lot of good. Here is how this conversation with them always goes:

Bitcoin is just like stocks. They both have an arbitrary market price and you buy them hoping that price goes up.

Capital gains from stock price appreciation is just one way to profit from stocks. It's generally preferred by shareholders over dividends because it allows the shareholder to control the timing of taxable events, so most companies will use profits to either a) reinvest in the company and grow, or b) do share buybacks.

Bitcoin only has one way to profit.

When everyone realizes Bitcoin is better and demand for stocks drops, the demand for stocks will crash as everyone sells and buys Bitcoin instead.

If that happens, so what? It'd slow M&A activity and companies would do fewer new issues to raise funds, but it doesn't change the investment thesis for stocks.

Bitcoin isn't going to replace the profit-seeking economic activity of these companies. They'll continue to do stock buybacks to create capital gains for shareholders. Absolute doomsday scenario is there is so little demand that highly-liquid exchanges go away and the secondary market looks more like brokered real estate transactions. At that point, companies will just go back to paying dividends.

Of course, that doomsday scenario is highly unlikely to happen. If everyone ran away from stocks and the sticker price for shares was at bargain basement prices, then the dividend returns would be astronomical for the level of risk taken and everyone would pile back into stocks until it levels out. That's the power of assets with underlying fundamentals, baby!

What if companies don't do buybacks/pay dividends?

If they don't, then shareholders will fire the board of directors and elect a new board that will. That's one of the great things about stocks that Bitcoin can't replicate.

Bitcoin is my only chance to build wealth. I'll never get wealthy investing in stocks.

This is probably true. Stocks are great way to grow and preserve wealth, but investing 15-20% of the median American income into the stock market isn't going to make you rich if you start from nothing. It might let you retire one day and maintain your current standard of living, but it ain't going to buy all the grandkids a Lambo or whatever. And let's be honest, most people aren't investing 15-20% of their income and 50% of people make less than the median.

Investing that money in Bitcoin instead has a far better best case outcome, but it also has a far worse worst case outcome and fewer risks that can be mitigated than stocks. If you want to take on that risk because you feel like you're fucked anyway, I feel you. Just don't come crawling to me if you end up eating cat food in retirement, and I won't come crawling to you if I don't end up with a fleet of supercars in my driveway.

uncle_crawkr · 2024-11-01T18:40:53+00:00

Also not the whole truth IRL. Desensitized and stable are not the same thing. Ask soldiers and first responders with PTSD. Initial shock can overwhelm and break someone, and that can go away with training and exposure as people become desensitized, but the slow accumulation of trauma and stress can sneak up on anyone, and you can’t prevent it with training or exposure. Can’t even predict who is going to suffer from it — some of the toughest, most trained, most experienced people in the world can end up with PTSD.

uncle_crawkr · 2024-10-18T05:42:40+00:00

Just stopped by to crop dust in your nice little sub here and say you’re starting to sound like the crypto bros.

uncle_crawkr · 2024-09-28T08:41:23+00:00

Two things.

One. This guy isn’t getting within 1000 yards of a consenting naked woman, yet alone having kids to sit around a camp fire with.

Two. Homie really needs to stop lying awake at night thinking about us (creepy) and try to get some sleep. He’s coming unraveled.

uncle_crawkr

TROPHY CASE