John M

Comments:

• I have been out of bonds for several years, and in a stable value fund. Yields on the bonds finally surpassed the SV fund by a full point a couple months ago, so I sold half the stable value fund and bought a Treasury Bond fund. It was a process based decision, and hasn't gone so well so far, but that's ok, I'll be holding those for a long time. Still, I wouldn't mind a nice little bond rally to help me break even for the year!

  Post: Worst Year Ever

  Link to comment from November 11, 2022

• We talked about cancelling Netflix a long time, finally did - and then within a few months we re-upped. My wife had an interest in one of their shows, and we're really enjoying 'Extraordinary Attorney Woo". Funny how those things go. I tend to be numbers oriented, so the power of storytelling often escaped me. As I've gotten older I've realized the incredible extent to which stories influence people. Good insights, and good luck with your financial future!

  Post: Tell Your Story

  Link to comment from November 11, 2022

• Jonathan, agreed. Additionally, my understanding is that the Fed's primary function is actually almost never in the news. It acts as a clearing house during bad economic times so that financial transactions may continue, and markets don't shut down. Otherwise, big banks may not trust each other, payments halt, and the economy (or parts of it) grinds to a halt. This was the core issue that was addressed with the creation of the Fed (and a big part of what they were actively doing in 2008. Small businesses that lost their line of credit had it restored much faster due to the efforts of the Fed.)

  Post: Walking the Highwire

  Link to comment from November 8, 2022

• Adam, good piece. The way I've hear it explained is the Fed has ways to fight inflation. They don't have much of a toolbox for fighting deflation. Negative interest rates would be expected to cause all kinds of capital misallocation, far worse than merely a high FFR.

  Post: Walking the Highwire

  Link to comment from November 8, 2022

• My understanding is that the identities are anonymous, but if you know an identity, then you have their entire history. So the FBI raids a scam operation, grabs the computers (PCs, pads, phones, etc), learns the identities, and can track all the players whose IDs are resident on those devices or other collected information. That's my best recollection of an actual event I read about some time ago.

  Post: Still Not Buying It

  Link to comment from June 6, 2022

• Thus far, Crypto acts a lot more like a Tech Stock (the ratio to QQQ pricing is very consistent for the past couple years.) If that relationship holds, I guess one could say there may be some inflation protection built in over the long-term, but in the short-term it takes a hit just like most equities do.

  Post: Still Not Buying It

  Link to comment from June 6, 2022

• Not a fan of crypto. I own a single share of BLOK just to keep it in sight. BLOK is supposed to focus on blockchain technology, which does have non-crypto uses. However, for now, BLOK price action mirrors bitcoin, which both makes sense yet is disappointing. I was hoping to see more innovation in non-currency spaces, but it may be too soon to expect that to be monetized in any significant way. Meanwhile it seems to me:

  • Crypto bots and pushers are running rampant in Twitter (and social media in genera,l from what I read.)
  • Crypto is still poorly suited to function as a currency.
  • Crypto has no inherent value (as with all currencies, but important to clarify), and is not backed by the full faith and credit of anything or anybody (which property it shares with some fringe currencies.)
  • Pushing real assets into the crypto economy may enable better lending terms (not proven) - but it complicates the transactions. You get the blockchain verification, but we do real-world verification just fine at present.
  • NFTs (to expand the net a bit) still really don't have a use case that isn't handled quite well by prior technology.

  Post: Still Not Buying It

  Link to comment from June 6, 2022

• Our credit cards are geared to travel, but when my son gets a credit card I've advised him to get that one. A lifetime of kickbacks is a nice boost.

  Post: Financial Slimming

  Link to comment from June 6, 2022

• Great article. I don't agree however with the assertion that DRC's don't increase with inflation. The percentage is always 8%, yes... but your primary insurance account increases with inflation, and the DRC is calculated as a percent of that. Therefore the DRC calculation captures the inflation adjustment. If your DRC was $100 in 2021, then in 2022 it is $105.90. Nominally, the DRC amount increased in 2022 by the 5.9% inflation adjustment.

  Post: Paid to Wait

  Link to comment from June 6, 2022

• Couldn't log on yesterday, but I wanted to say it's really good. If you back out SS from your 50% of income, using the $1300 per month estimate for SS, you're really close to 25x your minimum (50% of income) expenses by my calculations. Given you have some time yet to bump that a bit and let the market do it's thing, you should have enough to survive the worst case scenario. From this point forward you'll be building in a cushion, and that's a nice position to be in. Good job!

  Post: Ignoring the Experts

  Link to comment from September 7, 2021