stelea99

Comments

• I'd like to suggest to you that you visit the Boglehead's Forum Personal Finance section and review a few threads about price increases affecting people who purchased LTC policies over the years. For example: https://www.bogleheads.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=441945 https://www.bogleheads.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=460138 These are just the latest set of examples of why do one can safely purchase LTC insurance. No one can guess what they might have to pay 20 years into the future. It is much safer financially to set funds aside over time and self-insure. That way, you know what $$ you will have available. As a person who obviously has skin in the LTC game, you should at least comment about /explain how people can trust these companies today when the evidence is overwhelmingly otherwise.

  Post: How Are You Planning to Pay for Potential Long Term Care Expenses?

  Link to comment from September 6, 2025

• The goal of having simplicity in one's financial affairs is a good one. Unfortunately, in the US, the more successful you are in your working life, the more assets you accumulate, the more complexity increases for you. Our tax code is extremely complex. Worse, there is no general consensus, as Australia has, which would allow a national pension scheme to be developed. Nor, do we have any societal agreement on how to deal with healthcare, eldercare, or anything else.

  Post: The Main Thing … and the scourge of complexity

  Link to comment from September 2, 2025

• 1) Please explain how, in your new approach, the system would transition from how it works now to your new system. 2) Also, it looks to me like your system with individual accounts would be immediately insolvent; its liabilities would be greater than the total in the trust fund. All the people with financial assets would have an account they would only receive at death or if they became bankrupt. But these accounts would represent liabilities of the system which it would have to retain and not pay out to other beneficiaries. The accountants would establish a valuation method for each individual based on some life expectancy metric and the current level of benefits. Many current recipients have already received far more than they ever paid in..... 3) I think you should take a look at: https://www.stlouisfed.org/community-development/publications/the-state-of-us-household-wealth. This is a Federal Reserve study of household wealth. One big problem in the US is that around half the population doesn't earn enough to pay their current living expenses and also save for retirement. Just telling people to be self-sufficient doesn't seem to me to be a workable way to get around this fact.

  Post: Comments to 8-22-2025 R. Quinn’s “Does Social Security Work?”

  Link to comment from September 2, 2025

• As a person who does not use any social media opportunities, perhaps I don't understand the issue in this discussion. I almost never use those little up an down arrows when I read responses, and I never click the Like icon on articles. I have my own ideas based on my life experiences as to how things really work. When I read something here that doesn't feel right, I write a response. Basically, I don't care what others think about what I write here. I know what has worked for me but my truth isn't necessarily applicable to everyone else. In personal finance, there are many available strategies which can be used to help someone meet their goals. Personal circumstances often mean that "universal truths" are not as universal as one might think. When you participate at a site like this, you have to accept that while you can please some of the readers all of the time, and all of the readers some of the time, you won't please all of the readers all of the time.

  Post: re RDQ’s “down arrows” —> My 1 cent :

  Link to comment from August 30, 2025

• For index investors like myself, this theory is irrelevant. If you happen to have $1M of VTI in your taxable portfolio, you will receive $10,900 in dividends this year. You didn't buy VTI to get these dividends. You bought it as a part of your asset allocation scheme. Likewise all the other index equity ETFs pay some amount of dividends. Unless you buy an ETF that has the purpose of maximizing dividends, the dividends that these equity ETFs pay is incidental to your ownership. However, to you, these dividends from your taxable account represent incoming cash flow. This cash flow is just as valid as $$ from a pension, SS, earned income, or a gift from someone. Cash is cash. You can spend it, reinvest it, or save it. There is no reason to denigrate dividends that originate from within equity index funds. In retirement, they are just another cash flow source.

  Post: Dividends Part II – At least

  Link to comment from August 26, 2025

• At age 79, I just renewed my Driver’s License for 8 more years, so I know I will live at least that long. 😇

  Post: How Long Will We Live?

  Link to comment from August 18, 2025

• Gosh, I hope you know that you can actually go to any ATM, at any location and get some cash. You don't have to go to your own bank. All you have to do is to be willing to part with a few bucks in the form of a fee. Since I bank with Schwab, they will even pay me back for the fees. It has been noted that Americans are generally losing faith in religion, attendance continues to decline. Many people lack faith that our government is actually beneficial. As evidenced by some folk, there is a lack of faith in science and medicine. I am therefore not surprised that you doubt your own faith in our system of finance. With fiat money that actually has no intrinsic value, and things like crypto, meme stocks, there is much to doubt. But, even if you had a million dollars in paper currency, what would you have even then, except a few pounds of paper? Perhaps, as a few physicists have speculated recently, our universe exists inside of a gigantic Black Hole. ( You can check this out on YouTube.) Is anything really real these days?

  Post: Have you seen your money lately? 

  Link to comment from August 13, 2025

• I just have a question about the numbers….at the BLS I found the CPI index for 9/2020 to be 260.280, and the latest index from July this year 322.561. This represents an increase in the index by around 24%……Perhaps you are thinking of average inflation??

  Post: Pizza Inflation

  Link to comment from August 10, 2025

• There is a significant amount of international content in many products assembled in the US. The best example of this might be the automobile industry. Both Honda and Toyota have US factories, but a significant % of parts, and metals come from outside the US. Who makes wiper blades, oil filters etc. You might not buy these products, services often enough to notice the higher price. These higher costs will bleed into auto insurance price increases as well. You can't switch to alternatives like store brands.

  Post: Reacting to the Tariffs

  Link to comment from August 9, 2025

• When I looked into a CCRC in AZ, in order to get a refund, they had to have a buyer for your unit. Does yours have a similar feature? At present, demographics support the idea that there will be buyers available..,as the number of Baby Boomers diminish, perhaps at some future date CCRCs may become over-built and not really refundable.

  Post: Starting Over, if you can. Some decisions are subject to change (I apologize for its length)

  Link to comment from August 9, 2025