Welcome Roz!
May the gates of friendship never rust.
Welcome Roz!
May the gates of friendship never rust.
I've noticed that. Some of the discussions about the best time to file for Social Security get pretty vicious. It makes you curious about why people care so much about the strategies other people adopt. We all fall on different parts of the risk-return spectrum. Me, I'm willing to risk vacationing in New England instead of Old England, but not eating hot dogs instead of sirloin, so I'm willing to accept a bit more risk for the nice-to-have money in the hope it could jump up to really-nice-to-have. I don't find it particularly upsetting when other people in different circumstances have different ideas.
I kept up with the retire early forum and some of the Bogglehead discussions before I took retirement. They were helpful. One personal issue I've had with the forums and the various retirement calculators is that they count heavily on historical data projected in the future. And in times when the market is down, it will eventually return to the mean. Looking back into the historical stock performance the information is from times when there was no TV, then no internet, no climate change data, no nukes, no IRAs, no GMOs etc. I could think of it loosely as projecting an apple crop from how oranges have grown in the past.
I question whether economic growth can carry on infinitely. Looking at a longer and more global perspective on past performance, I can't think of any of the great civilizations or superpowers that have persisted for more than a few hundred years. For some reason they exhausted their natural resources, fell to corruption, decimated by war, or were conquered by less civilized factions. I don't see societal or economic collapse in my lifetime, but I think the risk is greater than is commonly thought. I have money in equities, but it is much less than the books and forums advise and is money that I can afford to lose without affecting my lifestyle in any major way.
For those reasons I can totally understand taking all of a person's money out of the market.
Damn! that's the sort of thing about which my dad would have said, "That really burns my ass."
My mother's friend, on the other hand, was married to a wealthy physician. They split up years ago, but despite his remarrying (more than once), he had this insurance policy he never took her name off. So when he died, she became quite comfortable indeed. The stuff dreams are made of. Except that he was a jackhole...
There are currently 1 users browsing this thread. (0 members and 1 guests)