I think they meant more like they wouldn’t have been able to afford the same house 4 years later, due to appreciation of the house, the increase in property taxes on that appreciation, and higher mortgage rates to boot. That or they had a variable APR loan.

The former case happened to us and is how my coworkers and I sometimes discuss the housing market - house values increase so fast where we are, buying a month later would have gotten us an appreciably worse home. A month later, worse again. Prices were increasing 25+% YoY. If we hadn’t locked in when we did (Dec 2020) I’m not sure we would have found a place. The mortgage rates seem to not matter because so many of the buyers scooping up houses are older families with lots of money buying investment properties, or whole ass corporations (often foreign corporations) willing to pay 20% over asking, in cash, and waive inspection, to lock out any other prospective buyers.

Insurance is about 50% more than when we bought the house and taxes are maybe 10% higher due to rate increases and the increasing value. We would barely be able to afford half the house we’re in if we bought today.

The only reason we switched from doing our own to paying a CPA is when my wife started operating her own business. This was more to have someone to ask questions about making sure she covers all of her tax obligations who can answer authoritatively and back us up if anything comes back to us in the future (since she is sole prop. and going it alone). We paid $200 the first year, and considering turbotax would have been about that much, getting our taxes filed for us was practically just a bonus. She charges a little more now, but it’s still worth it IMO just to not have to deal with doing the actual paperwork and having someone who will help us out if anything does come back to us. I would say anyone who just has W2 income and maybe some stock sales doesn’t have a complicated enough situation to warrant a CPA, and should just use FreeTaxUSA (and hopefully over the next couple years, the auto filing program with the government will eliminate the need for that, too).

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it feels like treading water and then rather suddenly having a credible chance.

That’s a good reminder. Just haven’t had one of those years yet. Thanks for the perspective.

I didn’t think an expense ratio of 0.08% was considered high?

Everyone always quotes the growth of the S&P500, but isn’t pretty much no one 100% invested for their entire retirement in the S&P500? My 401k is in a target date 2055 and my Roth is split between FXAIX (S&P500, 55%), FSPSX (international, 20%), FSMAX (extended market, 15%), FXNAX (bonds, 10%). It’s a little conservative but not that conservative.

Fidelity says my Roth 1Y returns are 10.8% compared to S&P 500’s 10.3%. It says my 1Y returns on my target date 2055 are 18.0%. Neither of those numbers can be accurate so it’s hard to know what to read in to them. If I try to calculate my returns in a very simple way (take current value, subtract contributions from the last 12 months, which can be easily looked up, call that number X, then find the growth rate that takes the account value I had as Nov. 1st last year and compound that at different rates until it produces X as of now - this gives an upper bound on returns, since the returns of the various money deposited throughout the year at random times is treated as not growing at all), I get 1%. And that’s 1% before inflation.

I know the S&P500 is 10% YoY over really long time scales, and I also know that number is like +/-15% year to year. But it feels like my fund picks are pretty normal yet they’re not worth any more than what I put in to them since I started saving. Because of that, I’d have to have a 30+% savings rate in order to catch up to the “X salary by Y age” rule because the assumptions over the growth rate of the accounts are wildly off in the years since I started investing.

Thoughts? I have to admit I’ve been nervous about this for a while now, with “once in a generation” events happening on a seemingly yearly basis, I started saving for retirement in 2019 and it seems like things have essentially traded sideways since then - my accounts are barely worth more than the money I’ve put in to them. The article is quite gloomy.

Unfortunately you can’t just recuse yourself from society. You’re still impacted by who the president is even if you don’t vote for them.

You’re still using public utilities. Driving on public roads. Interacting with people who went to public schools.

Acting like both choices are the same because they will always eventually do something you don’t like is disingenuous and you know it.

The people I know who’ve given up on housing affordability unfortunately are not shifting in to retirement. They’re so hopeless they blow their money on hobbies because they don’t foresee any possible path to homeownership or retirement and value a few bucks here and there on discretionary spending more.

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The match to the mat is really nice!

I am surprised the age would be so young. My dad retired at 67 but went right back to work a year later, still working now (71). Health insurance do be expensive. I wonder how this statistic would capture someone like him. My mother was working until she died at 60, but would have likely been in a similar situation, trying to keep working as long as possible, certainly was not looking at retirement within a year or two.

My wife’s parents are younger (late 50s) but in the same boat, there is no path to retirement for them and they plan to just keep working. The only people I know who managed to retire by any conventional definition are or were Silent Generation.

Also if a quick Google result is anything to go on, Apple sells hundreds of millions of iPhones a year. 3% of that is still a fuckload of people and IMO proves there is a market for it. Just maybe not a market that needs yearly attention. You also have to remember that’s split between tons of SKUs, so you would expect all of them to hover in the single digits to low teens.

I got my wife a 12 Mini - she loves it. The battery life is absolutely the worst thing about it, but it sounds like the 13 Mini was a huge upgrade in that regard and I had hopes it would continue to get better with future versions.

Something else that may not be taken in to account - the kinds of people buying the Mini are I would wager on a longer upgrade period than the kinds of people who buy e.g. a base iPhone or Pro model. The kind of person buying a Mini I would bet is closer to the kind of buyer that has historically bought the SE - they probably only upgrade every 3 or 4 years rather than the more stereotypical 2. Pro numbers are also skewed by the hyper fans who upgrade yearly and therefore show up in the stats a lot more, even though they’re both a firm Apple customer.

There is also this interesting note at the end of the article:

“Other reports … overwhelmingly presented the same picture of low ‌iPhone 14‌ Plus sales, to the extent that Apple was forced to slash production, suggesting that the low sales of the ‌iPhone 12 mini‌ and ‌iPhone 13‌ mini may not have been caused by the device’s size after all.”

I think the Mini should become the new SE. Keep it on 2+ year old CPU, keep it 60Hz, at least the form factor and design language will match the rest of the lineup unlike now where the SE has a design from 2016. That would be perfect for people like my wife, who want the smallest cheapest phone that’s technically an iPhone, and are only going to upgrade every few years.

I’m curious about how dielectric grease on the wires is different to 205g0. I’ve always just brushed 205g0 in a thick layer on to the wires and call it good but never tried anything else, and I don’t even really know what to look or listen for to know if I should be doing something different.

I’ve also seen you should use a syringe to inject extra grease in from the top after a few months, but never done that either and curious how important people feel it is.

Diamine Autumn Oak, Montblanc Corn Poppy Red, Montblanc Golden Yellow. I’m not sure which if any of these are still being made though, probably not the yellow.

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The IRS has been saying for years they in many cases don’t actually have the funding to dedicate to fighting multimillionaires who can afford protracted legal battles to avoid taxes. The IRS was granted a lot more funding as part of the Inflation Reduction Act, which is a direct result of the current administration. The government is big and slow though, things take time.

Graphical fidelity has not materially improved since the days of Crysis 1, 16 years ago. The only two meaningful changes for how difficult games should be to run in that time are that 1440p & 2160p have become more common, and raytracing. But consoles being content to run at dynamic resolutions and 30fps combined with tools developed to make raytracting palatable (DLSS) have made developers complacent to have their games run like absolute garbage even on mid spec hardware that should have no trouble running 1080p/60fps.

Destiny 2 was famously well optimized at launch. I was running an easy 1440p/120fps in pretty much all scenarios maxed out on a 1080 Ti. The more new zones come out, the worse performance seems to be in each, even though I now have a 3090.

I am loving BG3 but the entire city in act 3 can barely run 40fps on a 3090, and it is not an especially gorgeous looking game. The only thing I can really imagine is that maxed out the character models and armor models do look quite nice. But a lot of environment art is extremely low-poly. I should not have to turn on DLSS to get playable framerates in a game like this with a Titan class card.

Nvidia and AMD just keep cranking the power on the cards, they’re now 3+ slot behemoths to deal with all the heat, which also means cranking the price. They also seem to think 30fps is acceptable, which it just… is not. Especially not in first person games.

If prices were coming down commensurate with rates increasing you could make a lateral change and buy the same amount of house for the same amount of money, but raising rates has only slightly reduced the rate house prices are increasing, rather than bring them down. It’s insane. Every month is the new worst time in modern US history to buy a house. It sucks for property owners too because taxes based on fair market value are rising crazy fast as well.