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Yeah I'm in my 40s and I don't have that much in savings. Of course, working in failed tiny startups without 401k plans for most of my 20s didn't help. I've bee

Yeah I'm in my 40s and I don't have that much in savings. Of course, working in failed tiny startups without 401k plans for most of my 20s didn't help. I've been doing my best to make up for lost time the past few years, but I've still got quite a ways to go before I get to that point. But 600k in the bank is still not the norm for Americans, only a small percentage of them. Most are really struggling right now.

teekert 4y ago
Having it as debt instead of in the bank sounds even better as inflation eats your debt away.
- HideousKojima 4y ago
  Only if your wages go up as well
- cableshaft 4y ago
  Who keeps 600k in the bank? I could have it in stocks and be making around $16k/year in dividends right now (that's just me picking a stock at its current price and dividend, I'm sure it would have been over time otherwise), while riding out the recession.
  - d_k_f 4y ago
    If you believe that the stock market is going to go downhill as well, investing in a stock is only worthwhile if it loses less than it pays in dividends. I guess that a lot of people are on the fence about whether they should short stocks since "everything is going down" or just sit on their cash reserves, eat the inflation and hope to buy in again once the bottom has been reached.
    - cableshaft 4y ago
      Or you can stop trying to time the market and keep buying through the downturn. Might make less money that way, but you also don't risk totally mistiming the bottom, like a lot of people likely did back in March 2020 during what ended up being the shortest recession ever. Granted I think this recession is likely going to be significantly worse and longer than that one. I'm still taking advantage of the the 25% discount on stocks and buying, though. Also I suspect we're in for some terrible shit in the next 5-15 years with the way the environment is heading (the physical environment, i.e. lack of water, topsoil, ocean acidification, etc), but I also suspect we're in for at least one more solid bull run before that happens.
      - slaw 4y ago
        What if stocks will go down for the next 30 years, like it happened in Japan?
        cableshaft 4y ago
        If it lasts for multiple decades, then that flies in the face of the entire history of the US stock market and we're probably in for a US collapse at that point (especially considering most of the biggest companies in the US are multinational) and keeping money in dollars in a bank is probably equally foolish. I've lived through crypto winters before that have lasted 2+ years. If I had bought a little bitcoin every week during that time I would easily be retired now. I plan to do the same during this downturn, but focused more on stocks (also getting a small amount of crypto). I didn't have the spare cash back in 2008 during the Great Recession, or I would have done extremely well for myself then too. If for some reason the stock market stays fucked for decades, then I am acquiring other assets too, like precious metals. Also guns and ammo and goods to barter with might not be a bad idea in that case.
        ddorian43 4y ago
        > If I had bought a little bitcoin every week during that time I would easily be retired now. Problem is that bitcoin is a ponzi and doesn't have any revenue/profits but just FOMO. If you bought tulips at the bottom and sold at the top...
        cableshaft 4y ago
        Oh it's a ponzi you say? Well if only someone on the internet had mentioned that sooner I wouldn't have wasted my time with bitcoin then. Let me just sell everything real quick...done. /s Thanks for being casually insulting. I know Hacker News is full of those comments so I'm used to it, but I'm not sure how you expected me to respond to your comment there, or what benefit it would add. Your comment comes off to me as if I said something like "Oh look, I just got a pet mouse!" and you responded "Mice are crappy pets. It's going to bite you and give you the plague." For the record, I said buy every week (as in DCA, or just buy no matter the price, all the way up until now), and I'd be retired now. That's not 'buy at the bottom, sell at the top'. It's currently $20,000, and that's not "at the top", the top was ~$69,000 in Nov 2021, so now is nowhere near the top right now. First crypto winter I held bitcoin through, the price was hovering around $200 every week for two years, so I could and should have been buying more that entire time, instead of checking the price every couple of months to see if anything changed and buying nothing. But I probably could have accumulated at least 40 coins potentially based on my income then, with a few sacrifices (by that I mean less going out to eat and buying a bunch of random video games that I'd often play once or twice and never again...still a problem I have today, it just makes up a smaller percent of my paycheck now). I was excited in bitcoin even then, but I was also a lot poorer, making about 15-20% what I'm making now, and I also wasn't prioritizing it as much as I could have been. Even still, I'm not dumping all my earnings into this stuff. I put far more into my 401k/stocks than I do crypto.
- thatguy0900 4y ago
  This has never really made sense to me. Maybe if you're a big player somewhere, but the average person didn't get a 9% raise in June, inflation isn't really affecting their debt at all
  - jcadam 4y ago
    And with the economy cooling off, workers shouldn't expect to get raises anywhere close to the official rate of inflation anytime soon.
- kamaal 4y ago
  >>Having it as debt instead of in the bank sounds even better as inflation eats your debt away. This is a crazy hack, in countries like India where a home/rent-income is a defacto investment, being in debt is cleverest way you can can have your investments subsidised by the economy(general public). One of the biggest things you can learn as an adult is to be comfortable with manageable levels of debt.

teekert 4y ago

Having it as debt instead of in the bank sounds even better as inflation eats your debt away.

HideousKojima 4y ago
Only if your wages go up as well
cableshaft 4y ago
Who keeps 600k in the bank? I could have it in stocks and be making around $16k/year in dividends right now (that's just me picking a stock at its current price and dividend, I'm sure it would have been over time otherwise), while riding out the recession.
- d_k_f 4y ago
  If you believe that the stock market is going to go downhill as well, investing in a stock is only worthwhile if it loses less than it pays in dividends. I guess that a lot of people are on the fence about whether they should short stocks since "everything is going down" or just sit on their cash reserves, eat the inflation and hope to buy in again once the bottom has been reached.
  - cableshaft 4y ago
    Or you can stop trying to time the market and keep buying through the downturn. Might make less money that way, but you also don't risk totally mistiming the bottom, like a lot of people likely did back in March 2020 during what ended up being the shortest recession ever. Granted I think this recession is likely going to be significantly worse and longer than that one. I'm still taking advantage of the the 25% discount on stocks and buying, though. Also I suspect we're in for some terrible shit in the next 5-15 years with the way the environment is heading (the physical environment, i.e. lack of water, topsoil, ocean acidification, etc), but I also suspect we're in for at least one more solid bull run before that happens.
    - slaw 4y ago
      What if stocks will go down for the next 30 years, like it happened in Japan?
      - cableshaft 4y ago
        If it lasts for multiple decades, then that flies in the face of the entire history of the US stock market and we're probably in for a US collapse at that point (especially considering most of the biggest companies in the US are multinational) and keeping money in dollars in a bank is probably equally foolish. I've lived through crypto winters before that have lasted 2+ years. If I had bought a little bitcoin every week during that time I would easily be retired now. I plan to do the same during this downturn, but focused more on stocks (also getting a small amount of crypto). I didn't have the spare cash back in 2008 during the Great Recession, or I would have done extremely well for myself then too. If for some reason the stock market stays fucked for decades, then I am acquiring other assets too, like precious metals. Also guns and ammo and goods to barter with might not be a bad idea in that case.
        ddorian43 4y ago
        > If I had bought a little bitcoin every week during that time I would easily be retired now. Problem is that bitcoin is a ponzi and doesn't have any revenue/profits but just FOMO. If you bought tulips at the bottom and sold at the top...
        cableshaft 4y ago
        Oh it's a ponzi you say? Well if only someone on the internet had mentioned that sooner I wouldn't have wasted my time with bitcoin then. Let me just sell everything real quick...done. /s Thanks for being casually insulting. I know Hacker News is full of those comments so I'm used to it, but I'm not sure how you expected me to respond to your comment there, or what benefit it would add. Your comment comes off to me as if I said something like "Oh look, I just got a pet mouse!" and you responded "Mice are crappy pets. It's going to bite you and give you the plague." For the record, I said buy every week (as in DCA, or just buy no matter the price, all the way up until now), and I'd be retired now. That's not 'buy at the bottom, sell at the top'. It's currently $20,000, and that's not "at the top", the top was ~$69,000 in Nov 2021, so now is nowhere near the top right now. First crypto winter I held bitcoin through, the price was hovering around $200 every week for two years, so I could and should have been buying more that entire time, instead of checking the price every couple of months to see if anything changed and buying nothing. But I probably could have accumulated at least 40 coins potentially based on my income then, with a few sacrifices (by that I mean less going out to eat and buying a bunch of random video games that I'd often play once or twice and never again...still a problem I have today, it just makes up a smaller percent of my paycheck now). I was excited in bitcoin even then, but I was also a lot poorer, making about 15-20% what I'm making now, and I also wasn't prioritizing it as much as I could have been. Even still, I'm not dumping all my earnings into this stuff. I put far more into my 401k/stocks than I do crypto.
thatguy0900 4y ago
This has never really made sense to me. Maybe if you're a big player somewhere, but the average person didn't get a 9% raise in June, inflation isn't really affecting their debt at all
- jcadam 4y ago
  And with the economy cooling off, workers shouldn't expect to get raises anywhere close to the official rate of inflation anytime soon.
kamaal 4y ago
>>Having it as debt instead of in the bank sounds even better as inflation eats your debt away. This is a crazy hack, in countries like India where a home/rent-income is a defacto investment, being in debt is cleverest way you can can have your investments subsidised by the economy(general public). One of the biggest things you can learn as an adult is to be comfortable with manageable levels of debt.