Some personal finance answers
by havoc
I contribute to money.stackexchange.com sometimes; the site doesn’t get a ton of traffic yet, sadly. Some of the stuff I’ve written over there is as good (or bad) as my blog posts over here, so I thought I’d link to some highlights.
- Where to start with personal finance: my take was, don’t start with investing. Reading questions on the site, you quickly see that “getting serious about my finances” means “learn about investing” in many people’s minds. But I argue that’s all wrong.
- How much should I save for retirement: I like rules of thumb rather than expecting to get a precise answer from a complex calculation. I’m not a fan of “retirement calculators,” for example those that your mutual fund company may offer.
- A first post and a second post about the trouble with investing in precious metals.
- Here are some ideas on what you could do instead of investing in precious metals, and a guess at the lowest-risk investment you might make (“risk” = long term loss, not volatility).
- Bonds and why you’d want them in your portfolio – why not go with all-stocks? When do bonds lose money?
- When is debt a good thing? I pay off my mortgage as slowly as possible, here’s why.
- How should you benchmark an investment – time vs. dollar weighting, and a caveat that maybe a market benchmark isn’t the right comparison.
- Why term life insurance is better — there’s a big-picture obvious answer: you can’t afford a large enough benefit if you’re buying whole life.
It’s not a bad Q&A site on personal finance, if you browse around. Though it needs more people asking and answering.
My Twitter account is @havocp.
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Fellow Ashevillian that just stumbled over your site. Enjoyed your description of our city. For what it’s worth, I’ve lived all over the world as a military brat and found your location abstract quite accurate, eerily accurate. We too are transplants pushing a decade in Asheville and love it, weird stickers and all.
Just thought you might end up rethinking the mortgage debt formula after listening to Washington proposals in cue. We opted to pay off our mortgage in anticipation of government viewing an elimination of the mortgage deduction as a cash bonanza by calling it “closing loopholes” without “raising taxes”. It harkens back to your legal language reasoning in a previous post. Same outcome; different syntax argument.