The player must be in Texas. Even though the game is long since dead, they’re not legally allowed to end it unless it is a threat to their life.

That gif in reverse would look like Gerodi is about to throw hands.

“L.R.E.A.M. - Latinum rules everything around me”

“99 problems (trade union song)”

“I wish (I was richer)”

Stop. The Vanguard retirement funds all did this if the target is before 2060. And those are invested in index funds by professionals. OP likely had the VTINX

OP’s losses are more exagerated than just the Target Date fund experiencing a dip from bond exposure.

Here’s OP’s same initial investment on the same day but 100% in VTINX:

So instead of a $4k loss that OP showed, it would been a $71 loss. OP went picking individual stocks and got burned (assuming they liquidated their position after seeing their portfolio balance).

Or I completely disagree with the idea of individuals investing for their retirement as a base expectation when the options available are not universal nor affordable for half the population.

Then you should have led with that. I wouldn’t have wasted my time trying to explain how to use the system to someone not interested in any part of the system. None of your arguments are about the mechanisms of the system, but instead lack of its universal applicability. You weren’t interested to learning how the system can work, you’d already dismissed it from the get-go.

Your post comes across as dismissive of anyone criticizing the current system.

Your posts come off as trolling because you’re arguing about particular internal steps to the current system when you don’t even care about it.

You do understand a significant portion of the population doesn’t have a dollar to spare when they live paycheck to paycheck, right?

Listen friend, its entirely possibly you started off with good intentions in this thread, but somewhere along the line it looks like you got so concerned with “being right” or “getting zingers” that your responses got more and more useless and simply argumentative for arguments sake. I’m human, I’ve been there. Look where you started off this line of conversation with this:

So if the market crashes the year before I want to retire I should just put off retiring for another 30 years.

The way I know you went down the wrong path is that if you were genuine with your argument, you would have started HERE with your comments about people not being able to save anything for retirement. Instead, you attacked a legitimate way to save for retirement for those that can save for retirement. Worse, you did so from a position of ignorance, but then attacked the response that informed you how your stated position was inaccurate.

The other possibility is that you started your whole rant without any thought to having a good faith conversation about the benefits or challenges to Americans saving for retirement. That would make you a straight up Troll. I don’t that thats who you are, so maybe just let this conversation thread die because its not producing anything productive for you and its otherwise a waste of time for everyone.

Back in the day (before third party hardware to do this) the only way to get Dreamcast online was to Dialup or the very rare and expensive broadband adapter.

Seeing as the Dreamcast shipped with a dial up modem, it was possble to set up your PC (also with a modem) and with a a couple of resistors, make a type of “dial up crossover cable”. You would set up your PC to “answer” the call from the Dreamcast, then route the traffic to the PCs broadband connection. Zero phone line needed!

Earns enough money to set some aside for retirement.

Do you literally not even have $1 in your pocket that you earned for yourself? Thats all it takes to open an IRA and start saving for retirement.

Only 32% of people have 401k accounts.

45% of 18-29 year olds have a retirement account. That number keeps rising to 77% of people 60+ having a retirement account. source

You don’t need a 401k account to save for retirement. You can do this same savings/investing in an IRA or even an brokerage account (but you wouldn’t get the tax benefits). There are ZERO employer requirements to opening an IRA, you just have to be someone that earns money.

I recommend FSKAX over FZROX. There are few minor differences. Yes FZROX has a lower expense ratio, but it BARELY lower when compared to FSKAX. My understanding is the biggest downside to FZROX is that you can’t hold that in any other brokerage. So if one day you decide you don’t like Fidelity you have to sell all your FZROX and then buy something else offered at the other brokerage. In a retirement fund this isn’t so much a big deal, but could mean you miss out on gains between the sale and the purchase of whatever else you replace it with.

If you’re investing in a non-retirement account this is a BIG deal, as any gains would be taxed at the time of sale. This can mean you pay 15%-20% on the gains just to switch brokerages. FSKAX doesn’t have that limitation, and you’d be able to simply do an “in kind” transfer of the securities to your new brokerage without any tax events/consequences. To me, that portability is worth the tiny different in expense ratio.

Haven’t found a good fund yet except FSKAX and VTI

You found the good ones. No need to go looking further.

So if the market crashes the year before I want to retire I should just put off retiring for another 30 years.

Thats not how to do it. As you approach retirement age (5 to 10 years out), you move your money out of riskier (but higher return generating) stocks and into safer (but lower performing) investments like bonds or even cash (actual cash, CDs, Tbills, etc). Generally you also don’t move it ALL out of riskier stock. You don’t need 100% of your savings on day 1 of retirement, so you convert a few years worth (5 maybe?) to safe stuff and let the riskier stuff ride usually gaining more value even after you retire.

I lost $4k on my retirement plan. It’s invested in total market funds, some tech, some big cap companies, and healthcare. But every sector has been ravaged by the stock market changes.

Its not your total market fund killing you, its your individual stocks. I don’t recommend picking specific stocks for your real savings. Save individual stock picks for money you can afford to lose. In your case it cost you $7,000.

I used your same data and here’s what it would have looked like if all of it was in your Total Market fund.

You would have $18,679. This would have been a gain of $3479 or a 22% return on investment in only 2 years. That is crazy good! Retirement isn’t a total scam, but unless you are VERY lucky, picking individual stocks is risky. You can successfully save for retirement with just one, two, or three funds: Total Stock Market fund, Total Bond Fund, and perhaps an International fund. I mainly focus on just the boring Total Stock Market fund and it performs fairly consistently well over time.

EDIT: Just to underscore retirement is possible with saving and investing with boring Total Market investment, if 20 years ago you had that same $15,200 and invested it in a boring Total Market investment and never save another penny, today it would be worth $88,982.

I’m not saying that you can go back in time, but with 20 years of growth (very typical for retirement savings) it can really grow. The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago. The second best time is right now.

And TNG really was about taking the episodes more or less independently.

This era was also the high water mark for syndicated TV which really drove the episodic format. Viewers couldn’t be guaranteed the show would air on the same channel or even the same timeslot. So long form serial TV were really rare.

I was taught this lesson by “anything written by Dan Brown”.

As a regular reader of fiction, when The Da Vinci Code blew up in popularity I had all kinds of people around me telling me how amazing it was. I read it and was very disappointed. Its okay, but fairly formulaic and two-dimensional characters. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but it doesn’t stand out as exceptionally good like I’d been led to believe. Then I realized none of the people recommending it to me were regular readers. So to them, it likely was amazing. If they read more often of other authors they might have been equally if not more amazed by better books.

That didn’t stop Da Vinci Code nor the follow up Angels and Demons from being commercial successful and very popular books.

So, in theory if you had a vacuum pump and put the vacuum chamber in a freezer, would that just be a much slower freeze dryer?

The description you have is nearly identical to the freeze dryer reviewed. The one feature missing from what you’re describing and the commercial product reviewed was the commercial product had warmers for the trays to speed up sublimation. Besides the tray warmers, the freeze dryer was a vacuum chamber wrapped in a freezer.

FTFY:

• They’re REALLY expensive $3k for his unit which isn’t even the top end.
• They’re loud
• They run for an entire day for one batch
• They consume a massive amount of electricity (1 day freeze dryer vs 30 days of a regular freezer)
• The prep time for the food its VERY extensive.
• If you don’t prep just right the food is wasted
• the amount of actual food produced is really small
• Even if you’re fine with everything else, shockingly few things actually taste good after freeze drying.

There’s all kinds of info in here about freeze dryers that I never knew I didn’t know.

I still don’t want a freeze dryer, but I can now speak authoritatively as to why.

but it’s hard to imagine someone who thinks like that finding anything to like about Star Trek.

For those folk, my guess is they cherry pick all the flaws and celebrate them, like the:

• hyper masculinity of the Klingons
• female suppression of the Ferengi
• meritocracy of deception of the Romulans
• female enslavement of the Orions
• authoritarian control of the Founders
• the brutality to the weak of the Cardassians
• biological forced sexual intercourse of the Vulcans
• stubborn and rude arguments of the Telorites
• racism of the Andorians

They take all the flaws introduced to each race and celebrate those as evidence of an ideal. These folks don’t realize that each race has a flaw in them to show their imperfection.