Unpopular Opinions

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:If you need to finance a boat, pool, second home, vacation cruise etc then you can't afford it. These are all cash items only.

You should be able to buy a second home in cash? Come on! You must be incredibly wealthy and out of touch to think that.

+1. DH and I are considering a second home. We want to buy while the kids are young enough to actually want to go there and can easily afford the mortgage, but we can't pay cash.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Everyone should pay something in federal taxes. The yearly minimum could be as low as $10 or $15. People don't value that which is given for free, and that applies to federal services as well.

To add to that, people shouldn't get money back exceeding what they've paid such as the earned income tax credit.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Compound interest although great on paper is not as valuable as the fun you could have had with it when you were younger.

I regret saving small amounts in my early/mid 20s. The fun you can have with small amounts of money when you are young significantly exceeds it when you are older. I’m in my mid 40s, yeah maybe I have a few hundred thousand more now because I saved in my early 20s but spending that money would have brought more pleasure.

Now I see my parents who just turned 80, they don’t really spend much anymore. Wealth is wasted on the old, it should be the young that have money but the world doesn’t work that way.

So much truth to this that I unfortunately realized much too late. I worked and saved during HS and saved a lot during college as well. I'm almost 40 and I have a lot of money saved but with little kids I don't really have the time to do anything with the money nor do my friends who also have little kids have time to do anything either. I should have gone on spring break or used my money to do a study abroad or gone out more and had more fun. I'm trying to learn from my mistake though and pre-covid DW and I would try to get away for one week each year and go someplace nice.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Compound interest although great on paper is not as valuable as the fun you could have had with it when you were younger.

I regret saving small amounts in my early/mid 20s. The fun you can have with small amounts of money when you are young significantly exceeds it when you are older. I’m in my mid 40s, yeah maybe I have a few hundred thousand more now because I saved in my early 20s but spending that money would have brought more pleasure.

Now I see my parents who just turned 80, they don’t really spend much anymore. Wealth is wasted on the old, it should be the young that have money but the world doesn’t work that way.

So much truth to this that I unfortunately realized much too late. I worked and saved during HS and saved a lot during college as well. I'm almost 40 and I have a lot of money saved but with little kids I don't really have the time to do anything with the money nor do my friends who also have little kids have time to do anything either. I should have gone on spring break or used my money to do a study abroad or gone out more and had more fun. I'm trying to learn from my mistake though and pre-covid DW and I would try to get away for one week each year and go someplace nice.

I'm 40 with young kids and I did the traveling and going out thing in my youth. I'm glad I traveled, but for me traveling and going out lost its luster around 30 and everything after that wasn't worth it. I wish I had traveled less and saved more after that.

[Anonymous]

If you can't afford kids you shouldn't have them.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:If you can't afford kids you shouldn't have them.

But my definition of “affording kids” differs from yours.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Many people who are short on money suffer from incredibly poor financial literacy, impulse control, and budgeting skills.

+1

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Most parents who are anxious for schools to reopen are really just ready to unload childcare onto someone else.

Yeah we are! DH and I are trying to hold down jobs here. Forgive us for setting up our pre-covid lives on the assumption that our kids would be at school during the day. We also miss them having friends and, you know, learning stuff from professional educators. But most of all, we need them to be somewhere during the day so that we can work.

[Anonymous]

Many rich people are cheap. They are the worst tippers for pretty much everything especially when you factor it in as a percent of their income.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Many rich people are cheap. They are the worst tippers for pretty much everything especially when you factor it in as a percent of their income.

This doesn't make any sense. Isn't this automatically going to be the case unless a rich person tips in an amount greater than the cost of the service provided? Say a rich person ($2 million HHI) goes to Starbucks and orders a $10 coffee. Even if they tipped $5 (50% of the price of the item) it is still going to be a fraction of their income as compared to someone that makes $80K and tips $1.

[Anonymous]

SJW feel free to donate more of your income know... I'll wait

all of you are limo liberals too conservative cheap hypocrites

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Index funds are extremely overrated.

So overrated. It’s not that hard to pick stocks. Is it really that hard to see when a company is changing the world?

I don't think you understand efficient markets. An efficient market price accounts for expected future growth (ie, 'changing the world'). That is why decades of research has demonstrated that even sophisticated money managers with far better research than you do not out perform the market.

The stock market does not obey tidy economic theories. If it did, Tesla’s stock would not be up 300 percent in one year. Square wouldn’t be up 4x in six months. Amazon would not be up 500 percent in five years.

[Anonymous]

Using credit cards and installment loans responsibly is one of the best things you can do for your finances and access to the excellent benefits credit card companies dole out to their customers who put a lot of money on their cars and pay off the balance every month.

[Anonymous]

People should not be taking out car loans. Maybe for the first car (if it's 10k or so), but after that you should be able to save. If you can't afford the 50k car outright, you can't afford it. So many of my coworkers are working just for the car payments. Did they really need that 60k truck? Surely a 20k car would have sufficed. I see this a lot too in new college graduates. They get out and get a brand new car that's $800 a month. And they wonder why they can't save.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:People should not be taking out car loans. Maybe for the first car (if it's 10k or so), but after that you should be able to save. If you can't afford the 50k car outright, you can't afford it. So many of my coworkers are working just for the car payments. Did they really need that 60k truck? Surely a 20k car would have sufficed. I see this a lot too in new college graduates. They get out and get a brand new car that's $800 a month. And they wonder why they can't save.

Eh, I don't agree with that. We can easily afford our car payments and we don't want to pay for maintenance on an old car. Also, installment loans are excellent for building credit.