"Charge less money.  That's the only thing.  What that really means is negotiating lower ticket prices with venues, not removing fees.  People don't realize that Ticketmaster's business model is shielding venues from public ire, not adding arbitrary amounts to tickets for the minor service of buying online, a service everyone knows costs very little to perform.  The arbitrary fees mostly go back to the venue per their agreement, however, they're divided out as ""admin fees"" and ""processing fees"" and ""convenience fees"" charged by Ticketmaster so that Ticketmaster eats the blowback instead of the venue charging exorbitant prices."


"Serious, what a stupid bitch. That was a reasonable policy to have. You can't just say there's a life threatening situation and then go ""oh, nevermind"" when you change your mind when you don't get what you want. This woman should apologize for wasting everyone else's time"


All of the above mentioned items might appreciate in value (gold, wine, art). However your house is still the only asset that can appreciate TAX-FREE (no capital gains tax to pay when you sell your principal residence).


"If you are investing in a mortgage strictly to avoid taxes, the answer is ""pay cash now.""  A mortgage buys you flexibility, but at the cost of long term security, and in most cases, an overall decrease in wealth too.  At a very basic level, I have to ask anyone why they would pay a bank a dollar in order to avoid paying the government 28 - 36 cents depending on your tax rate. After all, one can only deduct interest- not principal. Interest is like rent, it accrues strictly to the lender, not equity. In theory the recipient should be irrelevant. If you have a need to stiff the government, go ahead. Just realize you making a banker three times as happy.  Additionally the peace of mind that comes from having a house that no banker can take away from you is, at least for me, compelling. If I have a $300,000 house with no mortgage, no payments, etc. I feel quite safe. Even if my money is tied up in equity, if a serious situation came along (say a huge doctors bill) I always have the option of a reverse mortgage later on. So, to directly counter other claims, yes, I'd rather have $300k in equity then $50k in equity and $225k in liquid assets. (Did you notice that the total net worth is $25k less? And that's even before one considers the cash flow implication of a continuing mortgage.  I have no mortgage, and I'm 41. I have a lot of net worth, but the thing that I really like is that I have a roof over my head that no on e can take away from me, and sufficient savings to weather most crises).  That said, a mortgage is not about total cost. It is about cash flow. To the extent that a mortgage makes your cash flow situation better, it provides a benefit- just not one that is quantifiable in dollars and cents. Rather, it is a risk/reward situation. By taking a mortgage even when you have the cash, you pay a premium (the interest rate) in order to have your funds available when you need it.  A very simple strategy to calculate and/or minimize this risk would be to invest the funds in another investment. If your rate of return exceeds the interest rate minus any tax preference (e.g. 4% minus say a 25% deduction = 3%), your money is better off there, obviously. And, indeed, when interest rates are only 4%, it may may be possible to find that. That said, in most instances, a CD or an inflation protected bond or so won't give you that rate of return. There, you'd need to look at stocks- slightly more risky. When interest rates are back to normal- say 5 or 6%, it gets even harder.  If you could, however, find a better return than the effective interest rate, it makes the most sense to do that investment, hold it as a hedge to pay off the mortgage (see, you get your security back if you decide not to work!), and pocket the difference. If you can't do that, your only real reason to hold the cash should be the cash flow situation."


Situationally, deregulating things is shown to help. Uber broke the artificial markets for Taxis and both consumers and employees have benefitted. The reason why certain industries are regulated vary.   1. To foster and grow the industry.  2. To prevent monopolies from forming 3. For safety and consumer protection.   If we heavily deregulated the healthcare industry, prices would definitely fall but malpractice would rise.   On the otherhand, if we deregulated the insurance industry and broke the regional monopolies that exist, it would help the consumer without changing much (besides the profitability of insurance companies).   Its very situational.


Go to [the source](http://www.nantworks.com/press-files/Launch-of-the-nations-fastest-genomic-supercomputing-platform-reduces-cancer-genome-analysis-from-months-to-seconds-one-patient-every-47-seconds.pdf)! Well, it's just a press release, but:  > In July 2012, NantWorks’ scientific team (Five3 Genomics – http://www.Five3Genomics.com) collected 6,017 tumor and germline exomes, representing 3,022 cancer patients with 19 unique cancer types. The sample collection included: 999 breast cancer; 1,156 kidney and bladder cancer; 985 gastrointestinal cancer; 744 brain cancer; 745 lung cancer; 670 ovarian, uterine, and cervical cancer; 436 head and neck cancer; 177 prostate cancer; 70 melanoma cancer; and 35 blood tumor samples.  > This massive amount of data totaled 96,512 gigabytes and was successfully transferred and processed via our supercomputing, high-speed fiber network in 69 hours. This overall transfer speed represents a stream of one sample every 17.4 seconds, and the supercomputer analysis for genetic and protein alterations between the tumor and normal sample completed every 47 seconds per patient.   Interesting but only tangentially related videos [here](http://www.nantworks.com/nanthealth).


If the price has gone up from what it was when the person bought, he may sell to collect his profit and spend the money. If someone intends to keep his money in the market, the trick is that you don't know when the price of a given stock will peak. If you could tell the future, sure, you'd buy when the stock was at its lowest point, just before it started up, and then sell at the highest point, just before it started down. But no one knows for sure what those points are. If a stockholder really KNOWS that demand is increasing and the price WILL go up, sure, it would be foolish to sell. But you can never KNOW that. (Or if you have some way that you do know that, please call me and share your knowledge.)


> Now, maybe that's the sort of stuff that happens every year and people get by regardless, but still.  Yup. It's strange bumper crops almost never make the news. Probably because there's no suffering, gloom and doom the media can milk for headlines.


Instead of purchasing computing power from an existing company, they created their own. Got so good at it they began offering their services to other companies. Same strategy being applied here I predict. Start building shipping capacity for themselves then begin offering those services to other companies when they excel at it.


It would depend how the simulation is run.  Is all of your revenue coming through A/R?  Is none of it being paid until the end of the credit term?  Are they simulating disruptions in revenue streams?  If it's simulating daily then cash flows can be all over the place depending on who pays when.  In a real business if you set credit terms of net 30 you will find some people pay you the day after you send them the invoice, some pay on a certain day of the month,  some wait until day 30, some wait until you call them, and a few don't pay at all.  They tend to simplify this in the classroom to longer intervals (months) and just have everyone pay you timely minus some allowance for bad debt.    If that's the case, then whatever interval they have you on I would just assume you get paid ~95% of the A/R due over that term.


So this is the only reason, I would consider it.  I mean, it's gonna take years to get the car, but I wonder if it would be worth it to get in the queue now.  Do you find the autopilot handy in heavy traffic?  I mean like even jammed commute traffic.


Another thing to consider, however, is the deductibility of business expenses.  Let's assume that the employer can legitimately hire you as a 1099 contractor.  (Would you be able to telecommute? Would you have a high degree of control over when you worked and when you didn't?  These factors also affect whether you're a true independent 1099 contractor or not.)  As a legit 1099 contractor, you're able to deduct certain business expenses directly from your income. (You can find a list of the rules at irs.gov.)  As a W2 employee, by contrast, can deduct only business expenses that exceed 2% of the your AGI (adjusted gross income).  So, you also have to consider your personal circumstances in making the calculus and comparing whether a legitimate 1099 contractor job is or is not good for you.  It's not just a comparison of what they'd pay W2 employees versus what they'd pay 1099 contractors.


My girlfriend works at The Honest Company and I've been very impressed with many aspects of the company since she started earlier this year. Our entire home is stocked with Honest products and I disagree with the other redditor who said the products suck. While I do feel like some of the cleaners may not be as powerful as the other more potent chemical based products, many of their products are great. We have just started using their new shave oil and I'm not sure if I will ever want to use shaving cream again! The soap bars are great for showering too. Other than the products, the office space is incredible and Jessica is very much involved with the operations of the business. It is an open work environment and Jessica is seated at a desk right in the middle of everyone. I'm predicting the Honest Company will do big things.


"This is the best tl;dr I could make, [original](http://www.reuters.com/article/us-global-forex-idUSKBN19L04P) reduced by 73%. (I'm a bot) ***** > NEW YORK The U.S. dollar recovered slightly on Friday, but posted its biggest quarterly decline against a basket of rival currencies in nearly seven years after hawkish signals from foreign central banks this week pressured the greenback further.  > The U.S. dollar index, which measures the greenback against a basket of six major currencies, declined about 4.6.DXY percent for the second quarter to mark its steepest quarterly percentage drop since the third quarter of 2010.  > The dollar fell against the Canadian dollar and was last at C$1.2971 after touching a nearly 10-month low of C$1.2948 earlier.   ***** [**Extended Summary**](http://np.reddit.com/r/autotldr/comments/6krjbv/the_us_dollar_recovered_slightly_on_friday_but/) | [FAQ](http://np.reddit.com/r/autotldr/comments/31b9fm/faq_autotldr_bot/ ""Version 1.65, ~157298 tl;drs so far."") | [Feedback](http://np.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%23autotldr ""PM's and comments are monitored, constructive feedback is welcome."") | *Top* *keywords*: **dollar**^#1 **percent**^#2 **against**^#3 **euro**^#4 **Bank**^#5"


If you think logically about strategic fit, I'm sure you can come up with tons of plausible M&As. Amazon and Whole Foods clearly makes sense. Would I have thought about it alone? Probably not, but in hindsight it is a good strategic move by Amazon.


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In practice momentum and trend following are two different ideas, albeit similar and often ocurr simultaneously.  I don’t know if the book makes a clear disctinction between the two but keep this in mind:  1) Momentum trading is a trade where prices are increasing/decreasing and an increasing rate usually confirmed by heavy volume.  Like you said, this can often be at the top of a bubble or nearing a bottom of a crash but not necessarily.  It may also occur when trend trading is violated (switching directions or a new trend emerging)  2) Trend following is a trade where one could draw a disctinct linear line in a chart (up or down at some angle).  Being able to draw a line into the future would be your projected ‘trend’ target.  You could buy now and say “the trend is up, in 365 days the S&P 500 will trade at 2,based on the trend we’ve seen in the past year


Why is someone transferring you 10 million USD? This is definitely a scam. If it isn't, then depending on why the money is transferred, taxes would be around 3 to 5.5 million dollar.


Well, considering the US barely buys any Saudi oil...anywhere in the US is usually a good assumption.  Of course that completely ignores the global nature of oil prices and why you don't actually have to buy from them for them to benefit from the demand in the US.


Because they are totally dishonest, and the only way people at the bottom can make money, is by bringing more people on board. There has to be a lowest tier who always lose a lot of money.  Elegant ponzi schemes exist today, dressed up as all sorts of shabby products and services.


Depending on the country, nothing.  For example, the US has about $1.3 trillion dollars of cash in circulation.  Which means that if you were to burn a million dollars of it, that would be 0.000077% of  the circulating cash.  But cash is a small portion of the actual money in the US.  Only about 8% of all money is in cash, the rest is in other forms of value, which means that you'd only be destroying 0.0000062% of the US's money if you burned a full $1,000,000.


Turukawa's answer is quite good, and for your own specific situation, you might begin by being sceptical about what you are getting for investing a few thousand dollars.  With the exception of Paul Graham's Y-Combinator, there are very few opportunities to invest at that type of level, and Y-Combinator provides a lot of other assistance besides their modest initial investment.   I can tell from your post that you think like an investor.  It is highly unlikely that the entrepreneurial programmers that you will be backing will be wired that way.   From the modest amount that you are investing, you are unlikely to be the lead investor in this opportunity.  If you are interested in proceeding, simply stick along for the ride, examining the terms and documents that more significant investors will be demanding.  Remain positive and supportive, but simply wait to sign on the dotted line until others have done the heavy lifting. For more insights into startups themselves, see Paul Graham's essays at www.paulgraham.com.  He's the real deal, and his recent essays will provide you with current insights about software startups. Good luck.


"TL;DR: Get a tax adviser (EA/CPA licensed in your State) for tax issues, and a lawyer for the Operating Agreement, labor law and contract related issues. Some things are not suitable for DIY unless you know exactly what you're doing. We both do freelance work currently just through our personal names.   What kind of taxes are we looking into paying into the business   (besides setup of everything) compared to being a self proprietor?   (I'm seeing that the general answer is no, as long as income is <200k,   but not certain). Unless you decide to have your LLC taxed as a corporation, there's no change in taxes. LLC, by default, is a pass-through entity and all income will flow to your respective tax returns. From tax perspective, the LLC will be treated as a partnership. It will file form 1065 to report its income, and allocate the income to the members/partners on schedules K-1 which will be given to you. You'll use the numbers on the K-1 to transfer income allocated to you to your tax returns and pay taxes on that. Being out of state, will she incur more taxes from the money being now   filtered through the business? Your employee couldn't care less about your tax problems. She will continue receiving the same salary whether you are a sole proprietor or a LLC, or Corporatoin. What kind of forms are we looking into needing/providing when   switching to a LLC from freelance work? Normally we just get 1099's,   what would that be now? Your contract counterparts couldn't care less about your tax problems. Unless you are a corporation, people who pay you more than $600 a year must file a 1099. Since you'll be a partnership, you'll need to provide the partnership EIN instead of your own SSN, but that's the only difference. Are LLC's required to pay taxes 4 times per year? We would definitely   get an accountant for things, but being as this is side work, there   will be times where we choose to not take on clients, which could   cause multiple months of no income. Obviously we would save for when   we need to pay taxes, but is there a magic number that says ""you must   now pay four times per year"". Unless you choose to tax your LLC as a corporation, LLC will pay no taxes. You will need to make sure you have enough withholding to cover for the additional income, or pay the quarterly estimates. The magic number is $1000. If your withholding+estimates is $1000 less than what your tax liability is, you'll be penalized, unless the total withholding+estimates is more than 100% of your prior year tax liability (or 110%, depending on the amounts). The LLC would be 50% 50%, but that work would not always be that. We   will be taking on smaller project through the company, so there will   be times where one of us could potentially be making more money. Are   we setting ourselves up for disaster if one is payed more than the   other while still having equal ownership? Partnerships can be very flexible, and equity split doesn't have to be the same as income, loss or assets split. But, you'll need to have a lawyer draft your operational agreement which will define all these splits and who gets how much in what case. Make sure to cover as much as possible in that agreement in order to avoid problems later."


Decorative Balustrades are ideally suited for residential buildings where the aesthetics greatly matter.In premises where safety is a concern steel balustrades are better equipped to address these issues. Swimming pool fencing, railings for staircases and balconies can be fabricated out of aluminium. With coloured powder coating to match the building's exterior, aluminium balustrades are the perfect choice for every home.Several service providers offer top quality and low maintenance Balcony Railings.


Would I be taxed at my personal income tax rate upon withdrawal of the   funds for this loan from my professionally managed, balanced 401k (not   Roth funds)? Yes. This is a regular distribution. Why wouldn't you be taxed? What's gifting has to do with anything? If taxable, this would move me to the next higher tax bracket. Depending on your other income - it may, or may not. Whether or not taxable when pulling funds out of the investment   account, when I'm repaid, do I owe Federal tax only on the interest   income portion of repayment funds or on the lump sum & interest   received (all of which which would return to my retirement account in   lump)? Only interest. And you will not return it to your retirement account. Not in a lump and not in installments and not in any other way.


"I'll take a stab at it. If you're not passionate about big ideas, about markets and companies and economies, if you can't read up on finance, companies, economies and markets for hours a day, for most of your free time for the next few years, if you're really just attracted by the ""money"" and notoriety, you should stick to engineering.   There's space for non-financial majors in finance anyway... Focus elsewhere for a while, and if finance still appeals to you in five years, consider it then.   (I have a non-financial background. I realized I liked it when I realized every time I had one question answered, five more came up, and this happened over and over... And still does, after four years. I could still leave finance, however... You never know where your path will take you.)"


Many of live streaming services providers available in the market but for selecting one of the best you need to focus on some points that later on help you in hiring.  These points is just about the time that minimize the travelling cost and increases the productivity.


What is the problem? That some people have more money than others?   Rather than caring about the really rich, which you shouldn't because they can take care of themselves, lets focus on the really poor, which you should care about since they need your help.   The poverty rate in the US is 13.5% and is at its lowest point since 2008.


"> Sounds good?  Sure, as long as the proper checks and balances have been applied and I also have the freedom to leave the country.  > The social contract you're referring to only applies for...  That's your opinion and the Supreme Court's interpretation of the Constitution disagrees with you.  Regardless, I reject the idea that the government outlined in the Constitution is somehow ""correct"".  That is an [argument from authority](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority) but the authority is 240 years out of date.  We need to change it to reflect the realities of a modern society.  > Redistribution of wealth IS violent interference by other individuals.  This statement assumes that the natural distribution of wealth in a capitalist system is somehow ""correct"".  That is arguably false.  Have you ever played a game of Monopoly to conclusion?  > I'm certain he will spin in his grave.  Then let's not consider ways to make our society better in fear of upsetting a dead philosopher."


Don't buy a house as an investment; buy it if/because it's the housing you want to live in. Don't improve a house as an investment; improve it if/because that makes it more comfortable for you to live in it. It's a minor miracle when a home improvement pays back anything close to what it cost you, unless there are specific things that really need to be done (or undone), or its design has serious cosmetic or functional issues that might drive away potential buyers. A bit of websearching will find you much more realistic estimates of typical/average payback on home improvements. Remember that contractors are tempted to overestimate this. (The contractor I've used, who seems to be fairly trustworthy, doesn't report much more than 60% for any of the common renovations. And yes, that's really 60%, not 160%.)


">I have never heard that phrase before. Thanks for posting that.   You're welcome.  It was (once upon a time) a commonly understood ""meme"".  Sadly in recent decades we have ""lost"" (ignored? set aside?) a lot of collected human wisdom that was passed down via such stories & parables (and regardless of whether the ""original"" was a REAL historical incident, the lesson via analogy can still be applicable and thus ""true"").  >It fits perfectly in this situation  Alas, yes it does.  Even worse, politicians are in many senses ""selling"" not only their constituents collective ""birthrights"" but are (in some cases) making them (and their children, even the unborn) into proverbial indentured slaves."


RealConnect is a unique independent real estate company which connects residential & commercial property owners & investors to real estate agents and property managers. We operate Australia wide & have registered agents waiting to offer their services from most areas across the country. We have a keen passion to create an easy to use, low cost system to benefit everyone dealing in the real estate industry. We aim to increase profits for property owners as well as real estate agents by lowering the business expenses for the agents and allowing them to offer the same service to property owners for less.


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"The ""retail"" label is the investor grouping for the fund, not a reference to the retail industry (the other ones are ""retirement"" ""premier"" ""institutional"").  It's unrelated to their investment strategy, which is a broad real estate strategy under which retail REITs make up about 13% of the fund."


I've talked to several very experienced accountants that deal with startup shares, stock 83(b)'s, etc. weekly (based in SF, CA) as this issue would have had a massive impact on me.  The most important part of filing an 83(b) is notifying the IRS within 30 days. The law requires the written notification within the 30 day window. Adding it to that years tax return is an IRS procedure. Forgetting to include a copy of that years tax return is apparently a common occurrence when no tax was owed (0 spread, you actually paid the FMV). And the accepted method to resolve this is to simply file a blank amendment for that years return and include the copy of the 83(b) election.


"Yes, and the reason for that is because things that are above the market (eg regulators, politicians et al) manipulate it constantly.  I think personally the market is still a price discovery mechanism, the rules of the game have just changed. I.e. risk now has taken on additional dimensions, so a lot of conventional theories of asset pricing can effectively be chucked out the window.   Whether we ever see the return to a more ""econ""-driven reality in market expectations (and by that extent therefore asset pricing) is anyone's guess, for now bye-bye to the established light-touch framework of decades past, hello to interventionist randomness."


The answer, for me, has to do with compounding. That drop in price post-ex-div is not compounded. But if you reinvest your dividends back into the stock then you buy on those post-ex-div dips in price and your money is compounded because those shares you just bought will, themselves, yeald dividends next quarter.  Also, with my broker, I reinvest the dividend incurring no commission. My broker has a feature to reinvest dividends automatically and he charges no commission on those buys. Edit:I forgot to mention that you do not incurr the loss from a drop in price until you sell the security. If you do not sell post-ex-div then you have no loss. As long as the dividend remains the same (or increases) then the theoretical ROI on that security goes up. The drop in price is actually to your benefit because you are able to acquire more shares with the money you just received in the dividend  So the price coming down post-ex-div is a good thing (if you buy and hold).


Short answer: No. Some of those 'automatic' payments you've agreed to (presumably by signing a PAD form) are initiated in batch by the company whom you're buying from (phone company, cable company etc). So no, the bank has no indication from one day to the next what is coming through.  And the request goes from say, your cable company to THEIR merchant bank to YOUR bank. Typically you have a monthly bill date which is fixed, and they should have terms established when it is due.  If a payment comes back NSF they can retry once - but only for the same amount and I believe it is 14 days from the initial payment attempt.  It makes it predictable, and you'd figure banks would clue in and start to predict for you when things may come out - but strictly speaking your bank doesn't know when or how much.


200 years ago, in 1817, in certain free countries, I would try to come with solutions and products that did not exist.  For example, in 1817, I would invent the zipper for pants.  If I was not such a genius and inventor, I would go to college and be one of the few with a B.A. or B.Sc degree. **Back then, a bachelor degree in any subject would guarantee you a great position in a great company with great income and stability.** (Today, such degrees are worthless - even a Masters degree is nothing much). I would then use my position to get good contacts and start my own business, preferably trading with goods coming from a foreign country.


Can you say a little more about how you want to use your new skills? For instance, machine learning to help make picks? Then I think the answer would be python. But if you’re thinking you’d like to write high speed trading algorithms, that’d be something else.


I would say that the three most important skills are: Note that some costs are hidden. So, for example, a mutual fund investing in other countries than where you live in may mean the investment target country charges a certain percentage of dividends going to the mutual fund. The mutual fund company doesn't usually want to tell you this. There may be clever financial instruments (derivatives) that can be used to avoid this, but they are not without their problems. If you diversify into equities at low cost, you will have a very wealthy future. I would recommend you to compare two options: ...and pick from these options the cheaper one. If your time has a high value, and you wish to take this value into account, I would say it is almost always far better option to choose an index fund. Whatever you do, don't pay for active management! It is a mathematical truth that before costs, actively managed investments will yield the same return than indexed investments. However, the costs are higher in active management, so you will have less total return. Don't believe that good historical return would imply good future return. However, if for some reason you see an index fund that continuously loses to the index more than by the amount of stated costs, beware!


It will affect Greeks as any bankruptcy affects the bankrupt. They already started reducing their welfare policies and government hand-outs. Default would mean that the government isn't able to meet its obligations. It's not only the external obligations, it's also the internal obligations - pensions, social security benefits, healthcare, public services, military (and the Greeks are in constant confrontation with the neighboring Turkey, with several armed conflicts throughout the years) - all that will get hit. Yes, they will get affected much more, definitely.


Copyrights and patents are inventions of the state meant to encourage producers to create works that benefit society *not* ensure the benefits of proceeding generations and their scions. You can't own an and occupy an idea like you can land or gold and to create a system that rewards the production of ideas takes resources to support and thus can such guarantees be sustained for a finite amount of time and not in perpetuity.


Absolutely  https://www.google.com.au/amp/s/www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2016/12/30/14128870/foxconn-robots-automation-apple-iphone-china-manufacturing  https://www.google.com.au/amp/m.scmp.com/tech/china-tech/article/2084740/manufacturing-automation-drive-chinas-robotics-spending-us59b-2020%3famp=1  But what’s interesting about China is that if automation leads to large loss of jobs (ie:social unrest) the government will intervene.  We may strangely see China as the leader and innovator in new social contracts between government & society over the coming decades rather than western countries.


OP, where did you get those percentages? Your post got me interested and the only article I could find was [this one](http://iphone.appleinsider.com/articles/17/01/20/report-claims-apple-music-pays-more-to-record-labels-in-royalties-per-stream-than-spotify), which actually indicates that Apple pays more than Spotify. Would be interested in reading more, if you could pass it along.


It's also a function of location.  Let's use an example of where I live in Eastern Tennessee and a skilled HVAC Tech with two years of tech school certifications.  The starting pay locally to me is roughly $15/hr but if you move 100-200 miles away you find starting pay jumps to $22/hr. With minor cost of living increases. Certainly not $7/hr worth of CoL.  Companies locally are simply preying upon a small skilled labor force they hope cannot afford to move.


there is now a large body of evidence to support the persistence of neurocognitive impairment lasting from hours to weeks. It is important to note that in repeated studies, subjects who reported a marijuana “high” were most likely or most profoundly affected by the drug. This supports the link between THC concentration and neurocognitive dysfunction. Residual effects, however, continued in subjects who no longer felt the drug's effect. Thus, subjective return to baseline mental status may not ensure full return of neurocognitive function.58  https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12427880  Considerable research into the functional psychomotor and judgment effects of marijuana smoking has been conducted in the context of transportation safety. Research demonstrates that acute cannabis consumption is associated with an increased risk of a motor vehicle crash, and especially for fatal collisions.59   https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22323502


I shop at Sears because of the enormous section of hardware parts.  You can find almost any bolt,screw,connector, etc for any DIY project.  Nothing online compares to being able to go to the hardware section only with an idea and piecing it together with the parts at hand.  Also, I'm 35.


When they started implementing safety procedures for stopping people from getting sick probably about two years ago now I want to say. When their stock was tanking and the ecoli outbreaks were happening. Yep, that’s why I get chicken now. It doesn’t taste like “steak” it taste like bland boiled beef that’s thrown on a grill, cause that’s what it is


So how does that work when you're past retirement age? Do you just keep paying huger and huger sums for insurance, or are you covered by your pension plan (if you have one)?  Or do Medicare and Medicaid cover everything (i.e. you don't have to pay)? In which case if you move to Latin America, you could get stuck with a big medical bill, but not if you stay in the States?


1) I don't give a goddam about what Romney said. That's not what *I'm* talking about, and I have no interest in defending or attacking it. You brought up Romney, no one else is talking about him.  2) The state is just as able to make or take *your* personhood as it is a corporations. That blade cuts every direction, remember. Of course corporations are only imbued with personhood (which they aren't, really, it's not like they can vote) because the state says they are. No one said otherwise.   3) >my personal expenses such as food, car maintenance, rent, etc were not tax deductible  They most certainly would be if you had your business in your home, discussed business at every meal, and used your car for work.  Turns out, a corporation uses the things it owns for business, and thus gets to deduct them as business expenses.  It's also possible for businesses to have expenses that are not deductible. Entertainment expenses, for example, are not deductible.


Lower fees are always better, everything else equal. A lower fee makes your transaction overall a better deal, all else equal.  Other transactions costs (like the SEC fee on sales) are mostly the same across brokers and there is unlikely to be any difference in execution quality either.  When comparing brokers be sure to consider the other issues: To me, most of these are minor issues.  For that reason, I'd say let transaction cost be your guide. I hear a lot of talk about the quality of the interface.  If you just want to buy or sell a stock, they are all pretty easy.  Some brokers have better tools for monitoring the market or looking at technical indicators, if you are into that.


What bank, and is there restrictions on the trades? (i.e. they only go through once a week?)  I do light medium term trading - maybe 5-10 trades per quarter - and would love to be able to cut out the fees.


i accidently deleted my comment, but like I said, random forests are hardly black box.   Please see here: https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/21152/obtaining-knowledge-from-a-random-forest  Random forests are not black box, and like I said in the comment I deleted, the variables have weights and metrics that can be traced back. This example in the link uses the other method of random forests which is decision tree, opposed to the Lin Reg.


Because they found their scapegoat.  They will parade and flog him while all his former coworkers are able to hide in his shadow.  He will be the public spectacle to show that the government is being tough on banks and CEO's, while they do nothing about the revolving door between finance and government he waltzed back and forth through.


It allows companies a time after which they can count the vouchers as part of profit in order to balance their books and also minimize internal fraud that could happen using the vouchers. If they didn't have an expiry date it becomes impossible to reconcile the voucher account as they can still possibly be used in future or may not be used. What do you count that as? If they have an expiry date, when the date passes you can count them as money coming in because they have been paid for though have not been used.


Millionaires, by definition of being millionaires (having a million dollars), save more money than the poor.  That means more of the unemployment check will go to savings rather than being spent in the economy.  Which means that it will not stimulate the economy as much if given to a millionaire.  The whole point of unemployment is that it gets spent into the economy immediately, and that is why it is one of the most effective forms of stimulus.  The money would not be spent on the economy immediately if it were given to a millionaire.  >You want to withhold unemployment insurance from rich people because you don't think they are worthy.  Tell me where I said that.


He was referring to tech companies. I am referring to old-school companies that haven't missed a dividend payment for 30 years. Anyway Facebook is probably a good bet – they have an even trying to monetize it other than to cover costs. Let someone else bet on that. it turns out that a lot of people open accounts and are active for about the first 30 days and that's it. But the accounts remain on the books. Linkedin – talk about worst in breed. Anyway, I still don't know what Facebook has that MySpace didn't.


"Correct!  But this is only true when a central bank is involved.  So if there's a single institution that has a territorial monopoly on the production of money (and competing currencies aren't allowed via ""legal tender laws""), then the debt-based money system OP describes isn't actually the system being used.  That's the problem with his post:  he's trying to make it seem like our current system of fiat currencies is somehow natural or emergent.  It's not.  What we have now is the result of a legal monopoly."


>But on the bright side, the most common decade for people to start saving is in their 20s. Twice as many 30 to 49 year olds said they started saving in their 20s instead of their 30s, while the 50 to 64 age group was “only slightly more likely” to have started saving in their 20s over their 30s, according to the report, which surveyed 1,003 adults living in the continental U.S.  So they are basing their analysis of how early people start saving purely by studying people in their 30s and 40s with those in their 50s and 60s. They don't compare either of those age groups with those in their 20s and 30s to see how things have changed?


sadly, it is illegal in most states to buy a car directly from the manufacturer. as such, most manufacturers do not offer the option even where it is legal. if you really do know exactly what you want (model, color, options, etc.) i recommend you write down your requirements and send it to every dealer in town (via email or fax).  include instructions that if they want your business, they are to reply via email (or fax) with a price within 7 days.  at least one dealer will reply, and you can deal with whoever has the best price. notes:


You can use interactive brokers. It allows you to have a single account to trade stocks and currencies from several countries.


"I would use a ""virtual credit card"" which is basically a fake card that cannot be charged.  http://credit-card-generator.2-ee.com/q_virtual-credit-card-generator.htm"


According to McKinsey, the consultancy, it took six months for the US economy to recover its pre-recession jobs level after the 1982 downturn. Following the 1991 recession, that had risen to 15 months. After 2001, it took 39 months – meaning that the economy required almost the full business cycle to regain the jobs total bequeathed by the previous one. Following the Great Recession of 2008, McKinsey forecast that the economy would take 60 months to reach the pre-downturn jobs level.  That now looks optimistic. In December 2007, the US economy employed 146m people. Four years later, it languishes at 140m. At the current rate of job creation it will take another two and a half years to regain 2007 levels – taking the replacement cycle to as much as 78 months. This is destruction minus the creativity. Even that understates the problem, since in that time the population will have risen by more than 10m.  “I know companies that employ senior engineers whose only job is to find ways to reduce the headcount,” says Carl Camden, chief executive of Kelly Services, a booming staffing agency based in Michigan. “The name of the game everywhere is to reduce permanent headcount and we are still only at the early stages of this trend.” The second problem stems from the first – America is employing a decreasing proportion of its people. At the start of the recession, the employment-to-population rate was 62.7 per cent. The rate is now 58.5 per cent. Last month, unemployment fell from 9 per cent to 8.6 per cent. On the surface, this looked like a welcome leap in job creation. In reality, more than half of the fall was accounted for by a decrease in the numbers “actively seeking” work. The 315,000 who dropped out of the labour market far exceeded the 120,000 new jobs.  According to government statistics, if the same number of people were seeking work today as in 2007, the jobless rate would be 11 per cent. Some have moved from claiming unemployment benefits to disability benefits, and have thus permanently dropped out of the labour force. Others have fallen back on the charity of relatives. Others still have ended up in prison. In 1982 there were just over 500,000 in jail; today there are 2.5m – more than the combined population of Atlanta, Boston, Seattle and Kansas City, according to the Economic Mobility Project of the Pew Center, a Washington-based think-tank.  Finally, a growing share of whatever jobs the economy is still managing to create is in the least productive areas. Of the five occupations forecast by the Bureau of Labor Statistics to be the fastest growing between now and 2018, none requires a degree. These are registered nurses, “home health aides”, customer service representatives, food preparation workers and “personal home care aides”.  Manufacturing is nowhere in the top 20, and such jobs cannot replace the pay and conditions once typical of that sector. “The food preparation industry cannot sustain a middle class,” says Dan DiMicco, chief executive of Nucor, one of America’s two remaining big steel companies, whose company motto is “a nation that builds and makes things”.  The tides are not with Mr DiMicco. According to a study this year by Michael Spence, a Nobel Prize-winning economist from Stanford University, and Sandile Hlatshwayo, all net job creation since 1990 has been in the “non-tradable sector”. Between 1990 and 2008, the US added 27.3m jobs, of which almost every one was in services. Almost half were in healthcare or the public sector – both areas in which productivity growth is virtually zero. Conversely, manufacturing’s impressive productivity growth has tracked its shrinking headcount. If there is an explanation as to why middle-class incomes have stagnated in the past generation, this is it: whatever jobs the US is able to create are in the least efficient sectors – the types that neither computers nor China have yet found a way of eliminating. That trend is starting to lap at the feet of more highly educated American workers. And, as the shift continues, higher-paying jobs are also increasingly at risk, argue Prof Spence and Ms Hlatshwayo.  What, then, can be done to revitalise the increasingly sclerotic jobs market? If the answer were simple, it would have been on everyone’s lips a long time ago. Unfortunately, there is no precedent for the challenges America faces, and thus little consensus among economists or policymakers on the best remedies. However, almost everyone agrees on how to ensure the situation does not deteriorate. Top of the list is a better education system for all stages of life.  Alas, rebooting an increasingly mediocre school system is easier said than done. Nor is permanent reskillling realistic for large chunks of the workforce. There may be lessons to be learnt from nations such as Germany, particularly on vocational education, but there is little federal appetite to apply them. “Every American is going to have to get used to the idea of a completely different work style,” says Mr Camden, whose company farms out hundreds of thousands of temporary workers around the world, from lawyers to office assistants. “What you learnt in college five years ago may already be obsolete.”  Perhaps inevitably, given the fiscal climate, education and training budgets have gone in the wrong direction in the past few years. State schools and vocational community colleges derive much of their funding from local property taxes. That model brings two big disadvantages. First, it means community colleges are victims of “zip code apartheid” – the lower the property values in an area, the less money there is to train the workforce or educate the children.  Second, it deprives communities of the fiscal stabilisers that they need during a prolonged home foreclosures crisis. The areas worst hit by the housing crisis have experienced some of the steepest education cuts. By contrast, some of the best community colleges have kept their heads well above water. But most budgets have taken a nosedive at a time when demand for retraining has surged. “It is absurd that we withdraw support from the community colleges just when they most need it,” says Prof Autor.  Economists also agree on the need for a panoply of other measures – from higher spending on infrastructure, with the quality of roads and airports now rapidly approaching second world status, to a more sensible immigration policy that encourages the most talented foreign students to remain in the US. Most also call for far higher public spending on research and development, as well as better private incentives. The US now has one of the least generous R&D tax credits in the developed world.  Taken together, these reforms would have an impact – but few believe they would transform the picture. “The truth is that we don’t know how to fix the US labour market – we are in uncharted territory,” says Peter Orszag, Mr Obama’s former budget director, now a vice-chairman of Citi. “It would help to spend more on retraining and on infrastructure and to have a more rational immigration system. But these wouldn’t fundamentally transform the situation for the middle class ... It is not yet clear what, if anything, could.”


if you bought gold in late '79, it would have taken 30 years to break even. Of all this time it was two brief periods the returns were great, but long term, not so much. Look at the ETF GLD if you wish to buy gold, and avoid most of the buy/sell spread issues.  Edit - I suggest looking at Compound Annual Growth Rate and decide whether long term gold actually makes sense for you as an investor. It's sold with the same enthusiasm as snake oil was in the 1800's, and the suggestion that it's a storehouse of value seems nonsensical to me.


1 - For FHA loans PMI is required for mortages where there is not at least 20% equity.  Bank Financed Non-FHA loans may have other standards. If you are getting an FHA loan ,if possible put down 20%  so that you do not have to pay PMI.  That said your PMI costs should be reduced by the size of your down payment since the PMI covers the difference between your equity value (Based on the appraisal at time of purchase) and 20% equity value of the home. So if you buy a home for 425k(assuming 100% appraisal price) 20% equity would be 85k.  So if you put 10% down you would be paying PMI until you accrue an addition 42500 in equity.  And you will be paying PMI on that for about 12 years(typical on 30 year mortgage) or until you refinance(having home appraised at higher value than purchase price where you would have 20% equity).  There are ways to get out of PMI early but few banks are willing to help you through the hoops unless you refinance(and pay more closing costs). 2 - Different banks offer better rates or other benefits for paying points.  We paid $300 for a 1.5% reduction in our interest rate (less than 1%) but it was called a point. We were offered a few other points (.25% for 2500 and an one time on demand interest rate adjustment for ~3k) but declined but they may make more sense on a 425k home than our more modest one.  You can talk to a banker about this now, get preapproved(which helps with getting offers accepted sometimes), and find out more details about the mortgage they will offer you.  This meeting should be free(I would say will but some bank would charge just to prove me wrong) and help answer your questions more authoritatively than anyone here can.   3 - The costs will come out of your down payment.  So if you put down 42.5k down your costs will come out of that.  So you will probably end up with 30~35k being applied towards your purchase price with the rest going for costs.  You can tell the banker you want to put 10% towards the price and the banker will give you a down payment probably around 50k to cover costs etc.  (My figures are hopefully intentionally high better to find out that it will cost less than my guesstimate than get your hopes up just to find out the costs are higher than expected.)


Yes, exactly. VaR is just a single tailed confidence interval.  To go from model to strategy, you need to design some kind of indicator (i.e. when to buy and when to short or stay out). In practice, this will look like a large matrix with values ranging from -1 to 1 (corresponding to shorting and holding respectively) for each security and each day (or hour, or minute, or tick, etc.), which you then just multiply with the matrix of the stock returns. The resulting matrix will be your daily returns for each stock, you can then just row sum for daily returns of a portfolio, or calculate a cumulative product for cumulative returns.  A simple example of an indicator would be something like a value of 1 when the price of the stock is below the 30 day moving average, and 0 otherwise. You can use a battery of econometric models to design these indicators, but the rest of the strategy design is essentially the same, and it's *relatively* easy to build a one-size-fits-all back-testing code.  I'll try to edit this post later and link a blog that goes through some of the code.  Edit: [Here](http://www.signalplot.com/simple-machine-learning-model-trade-spy/) is a post that discusses implementing a simple ML strategy. You can ignore most of the content but if you go through the github, you'll see how the ML model is implemented as a strategy.  An even easier example can be found from [the github connected to this post](http://www.signalplot.com/how-to-measure-the-performance-of-a-trading-strategy/), where the author is just using a totally arbitrary signal. As you can see, deriving a signal can be a ton of work, but once you have, actually simulating the strategy can be done in just a few lines of code.  Hopefully the author won't mind me linking his page here, but I find his coding style to be very clean and good for educational purposes.


While Ford and the other auto makers have a bad few years, some companies want to have a cash dividend. It appeals to certain investors. Others have tried to avoid dividends: Microsoft didn't start until ~2003; Apple only from mid 80's until mid 90's.; Google never has had a cash dividend. The desire to keep the dividend, or even to increase it, make some companies continue the practice; even when it doesn't make complete sense. Here is a list of stocks that have INCREASED their dividend for the last 25+ years: http://www.dividend.com/dividend-stocks/25-year-dividend-increasing-stocks.php Some have had good years, others bad years, in the last 25+ years.


If you are thinking of opening a home based fitness center, then it’s time to stop thinking and start doing. Home based gym gives personalized attention to every member. This means individual’s abilities and requirements are taken into consideration to know which exercise is most effective to achieve the fitness goals and reduce the risk of injury. Just you fitness is offering the home based fitness franchise opportunities. Contact them to know more at: https://docs.zoho.com/file/3ieym3bf54ae9c4b64538b453a30f1307ceb8


> A lot of contract positions have become less or equal pay than the permanent workers.      That many be true in many industries, but not in IT.   Technology contractors typically make far more than employees.   The example in the article was someone working for IBM.   IBM is a low paying IT contractor, and still pays more than $50 per hour for legally resident contractors (H1B's is a completely different story).


> if you leave like 5k at all times in your account the fee is waived  Easier said than done. In the US, more than 20% of adults have zero savings whatsoever, and 62% have less than $1,000 in savings. Pretty tough for most folks to have $5,000 just sitting around in order to prevent a $15 monthly fee.


I guess the opposite of being hedged is being unhedged. Typically, a hedge is an additional position that you would take on in order to mitigate the potential for losses on another position. I'll give an example: Say that I purchase 100 shares of stock XYZ at $10 per share because I believe its price will increase in the future.  At that point, my full investment of $1000 is at risk, so the position is not hedged. If the price of XYZ decreases to $8, then I've lost $200.  If the price of XYZ increases to $12, then I've gained $200; the profit/loss curve has a linear relationship to the future stock price. Suppose that I decide to hedge my XYZ position by purchasing a put option. I purchase a single option contract (corresponding to my 100 shares) with a strike price of $10 and an expiration date in January 2013 for a price of $0.50/share. This means that until the contract expires, I can always sell my XYZ shares for a minimum of $10.  Therefore, if the price of XYZ decreases to $8, then I've only lost $50 (the price of the option contract), compared to the $200 that I would have lost if the position was unhedged.  Likewise, however, if the price increases to $12, then I've only gained a net total of $150 due to the money I spent on the hedge. (the details of how much money you would actually lose in the hedged scenario are simplified out above; even out-of-the-money options retain some value before expiration, but pricing of options is outside of the scope of this post) So, as a more pointed answer to your question, I would say that the hedged/unhedged status of a position can be characterized by its potential for loss. If you don't have any other assets that will increase in value to offset losses on your position of interest, I would call it unhedged.


"An endowment is a large chunk of capital (i.e. money) held by  a university or other nonprofit.  It is meant to hold its value forever against inflation, and invested to generate income: from interest, dividends and appreciation.   They seem like a contradiction: closely scrutinized by Boards of Directors, managed to a high and accountable standard, closely regulated -- and yet, invested aggressively for growth: ignoring short-term volatility to get the highest growth long-term.  The law, UPMIFA (P for Prudent), requires growth investment, and says taking up to 7% of current value per year is prudent, even in down times when total value is shrinking.  On average, this lets the endowment grow with inflation.  7% is the high end of ""prudent"".  An endowment is watched, and the taken income is adjusted to keep the endowment healthy. 5% is very safe, assuming the endowment must pace inflation until the heat death of the universe. If you plan to die someday, drawing an extra 1-2% is appropriate.  There you go.  Invest like a university endowment, and count on up to 7% per year of income.  That's $21,000 a year. There'll be taxes, but the long-term capital gain rate at $21,000/year is pretty low.  That's pretty tight, but possible if your idea of entertaining is Netflix.  It would work very effectively for #VanLife, or the British version, living on a Narrowboat."


Depends how long you'll be resident in NZ for. Less than 183 days? Then no, you won't necessarily be tax resident. You'll need to declare your NZ income (and pay tax) in Australia, but New Zealand won't be fussed. It all depends on your tax residency


There is no rule of thumb (although some may suggest there is). Everybody will have different goals, investment preferences and risk tolerances. You need to figure this out by yourself by either education yourself in the type of investments you are interested in or by engaging (and paying for) a financial advisor. You should not be taking advice from others unless it is specifically geared for your goals, investment DNA and risk tolerance. The only advice I would give you is to have a plan (whether you develop it yourself or pay a financial advisor to develop one). Also, don't have all your savings sitting in cash, as long-term you will fall behind the eight ball in real returns (allowing for inflation).


The lowest cost way to trade on an exchange is to trade directly on the exchange. I can't speak to the LSE, but in the US, there is a mandated firewall between the individual and the exchange, the broker; therefore, in the US, one would have to start a business and become a broker. If that process is too costly, the broker or trade platform that permits individuals to trade with the lowest commissions is the next lowest.


Every economy wants growth and for growth to come you need investments. So, you must provide some motive for people to risk their money (every investment has inherently a degree of risk or if you want uncertainty about the outcome). As a result the tax on capital gains is lower than on other types of income (because the risk is almost zero). The tax is considered in the calculation of the net interest rate. And you can see this as the interest which the investors demand in order to invest their money.


"This is the best tl;dr I could make, [original](http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2017/09/gender-gap-stem-not-think.html) reduced by 84%. (I'm a bot) ***** > In a new NBER working paper David Card and Abigail Payne have a stunning new explanation of the gender gap in STEM at universities.  > The conventional wisdom is that the gender gap is about women and the forces-discrimination, sexism, parenting, aptitudes, choices; take your pick-that make women less likely to study in STEM fields.  > Narrow the gender gap in the fraction of university entrants who are STEM ready from 14.percentage points to less than 2 percentage points.   ***** [**Extended Summary**](http://np.reddit.com/r/autotldr/comments/6zwxp2/the_gender_gap_in_stem_is_not_what_you_think/) | [FAQ](http://np.reddit.com/r/autotldr/comments/31b9fm/faq_autotldr_bot/ ""Version 1.65, ~209141 tl;drs so far."") | [Feedback](http://np.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%23autotldr ""PM's and comments are monitored, constructive feedback is welcome."") | *Top* *keywords*: **STEM**^#1 **high**^#2 **university**^#3 **gap**^#4 **gender**^#5"


"There are two parts to the hack you describe.  One is moving to a high-cost, high-pay country to work, and the other is moving to a low-cost, low-pay country to retire. As Dilip mentioned in a comment, the first part is not so easy in many cases.  You can't just take a plane to the USA and start making big bucks immediately.  In the first place, it's illegal to work without special visa permissions.  Even if you manage to secure that permission (or take the risk of trying to work illegally), there's no guarantee you'll get a job, let alone a high-paying one.  The same is true in most other high-paying countries. As for the second part, that takes considerable willpower as well.  After spending X years getting used to a country, investing time and money, you must then have the resolve to uproot your life a second time and move to another country.  For the most part, countries are expensive for a reason.  Even if you in principle reject the cost-benefit tradeoffs of a particular country, it can be difficult to give up some of those benefits when the time comes (e.g., trains running on time, reliable electricity, donut shops, or whatever).  You might ""get soft"" or become co-opted by the rich-country rat race and find it difficult to extricate yourself. All of these problems are compounded if, as in many cases, you happened to start a family while in the expensive country.  At the least, moving would require uprooting not just you but your family.  Also, quality of education is often one of the main reasons people immigrate permanently to expensive countries.  Even a person who personally would prefer to retire to a cheaper country may be unwilling to transplant their children into that country's education system.  (Of course, they could wait until the children are self-supporting, but that makes the wait longer, and may result in them living far away from their children, which they may not want.) As JoeTaxpayer notes, the same reasons may work on smaller levels, even within a country.  In theory it's perfectly possible to power through a brief, lucrative career in Silicon Valley and then retire to Idaho, but it doesn't seem to happen as often as the plain numbers might suggest.  A simple way to put it might be that the kind of person who would be happy living in a cheap environment often cannot or will not endure a lengthy ""tour of duty"" in an expensive environment.  Either you like the expensive environment and stay, or you leave, not as a planned lifehack, but because you realize you don't like it."


"Real-time equity (or any other market) data is not available for free anywhere in the US.  It is always delayed by 10-15 minutes. On the other hand, online brokers who target the ""day trader"" (Interactive Brokers, TD Ameritrade, etc.) offer much closer to real-time data AND feature all the tools/alerts/charts/etc. you could ever possibly dream of.  I bet the type of alert you're asking for is available with just a couple of clicks on one of these brokers' platforms. Of course, accounts with these online brokers are not free; you must pay for these sophisticated tools and fast market access.  Another down side is that the data feeds sent to you by even the most sophisticated online broker are still delayed by tens of seconds compared to the data feeds used by big banks and professional investors.  Not to mention that the investment arm of the broker you use will be making its own trades based on the data feeds before relaying them on to you. So this begs the question: why do you need real-time information?  Are you trying to ""day trade"" -- i.e. profit from minute-to-minute fluctuations in the stock market?  (I can't in good conscience recommend that, but best of luck to you.)  If on the other hand you don't truly need ""real-time"" data for your application, then I support @ChrisDegnen's approach -- use public data feeds and write your own software.  You probably will not find any free tools for the sort of alerting you're looking for because most folks who want these types of alerts also need faster feeds and are therefore already using an online broker's tools."


Margin accounts do not have the problem you are imagining, which is unique to cash accounts


Pay off the debt first.  Life circumstances change without notice, and starting any stage of life with a debt puts you at a disadvantage.  Luckily, your debt is small.  Please also consider accumulating a 6 month emergency fund before making investments. This will further protect you when life hands you a curveball.


I like this part:  >Because insurance companies are required to take all applicants, healthy people (especially the young) would be wise to pay the penalty rather than buy the insurance. This makes the pool of insured individuals sicker and more costly, on average, and their premiums will higher. With higher premiums, more people will choose to pay the penalty, and a downward spiral will unfold.  Which is the exact opposite of reality.  If you have more people in an insurance pool, premium costs go down, which is the whole point of the individual mandate.  It's like they're trying to scare people to not buy health insurance and waste it on a fine instead.  Real nice.


"30 minutes of driving times 5 days is 2.5 hours of driving. Average 40mph is 100 miles per week. Guess of 25mpg on your car is 4 gallons of gas. 4 times 3 bucks a gallon is 12 dollars. Say 3 hours per week of your time, times 9/10 dollars per hour is 27/30 dollars per week. 12 plus 27 is 39. So I'd say around 40 dollars per week seems fair. You could do 50 but it is playing with a doggy for a couple hours. Unless it's a giant (or tiny) pain in the ass, it's hardly ""work"" but that's just me. $40/week sounds fair. Hope you work it out pal."


"> My issue understanding this is I've been told that banks actually don't hold 10% of the cash and lend the other 90% but instead hold the full 100% in cash and lend 900%. Is this accurate?  That's the money multiplier effect being poorly described.  You take a loan out, but that loan eventually makes its way to other banks as cash deposits, which then are loaned out, and go to other banks, and loaned, etc., so that the economy is ""running"" on 10x cash, where 1x is in physical cash, and the other 9x is in this deposit-loan-deposit phenomenon.  > The issue I see with it is that it becomes exponential growth that is uncapped.  Not true. If there is $1B outstanding ""physical"" cash (the money supply) with a 10% reserve, then the maximum amount of ""money"" flowing through is $1B / 10% = $10B. This assumes EVERYTHING legally possible is loaned out or saved in the banking system. As such, it represents a cap.   If you have an Excel spreadsheet handy, you can easily model this out in four columns.   Label the first row as follows: Deposit, Reserve, Cash Reserve, Loan Amount  A2 will be your money supply. For simplicity, put $100.   B2, your reserve column, will be 10%.  C2 should be =A2 * B2, which will be the cash reserve in the bank.  D2 should be A2 - C2, which is the new loan amount extended.   A3 should be = D2, as the loans extended from the last step become deposits in the next.   B3 = B2.  Now, drag the formulas down, say, 500 rows.  If you then sum the ""deposits"" column, it'll total $1,000. The cash reserve will total  $100, and the loan amount will be $900. Thus, there is a cap."


If you're correct that it's not taxable because it's non-taxable reimbursement (which is supported by your W-2), then it should not go on your 1040 at all.  If it is taxable, then it really should have appeared on your W-2 and would probably end up on Line 7 of your Form 1040.


A ton of good comments and a lot of innocent comments.  Basically with fractional reserve banking, the creation of money out of nothng to increase the money supply is very simple to do and happens every second.  But like anything leveraged, it's great in good times adn horrible is bad times.  Contraction is magnified so if I pull out $1, the banks available funds are decreased by a multiple of that (depending on the reserve requirements and capital requirements).    SO to answer you're question, the money gets destroyed and disappears and a portion remains.


"Profitability is not magical. It's not a mystical thing that requires a 4 or 8 year degree in business to understand.  Twitter will never make money. You cannot make money with Social Media. All of the steps necessary to make social media profitable are the same steps which will drive your users to other platforms that remain free.  Twitter is already losing users to a new software called ""Mastodon"" which is not controlled by any single corporation, it's open source and anyone can operate their own federated server. It allows much larger 'posts' which enables people to have actual, valuable conversations on it, instead of brain-vomiting.  Twitter's largest mistake is probably their reluctance to abandon the 140 character limit 3 or 4 years ago when they should have. But it's too late now. It would take a miracle to save them.  Social Media as a marketplace is saturated. there's 4 or 5 sites you've heard of and 5000 you haven't and they're all free. How can anyone make money in that market? You can't.  And if all of the social media sites suddenly became subscription based, users would stop using them, they'd set up their own blogs using services like Wordpress.com or self-hosting them with software like WordPress.org or Ghost, and they'd use free open source software based on protocols like RSS or ATOM which have been around for a very long time to achieve the same sort of ""Friends and follower"" networks that Social Media giants want you to believe require their service.  Social Media has always been a bad business model, and it will always be a bad business model. Facebook has only found success because of their puppet companies and side-projects, the social media part of their business remains unprofitable."


At your young age, the most of your wealth is your future labor income (unless you are already rich). Your most profitable investment at this time is most likely to be investment in your human capital (your professional skills, career opportunities).  Depending on how you plan to earn your money, invest time and effort to enable you to earn better wages in that activity. So focus on education or professional training. Also, consider that it is probably your total lifetime utility/welfare you should maximize (but you decide!). I suggest you do not focus narrowly on earning as much money as possible. Consider what sort of life you want and what you need to do to enable it. Best of luck!


Anything where the initial step of someone trying to get you into anything financial is to send you an e-mail. There are valid situations in which e-mails may be used to introduce you to a financial product or offer, such as if you have signed up for an electronic newsletter that includes such information. But in that particular case, the e-mail isn't the first step; rather, whatever caused you to sign up for the newsletter was. Even in a valid, legitimate scenario, you should obviously still perform due diligence and research the offer before committing any of your money. But the odds that someone is contacting you out of the blue via e-mail with a legitimate financial offer are tiny. The odds that a lawyer, a banker or someone similar in a remote country would initially contact you via e-mail are yet smaller; I'd call those odds infinitesimal. Non-zero, but unlikely enough that it is probably more likely that you would win the grand prize in the state lottery four times in a row. Keep in mind that responding in any way to spam e-mails will simply confirm to the sender that your e-mail address is valid and is being read. That is likely to cause you to receive more spam, not less, no matter the content of your response. Hence, it is better to flag the e-mail as spam or junk if your e-mail provider offers that feature, or just delete it if they don't. The same general principles as above also apply to social media messaging and similar venues, but the exact details are highly likely to differ somewhat.


">then why would the largest IT companies with the biggest budgets do it?  Do you understand what ""appeal to authority"" is?   Just because a large company does it doesn't mean it's right. Microsoft has private offices for their developers, and there's research that shows people are more productive with private offices. Yet some companies have private offices, though most still have cube farms. Who's right?  There's solid research that having multiple monitors makes developers more efficient. But how many of those ""largest IT companies"" only have their developers with one monitor? Or on a freaking *laptop*?   Large companies most certainly do things for the wrong reasons, or out of inertia, or with good intentions but poor implementation."


Credit scores have a huge financial impact on consumers, even though most people don’t know how they are calculated or which bad habits may be driving theirs down. Your credit score is a number on a scale of 300 to 900 that can affect all of your financial decisions, from shopping for groceries to applying for a mortgage. Read on to find out why a good credit rating is so important. 4 Things to Know About Your Credit Score Why it’s important. Throughout your life, you will probably rely on your credit to acquire the items that you want and need but can’t necessarily pay cash for. Each time you buy something on credit, merchants are taking a gamble on you; the bet is


I still don't know what the point of the stimulus was. What was it, like 300 bucks or something? Which for me was actually nothing because it came out of my pocket. It just took a bunch of overhead for them to give it to me, and for me to put it back in my bank.


">""The country exported 430,000 more barrels of gasoline a day than it imported in September, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.""   The article says nearly half a MILLION more barrels of gasoline per DAY, not half-billion per month.  That's a very big difference.  Like, you know, the difference between 15 and 500."


I can see the point of it but you also have to remember what kind of people are working here to begin with, they are often people with a high school education or equivalent with no additional training or education. That doesn't leave a lot of jobs open and pretty much regardless of where they work the market wage is going to be low because they are extremely interchangeable. That is to say this is the working poor, the people that the government targets quite a bit so they'll have a negative external impact on the rest of the economy as a whole.   So while it does cost you money per year really the more important question is if these people were employed elsewhere, or not employed, what would the cost be and if there is any difference to where the government is paying more then they should be taxed by that amount to pay for the externality.


I'm still short UVXY since a couple reverse splits ago, but I start to worry when everyone is shorting VIX, with VIX now under 10, and even VIX futures a few months out around 13. As far as VIX calls; I wouldn't play VIX options myself unless it's very near term (weeklies) and done as a quick trade at opportune times. This big trade however was an interesting approach.


It is easy to be a stock analyst.   #1.  Get a YouTube channel  #2.  Create a Twitter account  #3.  Every day make a video and tweet that the stock market crash is imminent  #4.  Hedge your prediction with a bullish long portfolio and lie to the public  #5. Watch viewership and following grow rapidly as you misinform the public


>To those moaning about loss of jobs, is this really a job you want to fight to keep?   Where should youth labor go with such jobs going away?  I am not pushing to keep such jobs but such jobs are primary for youth labor.  And without such jobs where are they going to get their first job?


If an accounting firm had constant errors and was wrong over 50% of the time about the books how would that go about?  As a former bond trader, I would rarely look at the ratings.... CDS was most useful when applicable, and if not spread to the closest benchmark/sectoral average.


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I think India and Africa are going to center of the economic growth market in the next two decades. Probably more India, since they have the means to develop and a culture that wants it. I think the growth rates are all relative, but you obviously know the standard growth rate of the Sp500. I just can't see it falling because we are still in the middle of a complete globalization and I really think it won't be over before I retire. It will probably yake Africa 50 years before they reach a first world living standards we enjoy now. God only knows what we will have as the definition of first world by then.   The medical industry alone will drive a large portion of growth. Cyber security is going to be the next frontier in tech as the internet of things explode into our daily life.   I am not as weary about long term growth. We are always innovating and creating new markets. The beauty of the Sp500 is that it doesn't even have to be in the US to make money off it.


"I think in part we should admit that many if not most of those artists who produce QUALITY work have some expectation of benefiting directly from those videos, or at the very least being presented the opportunity to work in/for The Industry.   So they would actually hate to see Hollywood completely buried by Piracy. Honestly, I don't ever see that happening. Piracy gets you into the habit of consuming entertainment, which means you're actually *more* likely to impulse buy that DVD rather than if you don't pirate any content. It's only when you completely remove Movies and Television from your daily habit that you look at a DVD  and think...""Do I really want to waste 2 hours of my life sitting on a couch?"". If it's literally been months or even years since you've done it you'll likely not break the norm AND lose out on money to do it.   How do we as a society get the best of both worlds? Libraries. I love books; hell, I double majored in English. But, for the life of me I don't understand why today's Libraries aren't COMPLETELY STOCKED with DVD's and CD's. I understand that they are easy to backup and can violate copyright that way, but that doesn't mean taxpayers who have enabled those works get to escape their eventual path to being ""free"". I can't believe that most libraries' Media department is sparse except for casette tapes, VHS's, and educational DVD's. It's not just so that consumers can get to the product for a very low price/""free"", it's that the art should continue to exist for generations in an unadulterated form. Public libraries do just that."


Election -> policies -> potential adverse effects on the bottom line. It's not like they aren't related. (I'm just playing devil's advocate; I'd like to think he wouldn't make important staffing decisions until those policies are enacted and actually affecting his business.)


Vick was proven guilty by a court of law as opposed to an organization with its own prerogatives. This leads me to believe he can overcome this.  Unfortunately, his ban is going to stay, but his name recognition associated with his accomplishments and charity work will too.


People who will receive UBI are going to immediately spend that money on goods and services. UBI is a gift to resource/production owners. The wealthy do not spend most of their money. They keep trillions locked up in interest & dividend yielding accounts, and that is killing the global economy.


~~Dividends~~  edit:  Sorry; misunderstood your question.  Subsidiary losses. If NI is -$1000 and you own 80%, then your adjustment for year 20XX is $-200. If the accumulated minority interest is <$200, the end balance of non-controlling interest at 20XX+1 would be negative.   I can also imagine a scenario due to negative value of the sub's net identifiable assets using partial goodwill method.


In the general case if you have income coming in from a foreign source you need to declare it on your Canadian tax form, and nominally pay tax on it. However Canada has a tax agreement with the UK to ensure that you are not taxed twice. You also declare how much tax you have paid to the UK, and that is deducted from your Canadian tax bill. You may need to consult a tax professional, or maybe just read the Revenue Canada website to get the details. If you are holding this money for a friend, then you may find that this does not count as income to you. If you are getting it transferred to you in Canada, and then immediately passed on to your friend, it probably doesn't count as income (though again a tax professional will probably be helpful). This would mean you don't have to pay Canadian tax. But it's also a bummer because you've paid UK tax, which you might also have avoided, and you can't get that back without a lot of form filling. If this is going to be an ongoing situation, and the amount is significant, then you might look at getting your friend's money (and any you have in a UK account yourself) transferred to an offshore account, where UK tax is not automatically deducted. Most UK banks will do this for non-UK residents.


>Not bad. Do you do similar bullets for the future of the world economy?  Not nearly knowledgeable enough for this. : (  I'm pretty dense about the college-bubble too. My hope is to encourage discussion so that I can learn from someone who wants to back up/debunk the items mentioned.


"For 3X, it's about 114, and for 4X, 144, which naturally, is twice 72.  These are close, back of napkin, results. With smart phone apps offering scientific calculators, you should get comfortable just taking the nth root of a number for a more precise answer.  Update in response to Brick's comment. The rule of 72 says that (n)(y)=72 to double your money. It answers both questions, how much time do I need, given a rate, and how much return do I need, given a time?  Logic tells me that if 72 is the number to double, 144 is the 4X. But I'm a math guy, and my logic might not be logical to OP. So -  Let's take the 20th root of 4.   This is the key to use. 4, (hit key) 20, equals. The result is 1.07177 or 7.177%. And this is the precise rate you'd need to quadruple your money in 20 years) Now (n)(y)= 20* 7.177 = 143.55 which rounds to 144. ""Rule of 144"" to quadruple your money.  This now answers OP's question, ""How to derive a Rule of X"" for a return other than doubling.  One more example? I want 10X my money. Of course I need the initial guess to enter one calculation. People like 8%, in general. It's a bit below the 10% long term S&P return, and a good round number. The Rule of 72 says 9 years to double, so, 18 years is 4X, and 36 years is 8X. For my initial calculation, I'll use 40 years. The 40th root of 10. I get 5.925% (Again the precise rate that gives 10 fold over 40 years) and multiplying this by 40, I get a ""Rule of 237"" which I'm tempted to round to 240.  At 6%, 237/6= 39.5 yrs,  1.06^39.5 = 9.99 At 6%, 240/6= 40.0 yrs,  1.06^40.0 = 10.29 You can see that you lose some accuracy for the sake of a number that's easier to remember, and manipulate. 72 to double is pretty darn accurate, so I'll stick with ""Rule of 237"" to get 10X my money.   To close, the purpose of these rules is to create the tool that lets you perform some otherwise tough calculations away from any electronic device. Of course I know how to use logs, and in real life I'm paid to explain them to students who are typically glad when that chapter is over. I've shown above how the ""Rule of X"" can be formulated with a power/root key, which, for most people, is simpler. Ironically, log calculations as @jkuz offered, force a continuous compounding which may not be desired at all. It would give a result of 230 for my 10X return example, and the following (using the first equation he offered) - At 6%, 230/6= 38.3 yrs,  1.06^38.3 = 9.31 which is further away from the desired 10X than my 237 or rounded 240."


I'm confused - I don't see your original post, and I wasn't referring to you in my post, so your answer is confusing.  But I know student housing often sucks; my son just finished 4 years of living in student apts.  But i also know the student tenants often suck, too.  I would have hated to own the apt I rented in college, and have tenants like my friends and I.  And some of my son's friends were total tenants from hell who cared not a bit what they did to the place.


I've heard of handyman type people making a living this way untaxed.  They move into a fixer-upper, fix it up while living there, stay over two years and sell.  They can pocket $125k/yr tax free this way assuming they produce that much value in their fixing-up.  (Beware, though, that this will bite you in low social security payments in retirement!)


Yea, you're still young. Just start trying and do the best you can. Maybe you don't land on Wall Street, if that's even the goal, but you can absolutely break into the industry and work your way up. People understand mistakes, and a DUI that will be 4 years old when you start working isn't going to be a big deal if you have a solid 3 year track record. Don't doubt yourself, don't keep people around that hold you back. You don't need to go to a top tier school. It helps, sure, but it's not a requirement by any means.


"> Sports are generally dominated by African Americans here in the states.  *Some* sports.  NBA?  Sure.  NFL?  Sure.  NHL?  No.  Soccer?  No.  MLB?  No.  NASCAR?  No.  IndyCar?  No.  Gymnastics?  No.  Figure skating?  No.  The myth of black athletic dominance is right up there with the myth of black sexual prowess (i.e. that black men have huge dicks).  It's one of those urban legends.  But let's go down this rabbit hole a little more.  If your argument is that ""sports are dominated by African Americans,"" and that you attribute this to genetic reasons, then you must believe that different races are inherently better/worse in other ways - i.e. *intelligence.*  Perhaps temperament.  Or the propensity to lie.  Or to commit crimes.  Etc."


The MWRR that you showed in your post is calculated incorrectly. The formula that you use... ($15,750 - $15,000 - $4,000) / ($15,000 + 0.5 x $4,000) Translates into a form of the DIETZ formula of (EMV-BMV-C)/(BMV + .5 x C) The BMV is the STARTING balance. And as a matter of fact, the starting balance was NOT 15,000. It was IN FACT 11,000. See, the starting value for a month MUST BE the ending value of the prior month. So the BMV of 11,000 would give you the correct answer. Because if you added 4,000 at the start of the month (on day 1), it would have to have been ADDED to the 11,000 of the PRIOR month's ENDING value. Make sense? That would also mean that the addition of 4000 to the 11000 would imply that you started day 1 with 11,000. Make sense? Summary: When doing the calculations, you may use the ending value on the last day of the month to get your EMV. BUT YOU MAY NOT take the ending value on day 1 to get the BMV. That simply can not make sense since you already added a bunch of money during the day. Think about it. Davie


Best thing to do is convert your money into something that will retain value. Currency is a symbol of wealth, and can be significantly devalued with inflation. Something such as Gold or Silver might not allow you to see huge benefit, but its perhaps the safest bet (gold in particular, as silver is more volatile), as mentioned above, yes you do pay a little above spot price and receive a little below spot when and if you sell, but current projections for both gold and silver suggest that you won't lose money at least. Safe bet. Suggesting it is a bad idea at this time is just silly, and goes against the majority of advisers out there.


"(Leaving aside the question of why should you try and convince him...) I don't know about a very convincing ""tl;dr"" online resource, but two books in particular convinced me that active management is generally foolish, but staying out of the markets is also foolish.  They are: The Intelligent Asset Allocator: How to Build Your Portfolio to Maximize Returns and Minimize Risk by William Bernstein, and A Random Walk Down Wall Street: The Time Tested-Strategy for Successful Investing by Burton G. Malkiel Berstein's book really drives home the fact that adding some amount of a risky asset class to a portfolio can actually reduce overall portfolio risk. Some folks won a Nobel Prize for coming up with this modern portfolio theory stuff. If your friend is truly risk-averse, he can't afford not to diversify.  The single asset class he's focusing on certainly has risks, most likely inflation / purchasing power risk ... and that risk that could be reduced by including some percentage of other assets to compensate, even small amounts. Perhaps the issue is one of psychology? Many people can't stomach the ups-and-downs of the stock market.  Bernstein's also-excellent follow-up book, The Four Pillars of Investing: Lessons for Building a Winning Portfolio, specifically addresses psychology as one of the pillars."


Someone really needs to shake up the car rental industry the way Uber shook the f*ck up out off the taxi industry.   Just cut out the middle men.   No need to deal with any employees; just Open your phone in a huge parking lot of nice cars at the airport and choose the car that you want to drive yourself for the next few days. Just walk up to the car and open it with the app. And you're off.


"Are you serious?  You really just admire physical books so much because you can put them on a shelf and look like a huge pretentious douche when you show off your collection to people who pretend to care?  Wow, I thought hipsters were bad.  Whats next, you gonna put on stylish ""reading glasses"" and read by candle light?"


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A *licensed* electrician is pretty much guaranteed to have the skills. A union electrician is almost guaranteed to fuck a project schedule  up.  >Unions also fought for and got us a 40 hour work week and overtime pay. Benefits and disability insurance.   Snore. Clichés are getting tiresome. You pay for disability insurance. Benefits came about as a way to get around WWII pay freezes. Look it up.  >currently politicians are rolling back those protections  No, they're not.  >the work to get those benefits will be that much harder  With this self-contradiction, you have proven my point: Unions were once needed, but now it's just abusing for the benefits for union workers only.  Perhaps you got confused by what is happening in Wisconsin.  >Police are pepper spraying old grandmas and people sitting down not doing anything  You are just full of tiresome clichés. If OWS wasn't violent and unruly, this wouldn't happen. Nobody got raped at a Tea Party event. No shitting on cop cars. No Teargas. OWS is responsible for those things that you cite.  The right to peacefully assemble does not mean you can encircle and block the police from doing their lawful job, which is what happened at UC Davis. The old lady got trapped in a protest that got out of hand thanks to OWS idiots.  Stop whining. Stop being violent. Get permits and do the right thing and you might be just as effective in electing change as the Tea Party has been. I doubt it though. OWS children are just plain ignorant.  The 1st Amendment doesn't mean you can build tree forts in the park. That was the final nail in its coffin.


Measures like GDP, unemployment, and wages are designed to measure the health of the economy.  Those are the right measures to look at.   When the economy is doing well, stock prices usually do well also, but not always.  The stock market went up 23% in 2009, and the economy was in the shitter.  And it shouldnt matter which newspaper published the numbers.  If the numbers are right, the numbers are right.  You dont need to hear GDP numbers on fox news to believe them.


Instagram isn't, but the instagrammers and marketers are. And Instagram wants to be friendly to them and not be mentioned in the headlines as having been a part of some FTC legal action. Already happened a few times and I'm sure they don't want it happening more than it has to


(1) You put MBA behind your name? Lol who the fuck does that.   (2) Of course it isn't  (3) Generally they work for 3-5 years and then go back for their MBA. Some go part time while working full-time (which is what I did).  (4) You claimed that there are no jobs without an MBA now - I proved you very wrong in 3 minutes - these are not shitty companies either.   (5) The kids won't get anything but an entry level job even with an MBA and ZERO experience...you don't get to move up in ranks just because you have an MBA...you need work experience.  If the amount of down-votes hasn't told you that the shear fact that I've backed up my claim should make you re-evaluate your thoughts on the advice you give.


"In a sentence, stocks are a share of equity in the company, while bonds are a share of credit to the company. When you buy one share of stock, you own a (typically infinitesimal) percentage of the company. You are usually entitled to a share of the profits of that company, and/or to participate in the business decisions of that company. A particular type of stock may or may not pay dividends, which is the primary way companies share profits with their stockholders (the other way is simply by increasing the company's share value by being successful and thus desirable to investors). A stock also may or may not allow you to vote on company business; you may hear about companies buying 20% or 30% ""interests"" in other companies; they own that percentage of the company, and their vote on company matters is given that same weight in the total voting pool. Typically, a company offers two levels of stocks: ""Common"" stock usually has voting rights attached, and may pay dividends. ""Preferred"" stock usually gives up the voting rights, but pays a higher dividend percentage (maybe double or triple that of common stock) and may have payment guarantees (if a promised dividend is missed in one quarter and then paid in the next, the preferred stockholders get their dividend for the past and present quarters before the common shareholders see a penny). Governments and non-profits are typically prohibited from selling their equity; if a government sold stock it would basically be taxing everyone and then paying back stockholders, while non-profit organizations have no profits to pay out as dividends. Bonds, on the other hand, are a slice of the company's debt load. Think of bonds as kind of like a corporate credit card. When a company needs a lot of cash, it will sell bonds. A single bond may be worth $10, $100, or $1000, depending on the investor market being targeted. This is the amount the company will pay the bondholder at the end of the term of the bond. These bonds are bought by investors on the open market for less than their face value, and the company uses the cash it raises for whatever purpose it wants, before paying off the bondholders at term's end (usually by paying each bond at face value using money from a new package of bonds, in effect ""rolling over"" the debt to the next cycle, similar to you carrying a balance on your credit card). The difference between the cost and payoff is the ""interest charge"" on this slice of the loan, and can be expressed as a percentage of the purchase price over the remaining term of the bond, as its ""yield"" or ""APY"". For example, a bond worth $100 that was sold on Jan 1 for $85 and is due to be paid on Dec 31 of the same year has an APY of (15/85*100) = 17.65%. Typically, yields for highly-rated companies are more like 4-6%; a bond that would yield 17% is very risky and indicates a very low bond rating, so-called ""junk status""."


"Defined benefit pensions are generally seen as valuable, and hard to replace by investing on your own. So my default assumption would be to keep that pension, unless you think there's a significant risk the pension fund will become insolvent, in which case the earlier you can get out the better. Obviously, you need to look at the numbers. What is a realistic return you could get by investing that 115K? To compare like with like, what ""real"" investment returns (after subtracting inflation) are needed for it to provide you with $10800 income/year after age 60? Also, consider that the defined benefit insulates you from multiple kinds of risk: Remember that most of your assets are outside the pension and subject to all these risks already. Do you want to add to that risk by taking this money out of your pension? One intermediate strategy to look at - again for the purposes of comparison - is to take the money now, invest it for 10 years without withdrawing anything, then buy an annuity at age 60. If you're single, Canadian annuity rates for age 60 appear to be between 4-5% without index linking - it may not even be possible to get an index-linked annuity. Even without the index-linking you'd need to grow the $115K to about $240K in 10 years, implying taking enough risks to get a return of 7.6% per year, and you wouldn't have index-linking so your income would gradually drop in real terms."


a true free market wouldnt have these issues.. the wealthy are protected, the curtency inflated, national debt in the trillions.. there is no flexibility for these systems to auto correct.. so they will get shittier and shittier till they crash, badly.. only a free society un urdened by top down structures can build sustainable societies, its how nature works, our bodies, life.