partial_accumen

It probably the fact that the industry is getting flooded with people who think working in IT is a easy get rich job.

It certainly was 20-25 years ago. Zero formal education besides high school would land you a job 5 times the minimum wage working mostly in air conditioned comfort. Upward mobility was built in, and many of us have leveraged that for even higher paying positions with the gained experience and continued learning of the tech on our own.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Earns enough money to set some aside for retirement.

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

Only 32% of people have 401k accounts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In very narrow cases, yes. If I remember, spread has a specific rate of fire which is fairly slow compared to flamethrower, so you can clear very specific targets faster with flamethower. Again, 99% of the time Spread is going to be better.

“Flamethrower” (the wavy path ball gun) is perfect for a couple parts of the game where you can lay down. You fire and ever shot hits, and you are never in the path of enemy bullets or mobs.

What I’m taking from your posts is that you don’t like that people are liking and buying what you like, which is driving up the price. Additionally, a part of the people that are buying what you like, you don’t like the reasons they’re buying them.

I can’t figure out what you want done though.

What is different from in my post from what you’re trying to communicate?

I think that scarcity of art is a rather bourgeois thing,

Scarcity isn’t a bourgeois construct. There are a finite amount of originals in both famous Renaissance paintings and original releases of video games. Its a macroeconomic function. When there are fewer of an item that is in higher demand, the price rises.

that the more available art is to everyone the better.

I own zero Monet originals, but I have lithographs of them I quite enjoy. The fact that the original painting hangs at the Art Institute in Chicago doesn’t prevent me from enjoying the copy of it on my wall. Video games are even better as copies are perfect copies, always, and every time. The only thing you don’t get to have (without parting with the money) is the original ROM IC etched in 1996 or the original disc pressed in 1997.

Video games were always art the moment someone figured out how to make two pixels move across a screen.

Your view was not universally held with others in the early days of video games.

We don’t need to prove that to anyone.

Its not an effort one undertakes, its a measurable metric of acceptance in society. You can choose to ignore its significance, but not its consequence. Originals will be more expensive, especially the groundbreaking titles from decade ago.

Silent Hill 3 is literally my favorite horror game ever, and I will never be able to afford a copy, or even if I did have the money to spare I could never justify the absurd price. I will never own a legitimate copy of Megaman Legends, Pokemon Platinum, Rule of Rose, or so many of these games that I really do care about and want to be able to experience on authentic hardware.

Believe it or not I see this as a good thing. It means that gaming has arrived to a point of a undeniably maturity as art.

I certainly can’t afford a Picasso or Degas to hang on my wall. They are far too rare and too valuable for me to afford. Their value is established because of their rarity and quality for what they are.

The rest of us can buy cheaper lithographs to hang on our walls, just as we can still play the games…in copies in flash cartridges or in emulation.

Video games have taken the final step to arrive as art.

Wasn’t the VMU, from the start, already a portable handheld console? Sure it was just minigames, but thats the V in VMU. I remember playing the Skies of Arcadia minigame.

Dreamcast did have Memory Units that didn’t have the screen so they wouldn’t have been VMUs, but were still MUs. I appreciate the hack of a Pi Zero and a full color screen though. :)

Our neighbor friend had an Odyssey. Lots of fond memories playing it with them.

Kale has a naturally high pH, so it’s basically just an antacid.

I have mild reflux, but know what triggers it after what time of day and can make easy diet adjustments to avoid those triggers too late before bed. For whatever reason, I never considered looking at the alkaline level of the foods I eat. In just doing so now, I see a whole bunch of my regular diet. Have I been unconscious choosing these to mitigate my reflux? I mean, I seek out these foods (that I now know are alkaline) because I like them, but do I like them more than just for their taste?

I love it! Someone back then was VERY jealous and wanted their c64 to look like an IBM XT.