I like many others would like to eventually retire, preferably earlier than later. Money does not make sense to me beyond paycheck pays for rent and food.
Can’t help you with YouTube recommendations, but I used to do this stuff. You can DM me or ask questions here.
My first piece of advice is to see if you can land a job with your state/local govt that provides a cost of living adjusted pension in retirement. Those are great and they tend to be better “deals” than just saving. Don’t do pensions in the private sector, though.
Second is, assuming you’re in the US, is just put money away in an IRA because you get some tax breaks for it. Then let it ride in an index fund.
Third is, learning how to grow food and get a little bit of land or pirate some nearby. The way things are going there’s a good chance by the time you or I are in retirement age things will be really bad so if you can grow your own food that will be better than money.
Yeah my ultimate goal is to have a garden and workshop. Growing food would be incredibly useful. I don’t have faith in the the state of the world by the time I hit retirement age, but if by chance shit is still moving along, I don’t want to be shit outta luck at 65.
Before becoming a communist, I was a FIRE guy, so i know all about it. The summary is:
- Earn a stable income
- Save at least 20% a paycheck, more the better
- Invest that money in Roth IRA + 401k
- After 30ish years, you can retire off that investment at the same standard of living as when you were working and saving.
I recommend Betterment because their portfolios and management strategies are good and they make it easy to do the smart thing in the long run. The priorities in my opinion:
- Take as much 401k match as you can. It’s free money. You’re basically getting double returns if your employer is paying half.
- Save enough money so you can survive 6-10 months if you lose your job. Betterment.com safety net fund is much better than putting it in the bank.
- Fund a Roth IRA every year.
- Save money in a normal Betterment retirement fund (not tax advantaged).
You can use the money from 4 to fund 3 and 1. You can use your contributions to 3 to fund 4 if you decide you’d rather have money sooner. I have an overfunded 401k and fixing that is much harder than fixing any of the others, so I would recommend to only take employer match and use Roth IRAs rather than try to abuse the advantages of 401ks. Frankly you’ll probably be fine without 401k if you use the other options.
I gotta add the caveat that I think we’re in a very large asset bubble, maybe the largest in American history. But you’ll never be able to time the top or the bottom and buying the top is not that bad in the long run as long as you keep saving, unless the stock market dies forever (please) in which case either we’re doing socialism and you’ll probably be able to retire some day, or we’re doing Mad Max and it won’t matter either way.
I’ll look into betterment, thanks for the advice.
and yeah, part of my adverseness to investing is I actively want the stock market to die so why would I want to take part in it. Yeah I might as well improve my material station if I can while its around, but with my investment luck, as soon as things look up is when the stockmarket dissapear button will be hit
Nothing destroys class consciousness more than 401ks in my opinion.
- The working class is divided into people who get 401ks because they have arbitrarily defined “good” jobs and people who don’t.
- Social security is de-emphasized since 401ks are “better” and poors can go fuck themselves I guess.
- As far as your 401k is concerned, your interests are completely aligned with the bourgeoisie. You want wages to stagnate (for everyone but yourself?). You want big profits. You want a desperate working class. You want low inflation austere fiscal policy.
- With everyone buying into these funds, it is literally pushing up prices of assets rich people own.
- Rich people can use their inflated assets as collateral to borrow money at lower interest rates than the rest of us.
- Buying stock in a thing has either no link or an extraordinarily weak link to actual money being invested in the thing, so you’re not really even creating employment opportunities for anyone. I think socially conscious investing probably achieves little to nothing. Money just bounces around like hot potato until it ends up funding a deep sea oil rig or something.
But there’s no alternative. Your individual actions won’t change anything and you understand that you’re literally going to be invested in you and your fellow worker being poor and the alternative is making sure you can only live paycheck to paycheck.
A friend of mine likes to taunt me whenever I wish for the end of the stock market, saying my retirement account will be gone. Oh well boo fuckin hoo. Most of the US will barely be touched and it will just be boomers living on their high horses that we’ll have to read sob stories about.
I hate it and its criminal how we’ve tied everyone’s ability to just be old and chill into this magical and fake system of rapidly moved numbers in a computer system.
Brother have you heard about the frickin’ Bitcoin ETF?! Sit down and strap in. Grab some coffee (maybe with a little whiskey in it). You’re in for a frickin’ wild ride.
Happy to help out with this comrade. In a weird way I enjoy this personal finance nonsense because it helps put on display a lot of the failings of financialized capital. What are you trying to learn? As far as retirement goes, just buy VT and chill and then retire when you can live off of 3.5-4% of your net worth a year.
Part of what screws with me is the endless non descriptive terminologies. IE I start reading and see something like “VT” and my understanding just stops. I start googling and the websites that define things often feel like microsoft documentation and only somewhat helpful.
Yeah the terminology is meant to confuse and alienate. You want to buy ETFs or Index Funds that are basically just the entire market, and maybe some bonds as you get older. That’s it. Don’t fuck with buying individual companies, the house always wins in the end. The best way to proceed is to just buy the entire market and relax, and don’t sell when it goes down. VT is just a stock you can buy that by buying you’re actually buying a very small piece of every stock in the entire world.
