All Things Economic

Venmo is another great place to send dollars for euthenasia. Seems to be their whole business model.

As a wise millionaire told me.. do NOT allow people to manage your money, learn and do it yourself as they make money even if it goes down !

I have used well known brokers in past and watch them make money and churn accounts.. not for me. I am also not at an age I want to lose what we have saved

Its not hard to learn what strategies to do and and with CD interest rates on Schwab now at 5.4% which pay monthly.. I will stick with my strategy of short one week option trading, buy and sell as stocks go up daily, and get out sitting with CD's that pay monthly and watch this shit show until we have some real direction in the markets.

Lets say on a $250,000 modest portfolio one can get $13,500 in interest now add in buy and sell lets say some NVDA or MSFT, Dell, etc and you have a winning combination that no one gets fees for. Learn how to read charts and watch the direction and news on such things as AI , etc making the headlines.. but get involved with your own money.

"... for traditionally dormant money in our checking accounts..."

Send your dormant dollars to me, I'll put those lazy fuckers to work.

Speaking of Treasuries, I'm investigating Evergreenmoney. They have a high yield checking account that is swept into T-Bills currently at a 5.31% yield, tax free, equivalent to almost 7% taxed. Not bad for traditionally dormant money in our checking accounts earning basically nothing.

my exxon stock is down .30%

Oh I didn’t realize I am already in a government money market Spaxx . I have a managed account , I have some cash on hand in Spaxx government Money market 4.98% . All dividends go into the managed account . And I have my mad money in my individual stocks. ..Dumb me , I never seen any growth in Spaxx. .

I know , Ihave seen this on the web page …Do I do Treasuries or more Nvidia

currentrider - I meant to mention to @funfor2houston that since they already have a Fidelity account, they can buy and sell them through that and do not need a TreasuryDirect account. If you Google "youtube fidelity t bill" you can find clips that walk you through it. You can of course do that through other brokerage accounts as well.

@Mayhem,

I have a very long term broker who handles this for me. I recently helped my Girlfriend set up treasury trades on etrade. Pretty straightforward and she mostly figured it out on her own (not really her forte' so that's saying something).

Another benefit of short term Treasuries is their liquidity. The downside is correspondingly limited to something less than the coupon on the bond (right now roughly 5.5% on the three month T Bill) depending on when you sell it. You can do this directly on eTrade.

We have used Fidelity for years . Are they special …I don’t know .. We just got hooked into them 25 years ago. There is another forum out there for retired people and they discuss financial planners every year . Fidelity always is one or two Vanguard is the other. For me it is too hard to manage our money and I am not smart enough. Wait till you get into the Medicare with supplement or Advantage for insurance. ..

When you look at t bill rates you'll see a High Rate and an Investment Rate. I wondered what that was and found this post that I thought explained it well -

The easiest way to understand the difference is using a 52 week tbill auctioned on 12/1/22. The High rate is 4.555 and the Investment rate is 4.784.

if you buy $10k worth of them, you actually dont pay $10k, you pay $9544.50 and at maturity you get $10k. So, you earned $10000-$9544.50 in interest, or $455.50 on a $9544.50 investment, and that amounts to 4.78% rate on your investment.

You are allowed to put up to $10M in t-bills. Not all that long ago they where < 3% interest, and they will not stay 5%+ forever, but seems like a good deal at the moment.

I still need to set up a brokerage account to be able to sell them and will probably go with Fidelity. You link the TreasuryDirect account to a bank account, but I only use the DCU and they do not sell t-bills. Plus a bank is very likely to charge a commission to sell t-bills.

My financial planner has told me over good and terrible bad the stock market will average 4% . So for example say
2 million 80k a year never touching the principal . But 5% guaranteed is really good . We are getting older and really need to take profits off and put into something g secure …We have a managed account and it churns so quick my head spins . I have some mad money in Tost and Nividia …That Nividia split 10 / 1 . I think it might split again in another year.

There are no fees/loads to buy them. You buy at a discounted amount and they are worth a set amount when they mature. You choose the maturity time of 4, 8, 13, 17, 26 or 52 weeks.

You don't know what your actual rate will be until you purchase them, and that date is referred to as an auction date, but not really an auction in the traditional sense that you're bidding.

For easy math, lets say you went with a 52 week maturity and at auction time your rate was 5%. Assuming you went with the minimum purchase ($100), you'd pay $95 and it would be worth $100 when it matured a year later, if I have it all correct.

For shorter maturity times, you'd have to divide that 5% rate into the amount of days in a year and multiply that by the number of days it matures. Again, for basic easy math, if you got the $100 t-bill at 5% and you decided to get one that matured in 26 weeks, you'd buy at $97.50 and it would be worth $100 at maturity,

To sell them, you have to transfer them to a bank or brokerage firm and they may charge a transaction fee, so it likely pays to shop around for brokers that have minimal fees. So long as you do not need to involve an agent, I believe there are no fees to transfer and sell t-bills via a Fidelity account, but I'm new at this game so others may be able to better answer that if I have this wrong.

Are there any fees or loads ?

Just put in an order for our first T-Bill purchase using TreasuryDirect. Pretty straightforward and seems like a no brainer to use some of that cash we have in the bank getting very little interest.

I love it when I spell Dessert like an arid wasteland. I seem to do it often.

The dessert first mentality is a fundamental tradeoff and cannot be ignored. Lifetime work habits, savings habits and frugality have no equal. I have no doubt that the young people who are talking themselves into doing it today will be bitter about it tomorrow. And blame the government. Or "corporate greed". Or some such.

It's not like people weren't self absorbed when I was in my 20s. Or living "for today". Or beating themselves up about work/life balance. I certainly did. For decades. Until I finally realized the only person in the way of that balance was me.

I do not regret those sacrifices. Time has made those investments pay off in spades. And time is a huge factor. It's not like I opted for crap versions of the things I really enjoyed along the way. Like good beer. It's more that I was brutal about not wasting money on things I didn't need. And doing what I could on my own (not that that always worked out perfectly). I suppose I owe that latter trait to my tight assed old man who grew up in the depression. Having a university professor dad who never owned a new lawn mower was not super fun for the kid who had to mow the grass. But, hey, I did learn how to fix small engines. And how to adapt (sort of) a Sears grass catcher to an old Toro mower. LOL I hated how cheap he was at the time but it definitely left a mark.

lobster rolls are going up

"dessert is dinner"

All too often the dinner portions are so big that I've decided that appetizers plus dessert makes more sense when we go to a restaurant! That way I get to enjoy things I either can't or don't make at home because of a lack of equipment or a house full of diabetics.

I remember reading about the grasshopper and the ant as a very young child and deciding to figure out a way to do both. Sometimes dessert is dinner and my advice to my kids and niblings is that if you spend less than you make, no matter how little that might be, you aren't poor, a lesson I field tested in my teens and twenties.

"...conversations I've had with Gen Xers and Milennials lately regarding the "Life is uncertain, eat desert first" approach..."

Life has always been uncertain.

Pretty sure If you eat dessert first and then live a long life you're going to be more miserable than if you sacrifice a bit now and save for the future. The safety net you create for yourself is bound to be more reliable than the safety net provided by the government (which can be here today and gone tomorrow as political priorities change).

Catching up:

I've had Cadillac health insurance (Teamsters) before, so I know crappy insurance when I see it. I've had that for 24years now. I call it "DCS". Doesn't cover shit. But it only costs a bit over $11,000 per year. Then again, you don't buy homeowner's insurance in case the dog pees on the carpet. We have come to expect annuitized health care, not insurance, in this country.

I have my ready cash in a money market and all my other available cash in short term T-bills. I'm not even thinking stocks for the near term. The valuations get more absurd by the week. If I was younger I would just keep investing in stocks prorgramatically. But when an index like the S and P is overvalued by 80-90%, a correction could take easily 8-10 years to return to base line. I'll take 5 and a half percent on treasuries as long as that's on the table.

I would really like to revisit 8-Inch's post ending in "The game is rigged". Lot's to unpack there and reinds me of some conversations I've had with Gen Xers and Milennials lately regarding the "Life is uncertain, eat desert first" approach.

exxon up 3% today

I've been accumulating Nividia for years, both individually, and through ETF's. It's nothing new. I'm just diversified.

@luver , I said this before and tomorrow will be a good time . Buy Nividia . It dived today but a year from now will hit 300.00 . The CEO just sold a bunch of shares and people got scared .