How do you think our lives will change...
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@Cindysphinx re your comment about your daughter -- exactly. I am too old for it to be relevant for me, and I'm not a parent, but as a teacher, I care deeply about what happens to my students. Who are primarily 18022 years old, may get pregnant, may identify as LGBTQ... May not have papers. May have parents that don't have papers....
These I think are more immediate than the threats to higher ed, which I think are real but will be slower to take shape.
I am also deeply concerned about something like attempting to do away with the 22nd amendment....
That's where I hope @Steve-Miller
These guys are not good at follow through.
is right.
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@wtg You win the internet today. Grave shopping. We just looked. We didn't buy anything. Lol.
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Mutual funds do not have a great history of surviving crises. Thinking of moving funds to stocks.
I don't have a public profile and I don't go to gay bars anymore. I expect more violence against gays, but expect it against the
very visible. Thought about keeping a low profile, but I could hardly be more low profile.
Some asset values were going up very nicely. They settled back down. Commodity and cotton prices are down and, therefore, my income is down a considerable amount.
I expect Jimmy Carter level inflation, possibly higher. Don't want to be liquid. -
@CHAS okay color me clueless but aren't mutual funds often stocks? What kind of mutual funds are you talking about?
A few days ago Mr Pique told me he'd moved a large sum out of stocks and into cash. I chided him for trying to time the market. He said "it's going down." Well looky here, he was right.
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@Steve-Miller said in How do you think our lives will change...:
I think it’s important to remember the threats and chaos from the previous Trump administration vs. what actually happened to average folks. Tariffs and the tax cut is all I remember.
As far as a personal impact, I doubt a Trump administration will have much of an adverse affect on me.
The rest of the country and the world? I don't like what I see coming. And am trying to figure out how I can contribute to preventing what I think will be unhealthy changes for the world.
These guys are not good at follow through.
He stumbled into the presidency in 2016. I think it's "game on" this time around and the people surrounding him have agendas and now have the power to move forward to implement them.
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@pique There are many kinds of mutual funds. Stocks are one kind.
I try to avoid mutual funds. If I buy and hold an individual stock and its value increases over ten years, I will owe capital gains tax when I sell. No other taxes or admin costs.
Say I buy a successful mutual fund and hold for ten years. Each year, the manager buys and sells stocks within the portfolio. I owe taxes on my piece of the action each year, not just at the end. I think I also owe tax when I sell at the end. And there are administrative costs too.
That seemed to be the situation when I stopped buying mutual funds. There was one year in the 90s when our mutual funds threw off all of this taxable income. I was so annoyed that I now buy and hold individual stocks.
I still use mutual funds for retirement accounts because those don't have immediate tax consequences.
Everyone, please correct me if I'm wrong. I might be.
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I'd offer a detailed reply, but it's just too damned depressing. Suffice to say that we expect our lives to change dramatically, and we've had serious conversations about what the trigger would be for us leaving.
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Oh Dewey... no words.
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@Cindysphinx there are mutual funds that have extremely low fees. Vanguard offers them. Have a look. I would personally rather have a someone managing a portfolio or go with an index fund that tracks a certain segment of the market than pick individual stocks. But that's because I don't want to have to pay a lot of attention to it.
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@pique Understood. My undergrad degree was in finance, so used to know how to evaluate stocks. I'm a little rusty, but I don't mind it. When we have some money, I think about what companies have a good product or service. I check a few basic pieces of data, like price earnings, and I check various analysts outlooks and news reports, looking for trouble.
I don't buy anything I don't understand, so no crypto or gold bars. I stay away from anything trendy because trends come and go. Buy and hold strategy doesnt mix well with the latest flash in the pan. In a way, buying a few of your own stocks is kind of fun, kind of like going to Vegas, except you usually make money over time.
Some of my.picks have done super well, and others have cratered. But . . . No taxes and no fees.
Someday I will compare my picks with my retirement mutual funds. For now, I don't want to know.
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Berkshire Hathaway, the stock that's basically a mutual fund...
