Scholarship table
HardsSounds like your Mom and Dad did it the right way. There are plenty of good stories out there, but I am afraid there are going to be a lot of very disappointed boomers in the upcoming months and years.
I'm sure I mentioned it in the retirement thread, but pensions, SS and other guaranteed income sources are key to retirement. Countless studies have shown that the people who are happiest in retirement and live longer in retirement tend to have guaranteed income sources, incomes they can't outlive.Early in my career I had the mindset that retirement planning was all about accumulation of assets, but then I met a guy that basically said, no, his statement to me was, you don't retire on assets, you retire on income.His point was to make sure you have enough guaranteed income streams to cover your essential expenses, if pension/SS or dividend income can do that great, if not consider using a portion of your assets to buy an annuity. You can then use your other non-guaranteed assets to fund your discretionary expenses.
jesmuWhat commentary makes you chuckle?
An actual attempt at humor. Good job, ziggy.
I think it depends. I know companies who have not changed prices cause they have, lets say a 50% markup, to their end customer. Thats a bit rich most of the time. Now that their costs have gone up 10%, they're tempted to raise their prices, but that may also trigger an evaluation of overall costs by the end customer, so they'll take short term heat hoping things temper down and they can keep their favorable long term markup.And FWIW, not all price competition is equal. For example, in my industry niche, we are the clear quality leader. But our main competition is involved in a variety of different product lines and their competitive product to ours is usually a loss leader, or attempted add-on. So we need to be VERY careful moving prices due to market factors, or inflation, cause while good, reliable customers understand the difference and value, others view it as a keeping up with the Jones' box tick and will take any excuse to cut costs. Its stupid, but sometimes that's business. Same as when new management boots a long time reliable supplier just to shake things up and put "their mark" on a business.
An attempt, but an abject failure as usual. Bitterness isn't really humor.
We haven't raised prices but as I mentioned last week our customers get a Fab + Average Monthly Metal value so the total price floats up when metals do.
That sounds like very transparent pricing. Fab should be crawling up with the increased cost of labor?
We're kind of a niche business. It's pretty much industry standard especially when it comes to copper alloys. Our labor is not really going up. We had some long tenure people retire and replaced by people who make way less even though we greatly increased the starting hourly rate to be more competitive. Plus like someone else said, if we increase too much we will lose business. We sell internationally and international customers prefer our wire for quality reasons as long as our price is in the neighborhood of Asian suppliers, but if we go too high they will switch for the lower price and eat the high scrap rate from the Asian suppliers.
Unfortunately, pensions are going the way of the wooly mammoth. Fewer and fewer companies offer them, and many that still have pensions for older employees make newer hires ineligible for them. So that leaves employees with self-funded options like 401ks, and many companies don't even match any contributions. Annuities come with a variety of fees and limitations, so they're a far from perfect alternative.My wife and I will get some pension money, and I also have set up our stock portfolio to pay out fairly significant dividend income. There are good and bad things about Dividend Growth Investing, but one of the good things is that even when the stock market goes down, an income stream continues to grow.
Question for Bitcoin/crypto folks: Are you buying more here, selling, standing pat? Are you as enthusiastic about crypto as you had been?I am a crypto agnostic.I have considered buying some but haven't because I decided it doesn't really fit my buy-and-holdish investment philosophy. But I am not one who makes fun of others for owning it, and I have friends who invested several years ago who are still way up -- and still enthusiastic about Bitcoin and a couple other big crypto players while critical of the likes of Dogecoin.I will say that I am skeptical of Fidelity's decision to make crypto available within 401k plans. Many who invest only through 401ks -- and that covers a wide swath of U.S. investors -- do not follow the market very closely.
I'm still way up, but don't have a ton of cash sitting around to throw more at it. The LUNA story and UST story is interesting. Worth a read.Personally, I don't buy the alt coins. I primarily own BTC and ETH. A couple of bucks here in there in other projects, but not enough to worry about.BTC goes through these cycles every couple of years and people (and the media) absolutely freak out. And then what has happened every time? It rebounds and finds a new ATH. No offense, MU82, but if I was your age and retired I'd only be doing a few bucks here and there. It is still and will continue to be a very volatile asset. At least until it can untether itself from the stock market... which may be never.
It's great that you can rely on pensions and SS, two guaranteed sources of lifetime income. Dividend income is nice too, but of course not guaranteed, if you recall after the financial crisis of 2008, many companies eliminated or reduced their dividends, so while I am a big believer in buying dividend paying stocks, I also think annuities can be a nice tool in retirement planning. I understand that there are expenses associated with them, but you are buying something with that money, a guaranteed lifetime income that can sometimes be as high as 6%, depending on age. It's not something I recommend for everyone, but for some clients they make sense.
Question for Bitcoin/crypto folks: Are you buying more here, selling, standing pat? Are you as enthusiastic about crypto as you had been?
Can you share?
Only adjacent to your question because I was in on COIN early, but don't actually trade crypto itself. But I'm trying to time the bottom and double down here pretty shortly. To Hards' point, this is just the volatility of crypto, so for me the real bet is "is crypto here to stay?" I think the answer is yes, even though I think it will only play a secondary/cyclical role to other currencies and investments. But even that, combined with what I think is Coinbase's still relatively strong position compared to other exchanges, is good enough for me to get in at this low.