vania-janet/multiturn-rag-retrieval-data huggingface dataset:
"Cash/CD's for a house downpayment = Good. Resist the urge to invest this money unless you're not planning on the house for at least 5 years. Roth IRA - Good. Amounts contributed are able to be withdrawn without tax penalties, though you would really need to be in a crisis for this to be a good idea. It's your long-term, retirement money. The earlier you start, the better. Use your 401K at work, if it's offered. Contribute to the Roth as much as you can, as well. Whole life (""Cash value"") life insurance: Be careful... Cash-value life insurance (Whole, Universal, Variable Universal) must be watched more closely as you age. Once they reach that ""magical"" point of being self-sustaining, you cannot relax. The annual cost of insurance is taken from the cash value, which your premium payments replenish. If you stop making premium payments, eventually the cost of insurance (which goes up every year) will erode your cash value down to nothing, at which point more premium must be paid to keep the policy in force. This often happens in your old age, when you can least afford the surprise, and costs are highest. Some advisors get messed up in their priorities when they start depending on the 8-10% commissions they are paid on insurance policies. Since premiums for cash-value policies are far higher than for term policies, you might get some insight into your advisor if they ignore your attempts to consider a term policy. Because of the insurance costs' effects on your cash value, these types of policies are some of the most inefficient and expensive ways to invest. You are better off not investing via a life insurance policy. You don't need life insurance unless someone depends on your financial contribution to their life (spouse and children, for example). Some people just like the peace of mind it brings, and some people want a lump sum to leave as a gift to their loved ones (which is an expensive way to leave a gift).  You can have these ""feel-good"" benefits with a term policy for much less money, if you must have them. Unless you expect to become uninsurable at some point in the future, you should consider using term insurance to meet your life insurance needs until it is no longer needed."
Yes.  It is understandable if someone is driven to earn that level of income.  There are places for that.  But consider this. In humanitarian missions, majors and colonels are entrusted with massive logistical constraints.  Think Kobe, Haiti, the 2004 Tsunami.  In wartime, lieutenants are entrusted with the lives of their troops.  The ability to assume leadership and make good judgements requires the experience of having made bad judgements and understanding the consequences of those on your organization. People can rise to that challenge.  Anyone requiring further proof should consider [the case of Japan](http://www.economist.com/blogs/newsbook/2010/06/japanese_executive_pay).  The article argues for higher pay, but the point is that large corporations in Japan have not done so and succeeded.
In addition to the already good answers you also want to consider your time horizon. Unless you are looking out 10+ years, building your down payment in an account that is invested in the market is probably subject to too much market risk. Are you willing to delay purchasing a home by five years if the market turns down at the wrong time? A better option is to just use a savings accounts. To avoid spending the money, you can open a dedicated account. Separate savings account for a special purpose are s common feature at credit unions and probably are available at many regular banks as well. Then for funding the account, many employers allow you to split direct deposits amongst multiple accounts, so you will just need to provide the routing number and fractional amount of your paycheck for that account.
I would say the real story is less about the implications of low vol but rather what has caused it. IMO that would be:  1) lots of money chasing a handful of investments    a) loose monetary policy    b) wealth effects from fantastic returns since the GR    c) consolidation in various sectors (health, energy, tech)  2) rise of low cost index funds (all inflow go into the large swathes of the market so volatility across stocks is dampened)   3) various externalities of expansionary Fed policy    a) resulting low bond yields lead to larger flows into equities     b) low cost of debt feeding buybacks     c) it has been sustained for so long it has had stabilizing effect i.e. predictability is good for markets and business decision making   These factors make for an interesting story because what happens when some component of this system begins to show cracks? What happens when this low vol feedback loop ceases? Nobody knows. But it will not continue ad infinitum. Not all doom and gloom but it won't be the market we are used to today.
Depends on the insurance company itself, as well as the costs of treatments. Imagine an ideal scenario where costs of treatments stayed the same, and that all insurance plans were segregated and pulled from the same pool of funds to pay for treatments. Then employer subsidized health insurance plans would be unaffected by the drama in the ACA plans. Those are the factors to consider, from my understanding. But I wouldn't be surprised if the burdens of accepting people that would previously never have been serviced by these companies has greatly distorted the market as a whole.
I'm more of a free market man myself. BUT, I do understand the balance of regulations, the problem is heavily regulating can actually cause market failure as well. There is a balance some where, as to what the laws say today? I'm not sure, but I think they should be altered. Commercial military isn't a bad thing they pay good wages to ex rangers and SF guys as far as I'm concerned. There's always going to be good business decisions that aren't good for humans, look at how people are massively advertised to, Companies pay psychologist just to figure out better ways to market. It's about getting people more informed, so that those negative companies die out from demand declining. This is how you keep an economy stable, when you are changing laws left and right it causes more speculation.
&gt; statement someone out of touch with reality would make... someone who is either naive, or has had everything handed to them for most of his/her life.  So absurd.  I love how this is just the go-to excuse.  As if no one can make it on their own.  I must have been provided with my wealth.  News flash! There are some people who don't accept the social class they were born into.  They get up and they do something about it.  They don't complain.  They don't beg.  They create.  They innovate.  They build.  They make good decisions.  &gt; Not everyone has the time, people might have families, mortgages, debt to pay off,  You act like all of this is random though.  As if someone randomly wake up one day and has $40k in debt, a wife who doesn't work and three kids to feed.  Those factors aren't random.  That guy chose that life.  What I'm suggesting is that we change the way we educate.  Instead of corralling kids into over-priced institutions where they earn meaningless degrees for $200k a pop, push alternatives.
"If you are not worried about timing the market and want to buy primarily ""blue chip"" stocks to hold for a while, consider using Loyal3. They don't charge any commission. The downside is that trades are executed at the end of the day and there's only about 60 companies currently available (but there are some really good ones currently available)."
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"Probably not, though there are a few things to be said for understanding what you are doing here. Primerica acts as an independent financial services firm and thus has various partners that specialize in various financial instruments and thus there may exist other firms that Primerica doesn't use that could offer better products. Now, how much do you want to value your time as it could take more than a few months to go through every possible insurance firm and broker to see what rate you could get for the specific insurance you want. There is also the question of what constitutes best here. Is it paying the minimal premiums before getting a payout? That would be my interpretation though this requires some amazing guesswork to know when to start paying a policy to pay out so quickly that the insurance company takes a major loss on the policy. Similarly, there are thousands of mutual funds out there and it is incredibly difficult to determine which ones would be best for your situation. How much risk do you want to take? How often do you plan to add to it? What kind of accounts are you using for these investments, e.g. IRAs or just regular taxable accounts? Do tax implications of the investments matter? Thus, I'd likely want to suggest you consider this question: How much trust do you have that this company will work well for you in handling the duty of managing your investments and insurance needs? If you trust them, then buy what they suggest. If you don't, then buy somewhere else but be careful about what kind of price are you prepared to pay to find the mythical ""best"" as those usually only become clear in hindsight. When it comes to trusting a company in case, there are more than a few factors I'd likely use: Questions - How well do they answer your questions or concerns from your perspective? Do you feel that these are being treated with respect or do you get the feeling they want to say, ""What the heck are you thinking for asking that?"" in a kind of conceited perspective. Structure of meeting - Do you like to have an agenda and things all planned out or are you more of the spontaneous, ""We'll figure it out"" kind of person? This is about how well do they know you and set things up to suit you well.
In addition to the answer from CQM, let me answer your 'am I missing anything?' question. Then I'll talk about how your approach of simplifying this is making it both harder and easier for you. Last I'll show what my model for this would look like, but if you aren't capable of stacking this up yourself, then you REALLY shouldn't be borrowing 10,000 to try to make money on the margin. Am I missing anything? YES. You're forgetting (1) taxes, specifically income tax, and (2) sales commissions//transaction fees. On the first: You have not considered anything in your financial model for taxes. You should include at least 25% of your expected returns going to taxes, because anything that you buy... and then sell within 12 months... is taxed as income. Not capital gains. On the second: you will incur sales commissions and/or transaction fees depending on the brokerage you are using for your plan. These tend to vary widely, but I would expect to spend at least $25 per sale. So if I were building out this model I would think that your break-even would have to at least cover: monthly interest + monthly principal payment income tax when sold commissions and broker's fees every time you sell holdings On over-simplifying: You have the right idea with thinking about both interest and principal in trying to sketch this out. But as I mentioned above, you're making this both harder and easier for yourself. You are making it harder because you are doing the math wrong. The actual payment for this loan (assuming it is a normal loan) can be found most easily with the PMT function in Excel: =PMT(rate,NPER,PV,FV)... =PMT(.003, 24, -10000, 0). That returns a monthly payment (of principal + interest) of 432.47. So you actually are over-calculating the payment by $14/month with your ballpark approach. However, you didn't actually have all the factors in the model to begin with, so that doesn't matter much.
"Financially speaking, you are absolutely right. But there are lots of conflicting messages out there that can't be boiled down to economics:  EX:   &gt;""Why aren't you giving your grandmother children before she dies?""  &gt;""I bought a house at 23. Why are you still renting?""  &gt;""Who is going to take care of your parents when we they get old?""  &gt;""If you don't have X by age Y, then there's something wrong with you""  Everyone had their own life, with their own circumstances. One person's formula for success might not work for others through no fault of their own. I have a very good friend who will never be successful in the eyes of her family until she is married with children. She works at Bank of China and makes a ton more than I do.   This is not to mention all of the industries promoting *their* product as the benchmark for achieving life goals. From real estate to jewellery, these industries can't survive off of the super wealthy alone, and they don't care what poor decisions customers make so long as it's poor decisions buying their products.   All I'm saying it's we shouldn't be blaming the deer for dying when the forest is covered in traps."
"You want to combine a set of techniques to avoid throwing food away. Consider setting aside a weekend day or other non-busy time to do some food prep.  Check to see if there is anything in the fridge that needs to be used quickly and prioritize meals that use that item.  Make a weekly menu and get your groceries.  Chop all the vegetables and fruits you need for the week's meals.  Cook meats that can be cooked in advance.  Chefs call the concept of having everything ready for making a meal ""mis en place.""  Try to do yours in advance to energize you for cooking and also make you more likely to cook on those nights you've been at the office late. Get to know and love your freezer.  Buy frozen meat in bulk and portion individually (wrap 1/2 lb blocks of ground beef and chicken pieces in foil then store in freezer bags, for example).  Get frozen packaged fish fillets for seafood.  Boil a whole chicken, shred the meat, and have on hand for easy meals like tacos, enchiladas, chicken pot pie, pasta, etc.  Do the same with beef roasts or pork shoulder for pulled pork, etc.  Freeze vegetables and fruits if you can't use them in time (or buy frozen vegetables to begin with).  You can even consider making dumplings like perogis or pelmeni and freezing for a homemade alternative to a frozen food aisle meal.  You can even go all the way with freezer cooking. Cook with shelf-stable items.  Rice, pasta, beans, lentils, canned goods, and other items can be made into major components of a meal. When you do buy something perishable that doesn't freeze well, try to utilize it in more than one of your meals for the week.  This works well for items like fresh herbs. If you don't want to spend a lot of time cooking, a source like stonesoup is a great place to start - many recipes there can be finished in under 10 minutes, most are five ingredients or less, and all are tasty and good for you. This question from Seasoned Advice has a lot of great suggestions, although geared towards a college student, that you should consider."
You notice, how at the base of all these funds, investment decisions are still made by humans. For instance, long the dollar, long oil, short this or that, etc. Although quant funds employ a lot of tech and math, it all still boils down to what the managers want to bet on.
&gt;What I was talking about is personal income tax   Got it, thanks for clarifying.  &gt;That would mean Amazon would need to offer 5k more pay for an equal job vs an employer in another state.  I think cost of living would also be a factor. So I don't know that a state with income tax would automatically not make the cut, as you asserted in your first comment, because the cost of living might be cheaper and even everything out.  &gt;This is just one factor a company this huge would consider when moving.   Agreed, there are numerous factors that Amazon will have to consider so I see no reason why a state that has an income tax should not submit an application.
"Ask yourself the same question for furniture making. Would you feel more comfortable sitting in a chair that you made yourself versus one that you bought from a furniture store?  How about one that you bought from IKEA and assembled? For an experienced, competent furniture maker, you might be able to make an equivalent chair for less money and be highly confident.  For a ""DIY"" builder, you might be less confident but be willing to take more of a risk with the possibility of making a good chair for less money (and gain experience on what not to do next time).   The same applies to investing - if you are highly confident in your own abilities, DIY investing may work better for you.  For the ""general population"", however, relying on experts to do the hard work (and paying a little more for their services) is probably a better option and gives you more confidence. As for the second quote, I'm note sure there's a causality there.  If anything, I think it's the other way around - people who have more money saved for retirement are more likely to use investment advisors."
Here's an easy test...   Look at the investments in your portfolio and ask yourself whether if you had the cash value, would you buy those same investments today, because effectively that is what you are doing when you continue to hold. If the answer is no, sell and pick something else. Above all else, don't react to market swings, in most cases you are going to get it wrong and wind up losing more by making emotional decisions.
Pre-1934 dollars, like virtually all paper currency until fairly recently, could be redeemed for physical gold or silver at a Federal Reserve Bank, and dollars were only printed if the treasury had enough physical gold and silver to ""pay off"" the bearer with precious metals. For a whole lot of reasons that are topics for another discussion, decisions were made that eventually led to the abandonment of the ""gold standard"" and now the dollar, like most modern currencies, is pure fiat paper: it's only ""worth"" whatever everyone agrees it is worth, and can only be ""redeemed"" by trading it to someone else for whatever they will give you for it. There are long, loud, and ongoing feuds over whether that was a good idea, and I'm not going to get into that here."
"I don't disagree that it is terrible what the current job situation is doing to people.  And I didn't mean to imply that I thought it was ""good"" that in the dot-com bust people had to leave the field and find new careers.  As I said before, this situation ""exists"".  It's not good or bad, it's just how it is.  The dot-com bust made a lot of engineers unemployable, receptionists and secretaries aren't in demand anymore, and there's nothing we can do to change the economics of the situation.  I'm certain a tax credit for hiring the chronically unemployeed won't help, which is the point I came here to argue.    If you're chastising me for being unsympathetic to those who dealing with this on a personal level, fine, I'll consider myself chastized.  I'm still not seeing the point of your statements -- what are you suggesting needs to be done to help out the woman in TFA?"
"Ah I got ya. I partially agree with you, but it's far more complex. I think that is simplifying the debate a bit too much. When people go ""passive"" you are making the assumption that they are able to stay fully invested the full time period (say 30-40 years until retirement when you might change the asset allocation). This is not a fair assumption because many studies on behavioral finance have shown that people (90% plus) are not able to sit tight through a full market cycle and often sell out during a bear market. I'm not debating you're point that passive often outperforms due to the fees (although there are many managers that do outperform), but the main issue with self-managing and passive investing is people usually make emotional decisions, which then hurts their long-term performance. This would be the reason to hire an adviser. Assuming that people are able to stay passive the entire time and not make a single ""active"" decision is a very unfair assumption. There was a good study on this referenced in Forbes article below: https://www.forbes.com/sites/advisor/2014/04/24/why-the-average-investors-investment-return-is-so-low/#5169be2b111a  Another issue is that there are a lot ""active managers"" that really just replicate their benchmarks and don't actually actively manage. If you look at active managers who really do have huge under-weights and over-weights relative to their benchmarks they actually tend to outperform them (look at the study below by martin cremers, he's one of the most highly respected researchers when it comes to investment performance research and the active vs passive debate)  http://www.cfapubs.org/doi/pdf/10.2469/faj.v73.n2.4  I guess what I'm trying to say is that for most people having an adviser (and paying them a 1% fee) is usually better than going it alone, where they are going to A. chase heat (I bet they always choose the hottest benchmark from the past few years) and B. make poor emotional decisions relating their finances."
I personally do not buy any those so-call forecasts - look no further than the economic forecasts by those experts with PhDs over the last decade or so.  Truth is there are too many factors that affects the tuition fees that far down the road (think inflation, cost of living, the method for which the education is being delivered, anticipated salary for the teachers, the ratio of schools and students, your children's ability to obtain scholarship money, and etc). Put in what you can afford for RESP - I put in $2000 annually per child to take maximum advantage of the 20% government matching.  And be prepare to augment that with additional fund in 18 years.  I am prepared to take on significant loans if my children both decided and qualified for graduated studies in specialized fields in a prestige universities - I have had met people with graduate degrees from Harvard and Cambridge and the obscure sum they (or their parents) paid on tuition are about as good investment as I have ever seen.  Education is one of the best gifts any parent could give to their child.
And for your amusement and entertainment, the Orange Orangutan will be assaulting the teleprompter, soon, in an effort to impress upon you why making him and his friends and puppet masters richer is your patriotic duty and even though you are too fucking stupid to understand, its good for you, so just shut the fuck up and lube up, because this is going to hurt you a lot more than him.  Especially if you are on your knees