vania-janet/multiturn-rag-retrieval-data huggingface dataset:
"Your argument comes down to ""he is presumed guilty until proven innocent"", a common injustice found in many authoritarian dictatorships and theocracies throughout history.    Your argument seems based on the assumption that M. Armstrong is guilty without a requirement for any evidence that he did anything.    I reject your 'guilty until proven innocent' as ethically bankrupt."
Before investing, absolutely follow the advice in mbhunter's answer. There is no safe investment (unless you count your mattress, and even there you could find moths, theives, or simple inflation taking a chunk out of your change).  There is only maximizing your reward for a given level of risk - and there is always risk. This question should be enshrined somewhere on the Q&A site for its comprehensive list of sources for information on asset allocation.  The tag is also going to have tons of good information for you. To answer your question on what slice of the pie is devoted to what, you can check out some common portfolios given by U. S. experts for U. S. investors - these should be convertible into Australian funds. Another portfolio that is, like all those above, loosely based on Modern Portfolio Theory for maximizing reward for a given level of risk is the Gone Fishin' Portfolio. A common denominator amongst these portfolios is that they emphasize index funds over mutual funds for their long-term performance and preference lazy management (yearly rebalancing is a common suggestion as the maximum level of involvement) over active management.  You can see more Lazy Portfolios.
They are there, but they are insanely slow.   A truck driver does not have to wait for the 100+ cars in front of him to bo unloaded.  A truck driver does not have to wait for the rail line to be free.  A truck driver does not have to wait for a locomotive to deliver the one car of product.  For the same reasons people own cars, there will always be trucks. Rail lines simply can not reach eveywhere.  Sending something cross country via rail can sometimes take 2-3 weeks. By truck it can take only a few days.
There are 2 primary ways to bet against a stock if you think it will decline. The first is to short sell shares of that stock the second is to buy put options (I would also add that selling naked call options would also be a bet against but I don't believe that is as common as the other 2 mentioned methods). The problem with short selling an IPO is that you first have to borrow the shares you are going to sell. Since the shares are privately held prior to the IPO that can be problematic. Even after the IPO you may have to wait a bit before shares become available to borrow.  The problem with options (either buying puts or seeking naked calls) is similar. Options are traded on a different exchange than the stock and they have their own requirements that a stock must meet to have options traded. Both of these problems eventually correct themselves however, not in time for you to catch the initial fall you seem to be looking for.
You can make a term deposit (looks like ""Fixed rate bond"" is the term), even, and at least break even - right now it looks like 1.9% is common for a 2 year term deposit in the UK. In total - my recommendation would be against paying off the mortgage early, particularly in this 2% interest rate period. 2% is around inflation levels, meaning you're not really paying any real interest, from one point of view. Once the rates are higher (4%+) then it may be worth considering. The exception here - basically the standard exception to these questions - is if you are otherwise going to spend the money on luxuries. In that case, you're better off prepaying the mortgage, at least from a personal finance perspective, if you can do so up front - but not if you're going to do it monthly. What is better for you personally in this regard is a question only you can answer, of course."
This is the real Truth and why we are soon going to find that Iran will also reverse course and every country that is able, will nuclearize.  Once the middle east is nuclear then there will be peace.  Nobody is stupid enough to trust or believe the US anymore not even our allies, especially when PePe le pew sends his shit stain of a son in law for pretend peace meetings.  I think actually in his own retarded stupid bumbling way, the Idiot in chief has actually set the world on the path to peace because everybody is going to tell America to stick freedom up its own ass.   PS: what does it have to do with the economy . . .it will bankrupt america
The actual idea behind collecting past due debt from creditors was genius. It was a legit, collectable debt… for a price. This is why and how the FDCPA was created. So when you deal with a third party collection agency you need to know that you are dealing with the dirtiest of dirtiest people. The people that are hired as debt collectors are your typical ex-felons. There is a reason for this. The good news is now there are laws put into place to protect your rights and your safety. Agencies purchase what is called ""paper"". There is ""good"" and ""bad"" paper. Good paper are accounts just sold from the original creditor. This includes all good information on the debtor such as phone number, address etc. Sometimes the debt is collected and sometimes not. Either way it is common for a collection agency to resell the paper to another collection agency. This is called 3rd placement."
I didn't say it *is* common but that it's getting so. The job market is brutal so people are looking for everything to get an advantage thus we're seeing the classic devaluation by commonality. A CFA will be worth less going forward just given the sheer number of people who seem to be studying/taking at least level I.
One of the most common types of consultancy is management consulting, which is the practice of helping organizations to improve their performance, primarily through the analysis of existing organizational problems and development of plans for improvement. Organizations may draw upon the services of management consultants for a number of reasons, including gaining external (and presumably objective) advice and access to the consultants’ specialised expertise. For more details visit our site lawyerslegalformsanddocuments.com
"When it comes to Norway there is also a cultural aspect, that translated into politics: Natural resources are seen as belonging to the people. Therefore, natural resources are not sold to the higher bidder. For instance, the oil companies pay an extremely high extra tax in Norway - around 80 % tax. This means that most of the profit from the oil and gas goes back to the people and are put into a common wealth fund - rather than going to a few share holders in oil companies. Over the years, this has added up to a considerable amount of money. This would not work in places like the US, because it is seen as ""Socialism"" not to let the oil companies and others rip off the population"
"Probably the biggest driver of the increased volumes that day was a change in sentiment towards the healthcare sector as a whole that caused many healthcare companies to experience higher volumes ( https://www.bloomberg.com/press-releases/2017-07-11/asset-acquisitions-accelerate-in-healthcare-sector-boosting-potential-revenue-growth ). Following any spike, not just sentiment related spikes, the market tends to bounce back to about where it had been previously as analysts at the investment banks start to see the stock(s) as being overbought or oversold. This is because the effect of a spike on underlying ratios such as the Sharpe ratio or the PE ratio makes the stock look less attractive to buyers and more attractive to sellers, including short sellers. Note, however, that the price is broadly still a little higher than it was before the spike as a result of this change in sentiment. Looking at the price trends on Bloomberg (https://www.bloomberg.com/quote/CDNA:US) the price had been steadily falling for the year prior to the spike but was levelling out at just over $1 in the few months immediately prior to the spike. The increased interest in the sector and the stock likely added to a general change in the direction of the price trend and caused traders (as opposed to investors) to believe that there was a change in the price trend. This will have lead to them trading the stock more heavily intraday exacerbating the spike. Note that there traders will include HFT bots as well as human traders. You question the legality of this volume increase but the simple answer is that we may never know if it was the target of traders manipulating the price or a case of insider trading. What we can see is that (taking ""animal spirits"" into account) without any evidence of illegality there are plenty of potential reasons why the spike may have occurred. Spikes are common where traders perceive a change in a trend as they rush to cash in on the change before other traders can and then sell out quickly when they realise that the price is fundamentally out of sync with the firm's underlying position. You yourself say that you have been watching the stock for some time and, by that fact alone, it is likely that others are for the same reasons that you are.
You make a accurate point.  I would like to add 2 points.  First off many people realize they do not need debt.  If they have a stable job and the car is paid off and the rent is reasonable they may never need to go into debt ever again unless to buy a home.  Second off.  The market is always swinging.  So next time we are in some sort of financial bubble people who had bankruptcy will be able to borrow like the rest of society.  I worked for a time in the finance industry and I do recall many many loans to people who declared bankruptcy.
If you have a lot of debt, I'd say first thing is to figure out what you can do to cut your expenses. Lots of things that people call ""fixed expenses"" aren't really fixed at all, they just take some effort to cut. Like if you have a big expensive house and you're paying a large mortgage, you can (probably) cut that by selling the place and moving to a cheaper house. (I say ""probably"" because the housing market may make it impossible to sell for enough to improve your situation.) If you have large heating bills, you can turn the thermostat down and get used to wearing a sweater around the house. Etc. Final note: I've talked to a fair number of people with debt problems, and I often hear them say, ""Yes, I really need to cut my spending and start paying off these debts. And I intend to ... right after I buy this one last thing that I really really want."" But of course after that there's one more vital purchase, and then another, etc. Avoid falling into this trap."
NB - I live in Surrey and bought my house in January 2014. If you don't have a very social life, it does pay to stay outside London. Places outside London are cheap and you will get a better deal in relation to houses or flats as compared to London. I feel very priced out of the market regarding London mortgages I will strongly question you logic behind this ? Why only London ? Why not live in the commuter belt outside London. Good places to reside, good schools, nice neighbourhood and away from the hustle and bustle of London. Many of my colleagues commute from Cambridge and Oxford daily into Central London and they laugh at people who want to buy a house in London, just for the sake of buying a house. It seems that the housing market is generally in a bubble due to being distorted by the finance market London house market is different from the rest of UK. People from overseas tend to invest in London property market, so it is always inflated. Even the property tax hasn't deterred many. I could look into buying somewhere and renting it out You are trying to join the same people, because of whom you have been put out of the housing market. I strictly question this logic unless your mortgage is less than the rent you pay and what rent you get. Buy a roof over your head first, then think of profiting from property.
But now you're suggesting that the losses made by Starbucks are all because of expenses made by expanding into the market. If that were the case, then, well, I doubt the management would think the UK branch is operating on a healthy basis.  Also, the point the article is trying to make is the losses are *not* just from expansion into the market. No, Starbucks in the UK is healthy and profitable, and the debt costs are inflated by bringing in debt from abroad; debt that has nothing to do with the operating and expansion costs made in the UK, and yet it lowers their tax rate.  This moving around of debt is a scheme only suitable for large multinationals, and I think it's very fair to ask if your tax system should allow such practices. After all, the smaller coffee guy on the corner or your local three-store branches don't have the ability to perform such write-offs, and therefore pay a significantly larger tax cut.
What are your goals in life?   If one of them is to appear wealthy then buying a high price import is a great place to start.  You certainly have the salary for it (congratulations BTW). If one of your goals is to build wealth, then why not buy a ~5000 to ~6000 car and have a goal to zero out that student loan by the end of the year?  You can still contribute to your 401k, and have a nice life style living on ~60K (sending 30 to the student loan). Edit: I graduated with a CS degree in '96 and have been working in the industry since '93.  When I started, demand was like it is now, rather insane.  It probably won't always be like that and I would prepare for some ups and downs in the industry. One of the things that encouraged me to lead a debt free lifestyle happened in 2008.  My employer cut salaries by 5%...no big deal they said.  Except they also cut support pay, bonuses, and 401K matching.  When the dust cleared my salary was cut 22%, and I was lucky as others were laid off.  If you are in debt a 22% pay cut hurts bad.
Gosh don't do either!  Unless you are fully funding you ROTH accounts and even then I wouldn't do it.  Those interest rates are free money.   You are giving away the best bargain in the history of home mortgages. Don't you think you can make more than 4% on your money invested?   Don't you think in 5 years you will be able to make 4% on bond/cd's/ and other low risk investments? Don't forget money you pay in the 2020's on beyond to your mortgage are inflationary dollars.  Do you think that money will be more valuable in the 20's and beyond? I don't.  Roths are free money too.  Think if you put 11k in there a year how much would you have at the end of it tax free.  There is a reason you can only put $5,500 in them, they are too good a deal tax wise to let people put too much in there. Think about this my parents bought their home in 1967 their mortgage was $170 a month.  Inflation hits and the interest they are paying at 8%! mind you, it was still a laughable amount of money each month for mortgage payment from 1977 and on. Also I bought a $450,000 house 38 months ago.  Instead of putting down 180 I put down 80 I let the other 100k in my investment account and moved 5.5k over to Roth every year. I now have a roth worth $38k and an investment account worth $105k.  I made 40k on my money those three years and the 38k is tax free! If you don't believe me call the help line at clarkhoward.com  Get over the emotional need to be debt free and make a logical finical choice.  I am begging you to think about this.  This post could save you tens of thousands of dollars. Let me put it one more way.  100k in debt with 100k in investments is debt free living.  Especially when you debt is under 4% and a tax write off.
"I bought a house when I was 22, I also had $10k in student load debt. After the down payment, I had $1,500 to my name and $82k worth of debt. All the advice pointed to ""pay the minimum payment and invest the rest."" I discarded the advice and scrimped and put everything extra to those bills. I paid it all off by the time I was 31, and now at 34 I'm self employed, have about $110,000 saved up, a house worth $105,000, 2 cars worth a total of $8,000 and no debt. Keep in mind most of those years I was making $24-$30k a year I might have lost out on a couple years of investments, but right now there are no money worries... wouldn't you rather be like that instead of worrying if you might lose your job?"
When considering whether to pay off the student loan, note that, because you work for a non-profit, some or all of that debt may be forgiven after 10 years under the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program. I would also like to be slightly contrarian on the main question. I like having lots of savings and little debt as much as the next person. But, unless you have been planning your life with the expectation that you would receive this bequest, it is a windfall. If you weren't already doing an excellent job of saving for emergencies and retirement, or had a lot of consumer debt, I'd say you should use the money to stabilize your finances before doing anything else. But your finances do seem stable. So take some of the windfall and do something nice with it. Travel to the ancestral home of your late grandmother. Endow a small scholarship in her memory. Buy some small luxury that you could never manage on your own salary. I'm not suggesting you spend it all, but using 20% of it on something otherwise out of reach will give you good memories while still leaving you materially better off.  Saving for the future is important. Paying off debt is important. Enjoying life when you can is also important. Balance is everything.
"&gt;he's confusing money with credit. Money is accumulated work, not debt.  It's not accumulated **work**, because work has no intrinsic value. Money is a placeholder for **product**. Money is a token used to distribute fractional shares of product, just like an IOU, before the product is completed and tradable.  In the case of our currency now, the risk of specific IOU-based money  becoming worthless is avoided by making it a true fiat currency. It is still, however, effectively a placeholder for **debt**. The debt is simply collective, distributed, and easily divided into arbitrary amounts to pay for goods and services. If I have worked for my employer for a week building widgets and he has given me $100, the he has a bunch of widgets and I have a piece of paper with ""$100"" printed on it. That piece of paper has little intrinsic value. It is a placeholder for a partial share of the debt owed the company for giving people widgets, which they accumulated by creating fudgits where they work, and it continues backwards all the way to the Federal Reserve which says to the banks ""I will give you $10billion if you promise to repay it later with interest"".  You know what prime rate lending is, right? **There's the debt upon which the whole system is built**."
Compare the amount of debt that someone has today with the amount of debt that they typically had in your great-grandfather's time, in the 1930s. There's a constant *drain* of wealth towards the lenders. This is one of Elizabeth Warren's favorite grousing points — people take out a *lot* more debt, particularly on housing, than they ever did in the past, and so a lot of their income is eaten year-by-year on debt service. There are lots of factors that make it easier to take out more debt. The biggest source of personal debt is [by far mortgages](http://www.utahfoundation.org/img/pdfs/rr689summary.pdf), and this is where the largest increases have taken place; policies to try to encourage people to go into debt to take out larger and larger mortgages have been steadily ramped up over this time, with the government subsidizing and taking on risk for insurance liability on mortgages to keep encouraging ever-larger amounts of debt. Lenders have computers and much more information and sophisticated systems for evaluating risk of default, which permits lending out more wealth. So there are technological changes driving this. The government has more *public debt* which means more such payments, even if they don't show up on your personal checkbook and are only seen by an increasing disparity between what you pay in taxes and the services you get back. Here's a chart of [inflation-adjusted debt per capita](http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/07/chart-of-the-day-americans-income-and-the-us-debt/241463/) in the United States. That means that there's a constant increasing in the siphoning off of taxes as well to pay for the government having purchased a good or service without having actually paid for it at the time it was ordered. That decreasing green line means not that personal debt is falling (well, most of the time) but that the government is taking out debt on your behalf even faster than private debt has been going up. **The rest of the world catching up and breaking a temporary limited monopoly on certain goods**.
I haven't done a ton of work on this case, it was before my time, but I would be very surprised if the growth wasn't accompanied by employee expansion as well. You also get the “I wish I had a way to just walk away from my debt” comment. I don’t even know where to begin explaining how asinine that is. Equity is subordinated to debt. That’s the definition of equity. The article also notes the one-sided-mattress idea, which is construed as Romney's giant scam to screw the average American while flipping this company and making his millions. The article of course didn't note that this one-sided mattress idea was a mere fraction of revenue. This was designed as an economy mattress, with an advertised shorter shelf life. Plus how can this be a scam? Would you go into the mattress store and pay the same amount for a mattress with only one side? If you would you deserve to get half of a mattress. So the crux of it is, this is in actuality an example of what an LBO should be. At least for Bain’s part. Bain took a business that was ripe for an LBO (reasonable steady FCF, low leverage), did the LBO, improved the business, and came out on top. What KKR did with it afterwords I have no idea. I would imagine it has more to do with deteriorating business conditions than the debt on its balance sheet. I work with restructurings over 100 hours a week. I of course don’t come up with the plans (I’m a lowly analyst building models and associated bitchwork) but I see just how brilliant these ideas are. In a lot of cases restructurings prevent the tripping of covenants and associated bankruptcy and allow for strategy to play out and for companies to grow. I can of course give a more detailed rant on the article, but I figured no one will read this anyway."
"As others have said, doing a monthly budget is a great idea.  I tried the tracking expenses method for years and it got me nowhere, I think for these reasons: If budgeting isn't your cup of tea, try the ""pay yourself first"" method.  Here, as soon as you get a paycheck take some substantial portion immediately and use it to pay down debt, or put it in savings (if you have no debt).   Doing this will force you to spend less money on impulse items, and force you to really watch your spending.  If you take this option, be absolutely sure you don't have any open credit accounts, or you'll just use them to make up the difference when you find yourself broke in the middle of the month. The overall key here is to get yourself into a long term mind set.  Always ask yourself things like ""Am I going to care that I didn't have this in 10 years? 5 years? 2 months? 2 days even?  And ask yourself things like ""Would I perfer this now, or this later plus being 100% debt free, and not having to worry if I have a steady paycheck"".   I think what finally kicked my butt and made me realize I needed a long term mind set was reading The Millionaire Next Door by Tom Stanley.  It made me realize that the rich get rich by constantly thinking in the long term, and therefore being more frugal, not by ""leveraging"" debt on real estate or something like 90% of the other books out there tell you."