Personal Finance

48 years old, currently have no investments. My net worth is my car and the clothes on my back, and I don't ever want to be in this situation again.

(Edit: I don't need to buy a house or anything whatsoever related to a house, so please don't mention the "h" word in your response, it's triggering me for tangential reasons. Let me be clear, I will NEVER care about real estate whatsoever, mmmkay? Just trust me when I say I have a roof over my head and it's completely paid off, no property taxes, and No, I will never sell it, so the whole h-word" aspect of life is not a concern for me, k?)

Just looking for guidance where to invest this relatively small amount of money every month so in a few years when I'm older & frailer I'll have enough for retirement. I don't want it to just sit in my bank account, I want it to grow.

For reference, I've been living on approx $1500 per month for as long as I've noticed, so I don't need much per month, and the sooner I die, the less retirement fund I'll need, but we can never predict when anyone's death will happen, so let's assume I'll live to 100 because I'm ridiculously healthy & an exceptionally good driver, never been in an accident, one speeding ticket in my entire life, no social life so I never get into risky situations, so let's just plan for the possibility I'm going to live another 50 years.

Climate Town recently did a fantastic video detailing how banks use our money just sitting around in our account to invest in fossil fuels. Wanting to avoid this, I figured it'd be better to direct my money in an investment that's at least a little less planet destroying, which lead me down this ecological rabbit hole that I thought might be worth sharing.

I know there's a lot of controversy around ESG funds, and after checking a lot of common index funds and money markets with this fund checker, that controversy is unfortunately pretty well earned. A lot of ESG funds are still heavily invested into fossil fuels, or industries and banks that support fossil fuels.

However, there are a few amount of funds that really do seem to divest fossil fuels. Unfortunately most index funds will often still be invested in unethical companies like Amazon and Google, but it's nearly impossible to truly ethically invest unless you pick individual companies, which if done in isolation is probably a recipe to lose a good chunk of your money. So I settled for at least doing better, even if it's not perfect.

I also want to note that most ESG funds tend to have pretty damn high expense ratios (the yearly fee you'll pay on your investment for them to 'manage' it), though I have found a couple that buck that trend.

The most promising fund that has a low expense ratio that was the Sphere 500 Climate Fund, which is basically a copy of the S&P 500 minus all fossil fuel investments. The only downside with it is that it's fairly limited on what investment brokers host it, with the main one being Vanguard. It has an expense ratio of 0.07%.

The other low-cost option was Vanguard's ESGV ETF, which unlike every other mainstream Total US Stock Market ESG Index from Fidelity, Shwab, or Blackrock, actually does seem to limit their fossil fuel investments. It's not perfect, as a small percentage of the portfolio is still invested in the fossil fuel industry, but it's significantly better than its peers, which gets it consideration from me, purely due to its low expense ratio and the fact that it's an ETF, so you can get it from any brokerage. It has an expense ratio of 0.09%.

Vanguard also has an ESG Total International Market Index fund (for those of you who follow the Boglehead 3-fund strategy), VSGX, with an expense ration of 0.12%.

Alternatively, if you're willing to accept a higher expense ratio (0.91%) to divest from ALL fossil fuels, the Amana Mutual Fund seems like a decent one. It has a solid performance track record, and I believe (though I may be wrong!) this is equivalent to a Total Stock Market Index Fund.

Anyway, I hope some of you found that website useful! If you have any other suggestions on climate friendy-er investing, I'd be interested to hear it. :)

FOSS/self hosted preferred, but open to anything!

I have been contributing to a HSA the last couple years, and it's been fine. My work contributes $1800 over the year and it hasn't really been a problem at all.

Now I have a kid and a spouse on my insurance, and they tend to go fairly often it seems. The copay and deductible on the HDHP is a bit crazy and I'm thinking of swapping to a PPO. Is that a good idea, or is turning down the free $1800 from my work a no no?

Here is a link to the plans

In the US, if you make a lot, are covered by a work retirement account or you contribute to a Roth, you can't deduct traditional ira contributions right?

So that money gets added to the rest of your traditional ira monies right? and then when you hit retirement age, you have to pay income level taxes on deductions on that already post tax money right?

Why get taxed twice? What's the benefit? +Not being able to touch it til retirement age.

For four decades, patient savers able to grit their teeth through bubbles, crashes and geopolitical upheaval won the money game. But the formula of building a nest egg by rebalancing a standard mix of stocks and bonds isn’t going to work nearly as well as it has.

Is anyone using Gnucash? I've been on a kick of streamlining my finances and want to simplify from my current spreadsheet for tracking expenses. I have seen Gnucash mentioned around and am considering it. Is it easy to use and import transactions from credit cards?

I hate manually entering each purchase because I invariably typo an amount somewhere and spend hours at the end of the month trying to figure out why I don't balance.

I've downloaded it and tried playing with it but it seems clunky. I'm wondering if it gets easier once you get past the learning curve. Thoughts/experiences?

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/7528778

Age	2022 Net Worth (Median) USD$
Less than 35	$39,040
35-44	$135,300
45-54	$246,700
55-64	$364,267
65-74	$410,000
75 or older	$334,700

Source:

https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/scf/dataviz/scf/chart/

I'm almost 40 and according to the wisdom found everywhere on the internet, I don't have enough saved for retirement. Which worries me because I've been saving for as long as I've had a proper job with access to a retirement vehicle. But also because the internet wisdom doesn't make sense or sound feasible.

According to what I've read, you're supposed to have:

• 1x your income when you're 30
• 3x your income when you're 40
• 6x at 50
• 8x at 60
• 10x when you retire

I'm almost 40 and I have just barely over 1x saved. So it feels like I'm 10 years behind. However, my income has grown substantially over the course of my 30s, more than doubling. So accounting for growth in income, I do have almost 3x my salary in my late 20s. But similarly, the above advice could be interpreted as needing 6x the income you had when you were 30 by they time you're 40. And by that metric, I'm doing even worse!

First time poster! Outside of my retirement account provided by work, I'm just beginning to get brave enough to move other money around. I'm very late to the game and pretty scared of gambles.

There are many high yield savings accounts out there right now. Outside of the 6-withdrawl/month restriction are there any things I should be aware of? Do people hop between savings account regularly to keep up with the highest interest rates?

UFB Direct is on the top of many charts. Backed by AXOS bank, but an Internet bank. I've put some cash there but still nervous. Any thoughts on UFB Direct and Internet banking in general? I don't necessarily need a brick and mortar. I think I've been to my local bank less than a dozen times in the lifetime of my account.

Please forgive me ignorance!

My partner recently started a new job. Prior to her employment I had been paying into my employer personal supplemental insurance as well as spousal insurance. Now that my partner has employer provided and options for employer supplemental life insurance, what should we be looking at doing? Do I stop my spousal life insurance? Or for dual income is it not bad to have both partners have self and spousal life insurance in case of things like lay offs? Also any general life insurance advice is welcome. I've never understood if it is wise to have supplemental life insurance provided by the employer or found in the open market. Thanks.

As the title says I am trying to see where people stand on this. Obviously this is all personal preference. But that is what I am after.

After depleting our savings when buying our apartment 2 years ago, we’re about to cross 6 months liquid savings in just plain old savings account with ability to immediately withdraw money.

(To clarify that is 6 month assuming 0 income, which is very unlikely given the social system of our country - so realistically we have even more in savings.)

As you can imagine, the interest in this account is not great, so I want to set a limit as to when we stop dumping every spare penny into the savings account and begin doing other things (likely try to invest).

As the title mentions, the company I work at is offering free shares when buying back some of the company's shares, as well as a discount, depending on the amount of shares purchased.

Could any of you advise me if it would be a good idea to start investing into this? If not, could anyone suggest any other investment avenues to a complete n00b like me?

Thanks in advance!

The average retirement age in the U.S. is 61, according to a 2022 Gallup survey. But the target age for retirement is 66.

So for our kids, who are still quite young, instead of opening an entire other savings account for them, we decided to do "virtual" savings accounts.

Essentially, we have a spreadsheet with what money they have gotten from birthdays and other events, then we just deposit it in our savings. They can withdraw whenever they want.

In this spreadsheet, I've been trying to keep track of interest (in a basic way), to show how saving can also help them "earn" money. However, I don't think I'm doing it correctly.

See Google sheet: dates are not correct and interest rates are not accurate. I just wanted to show that we are attempting to give the "correct" interest rate for the given date. (I know interest rates fluctuate all the time, just trying to not make it not too difficult to maintain)

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1rwwIFVOGYt-lIx8Dtuv_6PGz28jSNQbH7LcZG2qKlfg/edit?usp=sharing

Thank you for taking a look, I've been trying to get this right for a while.

Comingle is an interesting idea that would act as a pseudo emergency fund to provide a stable week to week income for their users. It could act to stabilize your income if you have an irregular income or as an backup plan or insurance for when you lose a job or income source. It works by distributing the average of all their members contributions weekly to each user. Once the service starts, the end result will be a net gain for those with low income and a payment to provide a guaranteed monthly income for higher earners.

• For those with low income, any amount of extra money can aid in the pursuit of opportunity and keep things from turning desperate.
• For freelancers and gig-workers, reliable weekly income can ease the complications of sporadic cash-flow.
• For those with more income, Comingle lets you help others, sends you a little extra cash on slow weeks, and provides a safety-net if things take a turn for the worse.

Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with them. I just got this in an email newsletter and was intrigued.