> Seven of the top ten results are trying to sell you something, which really makes you question the objectivity of the advice.

This is true when searching for pretty much everything in Google nowadays, that's why if you're looking for any info, searching on reddit usually yields much more objective and generally better results.

Agreed, I often default to Reddit or HN for a lot of stuff although there are an increasing number of obvious adverts disguised as genuine posts (see r/hailcorporate for some examples).

More difficult to spot are marketing firms who curate a bunch of fake accounts, make them seem like "real people" by posting random content but interspersing this with subtle ads. There was an AMA recently from someone working at a firm that does this, they even gave their accounts personalities by posting in specific related subs (e.g. hiking, outdoors) in order to advertise boots. Unfortunately I can't seem to find it now, but still my point is that even though Reddit generally leads to better advice take it with a grain of salt.

Edit: Found it, wasn't an AMA but just a comment: https://old.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/f9rjh0/he_dressed_up_...

Although I don't see a reason not to trust this comment, the line about "we have seen great success with this method" had me wondering how they measure the impact of this strategy? It seems this would be quite time and effort intensive, therefore expensive. How do they know they can attribute sales to this since presumably they aren't providing affiliate links as that'd be too obvious?

It was not just marketing, but PR too, for example she bragged about when Whirlpool had a serious problem with one of their washing machines in my country, and it was going viral, so Whirlpool paid the marketing agency to make all fake profiles (even ones not belonging to their campaigns) make other viral posts to drown out the washing machine one. She bragged about two things: 1. It worked, the "counter-viral" campaign successfully made people ignore the washing machine issue. 2. They got paid ludicrous amounts of money (she hinted that each account with 5000 followers, that was Facebook limit, was worth some thousands USD, and that they had many, many accounts, precisely to go around that 5000 follower limit, for example if a company ordered 50.000 followers from them, they would setup 10 fake accounts and try to attract 5000 real people in each, each account with different hobbies to try to attract different people).

EDIT: some other interesting info:

* They had a huge cache of personal photos, to make it look like the person was real, there are even stock photo agencies that create these photos, for example take a female and a male actor to tourist destinations and take pictures to make them look like a couple doing romantic things, then they would release the photos slowly, so people wouldn't notice it was fake, and to stretch their money for photo purchases.

* They would get sometimes employees with real hobbies, and have them take care of fake accounts with same hobbies, so a surfer for example would have some 8 accounts under her care, each for a different company, and write some surfing content that is real, but tweak and then repost on all 8, with differences, and adjusting to fit each profile.

* Another technique at the time was the sale of "instantaneous company profile", you made a fake profile, and made it get genuinely popular with a target demographic, then you sold it to someone, after the sale you could edit the account to turn it from a person to a fan-page, with the category correct for the company that bought it, so a company could buy a fan-page for them with 5000 real followers that actually are about the subject. I never asked how often people would realize what happened and unfollow... but I guessed most people wouldn't bother with unfollowing anyway.

Marketing is a massive business. It makes a shit ton of money. FB and GOOG are ad companies at the end of the day, and there’s ton of little companies that they nurture as side effects.

There are difinitely some posters, who are clearly promoting given brand, but.. 9/10 it is pretty apparent, so again drowned in HN sea.

Incidentally, have you tried Xyz vpn? Totally decentralized, easy setup and great customer service.

You can similarly generate the history and backstory of each fake person, complete with realistically banal social media posts, etc..

(Unless Facebook had access to the national ID database, a terrifying prospect)

Yeah those excuses run thin. Actively participating in this stuff is not acceptable.

It would be interesting to get an idea of what percentage of posts are from marketers.

Only if the prospective buyer is actually interested. This too often gets translated to "I have a right to spam everyone!"

Maybe that's a space worth disrupting? Google is getting fat and lazy (but still has a scary warchest and resources).

All of the advertising on the internet that I don’t find abhorrent is controlled by the content creator.

Very few subs have FAQs or rules asking newbies to search the sub for their question. As a result, most of the subs I follow are littered with the same questions over and over.

The other problem is that when someone does ask for advice, the quality of the advice is usually somewhere between mediocre to terrible. I think this is largely because there is no incentive for experts to stick around in subs to provide good answers. And because they are tired of giving the _same_ advice over and over. This gives space to the non-experts who don't _really_ understand the concepts behind the advice they are giving and end up giving bad (and sometimes dangerous) advice because that's what they were told by other non-experts in the same situation.

I've witnessed this pattern in an array of subreddits spanning from hobbies to coding to gaming. Ultimately they become discussion forums for the lowest common denominator of skillsets.

The science is settled, but like everything else, untrained people can't tell the difference between a good study and a bad study, and the media reports on them all.

Check out the book _How Not to Diet_, which is the most recent masterwork on evidence-based nutrition.

It doesn't take a domain expert to know this claim is fundamentally wrong. Science is never settled. There are conclusions that stand the test of time and accumulated evidence, but nutrition is a field with precious few of those.

Vegetables - way too broad a category. Should be split into leaves, stalks, roots, starches, seeds, alliums, brassicaceae, legumes etc. Calling it all "vegetables" makes it hard for people to rank, prioritize, and proportion which are a better use of time, money, and energy to consume. There might be consensus on eating "vegetables" but not necessarily every group of them. Nutritional density is more complicated than "vegetables."

Whole grains - Antithesis to previous point, grains are not categorized as vegetables. Why are whole grains their own recommended category everywhere as a staple part of diets? Is it cost? Industry lobbying? Diet recommendation should focus on leaves and seeds, with cereals as a filler. Cereal portion should be the one controlled to control weight gain, moreso than plant fat from seeds/nuts. We've gotten too comfortable with a huge serving of rice or potatoes with something thrown on top.

Red meat - carcinogens appear to come from preparation methods (browning, curing) and can be mitigated by vegetable intake. https://examine.com/nutrition/does-red-meat-cause-cancer/

Fruit - mostly as not necessary to a healthy diet as this makes it look like. Can be avoided the same way meat is.

Fish (salmon & sardines) and Seafood (mussels) belongs in the consensus part over fruit.

Doesn't touch on fermented food.

The jury is more out on saturated fat and dietary cholesterol than these government bodies want to admit.

Its hard to reverse course quickly and say "everything we said for the last 30 years is wrong."

Almost none of the diet suggestions focus on digestion, absorption.

I just dont see consensus on what percent of a diet should be grain vs vegetable, starches, legumes, fats, meats. Maybe it doesnt matter. "WFPB is the healthiest diet" is very different from "WFPB is one of the healthiest diets."

Mostly plants is one of multiple ways to an optimal diet.

/r/programming in a nutshell.

Consequently, I haven't discussed programming on an open forum in over a decade, because I've never found a single programming forum that wasn't openly toxic in this way.

Frankly, that's my perception of HN, too. Try telling someone here that running your own email server is easy, for example, and then prepare to fend off the throngs of people clamoring to be the first to tell you that email is hard (tm), and only fastmail can save us from Google's dragnet, oh also email is deprecated and we should just use signal or some other proprietary walled garden.

Well, I guess there are different levels of expectations on what easy means. letsencrypt with dovecot and postfix is the definition of complex legacy, but in times where everything is spam that didn't come from domains with dmarc et all... there might be people that think of "what email server is" differently than you.

Could that be, because so much of programming is a group activity (understanding, maintaining, and evolving other people’s code), and thus actually benefits (in an evolutionary sense) from simplistic group think more than from innovation and perfection?

Professionals have time for the internet as a hobby. Hobbyists have time for the internet as a job.

/r/askhistorians has kept up their quality through removing top line answers that are not properly cited, sometimes entire posts have nothing other than [deleted].

I think most smaller communities are still pretty valuable, maybe because they are too small or infrequently used to have their users coalesce around a single set of ideas. I think/r/asknetsec is still a pretty good resource even though it’s in the bigger end of small, I’m not sure how it’s kept it’s quality though.

Maybe that’s just reflecting how our species seems to work. The larger the group, the more it turns into a mob unless increasingly tightly structured.

/r/legaladvice is heavily moderated to keep it clean and high quality.

Ken White was banned for deliberate persistent rule breaking and hijacking the sub to make it popehatLegalAdvice.

https://amp.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/7xpggl/what_i...

While /r/legaladvice is heavily moderated, it is not particularly high quality.

So I could format my data for Reddit, or post a simple summary (which looks as authentic as any random poster), or I don't post at all.

I have the highest quality, low cost food Data, but can't post it. But hey Aldi astroturfs and gets away with it.

People don’t follow that, anyway. First, the rules for subs, on the sidebar on the desktop, are fairly hidden away now in the ‘about’ link. It’s doesn’t matter, though. Even when it’s at the top in a sticky post people don’t read it - take /r/scams, for instance, and the ‘I installed a RAT and filmed you watching poern so give me bitcoin’ scam. People post about that every day for months despite a highlighted bold post at the top of the sub for 6 months. Or /r/celiac. Plenty of links about diagnosis in the sidebar, but people ask ‘I have this and this symptom, do I have celiac?’ about 4 times a week.

Overall people come to reddit or a forum to have a discussion. Searching and reading is what they don’t want to do.

I’m on the fence as forbidding previously covered topics makes a forum dry and cobwebby. On the other hand, repeating the same basic advice 5 times a week for different people feels very repetitive, like you say. It takes a community of dedicated posters, basically obsessed volunteers, to make a sub consistently give good advice to everyone who comes by. I essentially do this as a hobby, myself.

1. (mostly) US politics, with shills on all sides 2. corporate advertising. r/hailcorporate takes this to the extreme sometimes, but there are plenty of astroturfed posts supporting or advertising various brands reddit.

Think about how much companies would pay to have the discussion around their brand monitored and controlled on a forum with millions of eyeballs.

Also, reddit accounts being farmed for karma then sold on is an open secret.

I answer questions in r/personalfinance's "new" area, and the split is something like:

"I am upside down on my car loan/loan is too expensive/want to get out of my current car" - 40%

"How do I do I make [some crazy ROI]? I have [$small amount] to invest" - 20%

"I have no money and need to pay my bills" - 20%

"Can I afford to buy this house?" - 10%

Novel questions - 10%

So many car questions come up I'm tempted to write an ebook on it and sell it for $1 - I sold cars in college and have a lot of info on how the sausage is made.

You should, but charge the full price, if you genuinely have useful information. The perceived value of an item changes according to the price you charge.

Given that cars are multi-thousand dollar expense, investing a tiny fraction to get better information is a good return of investment.

To be fair I haven't seen much recently they seemed to be more common in the past.

I wonder if that's usable as an indicator?

Much of reddit still has functioning referees in the form of its moderators, but I'm seeing signs of it cracking — e.g. when I researched the backgrounds of certain moderators I found out that they produced content in some space and would allow their own stuff to get posted while blocking other people's submissions.

It takes very few bad actors to poison the well. At least on Reddit, there's a myriad of small subreddits which makes it more difficult to infiltrate all of them effectively.

Also reddit not curating the moderatorship of it's big subs unless there's controversy. Making it so the top mod can basically take over, disappear, etc. Basically the tiered nature of mods is an issue imo.

Today, Google results are a big problem in the sense discussed in the article, there are no more sources of information that can be trusted like in the old days. Some days I reflect with myself trying to figure out how it can be solved…I hope someone ends up finding a solution.

On a similar note, Google deranking Wikipedia (which used to be the first result for like half of my searches) makes it so much less useful. I now need to add wikipedia to my searches.

If you're using search as a shortcut to get to some other service, it can be nice to go straight there instead of sifting through whatever garbage has been SEOed to the top of Google.

Hopefully it will take them a very long time. I don't want companies to start poisoning online communities with their hidden advertising. When I visit an online community, I want to read about the real thoughts of real people that are hopefully much smarter than I am, and maybe even post a few of my own. No community wants paid members with ulterior motives and conflicts of interest.

I've tried to combat this but it seems very difficult. The thing that works best is to really hide the status and let people make their own ways of standing out.

I also very rarely gave moderator status to anyone who asked. It would mostly be people I see could be a good fit and also make sure there are no obligations to actually use power.

I'm particularly concerned about political subs, those dealing with hot button issues, and global news. There is zero way to tell if a mod is acting in a potentially alarming manner.

The simple issue is that people who make money from being first page on Google can afford the money it takes to game the index to their benefit.

This would be true of other search engines too if they were as popular as Google, so I don't blame them for it. Nor do I envy their task. I imagine making SEO gaming harder would be in Google's benefit, so they could sell more advertising.

Commerce has ruined Google's results consistently for years now. It is just what commerce does to everything, when there is money to be made from it. You can't even fly on a plane you paid to be on without being advertised at as thanks for your patronage.

Just yesterday I searched for "index funds vs etf reddit", as I'm really new to any sort of investing. The first reddit result on google has a simplified response that is to the point.

Now try searching google for "index funds vs etf" and the results are littered with investing sites and long lists of information, that is more than likely helpful, but much more verbose.

In this case I would just replace 'Google' with 'the internet'. Switching search providers isn't going to make a marked difference the vast majority of the time, as at the end of the day, if the vast majority of the internet is filled with 'garbage' a search engine can only do so much to avoid it.

Citation needed. Searching "index funds vs etf" on Bing gives ads for the first five results, while Google shows a card thing and organic results.

If you're going to accuse them of deflecting, at least show evidence that it's not just the whole internet.

Try searching for "financial advisor" on Google. I did it on my phone, and the only thing on my screen is ads.

Which is what makes other people having similar experiences interesting. Because if enough of us feel like this, then there would be a need for a better search engine. Not sure who’s going to make it though, libraries?

Always investigate who is behind a statement that advises you one way or another.

What would you do here, specifically?

Well, search on reddit has always been pretty terrible.

I find that appending `inurl:reddit` to a Google search gives the best results.

That works, but for many searches will include results from other sites, since the operator works on the entire URL, not just the domain. If you want to limit to just reddit.com, use `site:reddit.com`.

here's one the has started to puzzle me: TED talks have become the ground for people trying to sell you something. but it's different when what they are selling is hope, optimism, and encouraging words, right?

wrong!

at least to me. this feels wrong.

Are they really selling these things versus their revolutionary new book, trying to get attention for their research, or some good/service?

I agree. I think TED and similar pop-science programming is dangerous. People think they're actually learning something meaningful. I see it as the granola bar of media. They're filled with sugar and only minor nutritional value. You feel like you're getting something healthy, but you're not doing much better than a snickers bar.

The reviewers seem to believe they are unbiased but your satisfaction with the results may differ if you had spent $5,000 versus if you had spent nothing.

It seems not many people are taught about money properly. I certainly wasn’t and non of my friends where.

I’ve always been good in that I never spent what I didn’t have and lived within my means. What savings I did have where in a zero interest current account though!

Following the finance Reddit’s at least put me in the right path. 6-12 months cash savings now in a high interest account, now have a pension plan, putting money in to ETF’s until I have enough in the ETF’s I’m willing to by some individual stocks which may not be as stable as the ETFs I have.

As someone who’s been a senior dev for 10+ years doing well but stuck in a rut I’m also finding the various cscareers Reddit’s useful about the job market. Seeing people’s salaries, negotiations, what jobs to look for, what companies to look for etc etc.

That's not great, but overall, I'm not making very much money from my "high-interest savings account". Maybe a grand or two over decades, but even that's generous. I don't know if it's worthy of an exclamation mark. The biggest losses are prevented by not overspending and some of the other things you mentioned.

"Personal-finance gurus obsess over buying coffee not because it is unsustainable, Vanderkam suggests, but because being a personal-finance guru is. “The strongest finance advice can be summed up in a couple sentences,” she explains. Maximize your income. Limit your big monthly expenses. But if your job depends on doling out financial wisdom, Vanderkam notes, “you have all this real estate you have to fill on your blog, your podcast, and your books. That’s where all this little stuff winds up coming in, but in the larger scheme, it’s kind of irrelevant.”

I think it's why a lot of people end up switching to giving talks or some other repeatable income stream.

Once you've written a blog post, that info is out there.

But if you can make it an "event", you can give the same advice over and over again.

In the past couple of years I’ve made $2-3k in interest. Not much but it’s $2-3k I wouldn’t of had if sat in a checking account so to me it’s free money for holding the exact same savings just under a different account with my bank.

All that says is that you barely have any balance in the account. Maybe a couple grand.

Either it's some sort of 6-month emergency fund and CDs typically make more sense (ladder or not) or it's money you want to grow, in which case investing in index funds is the better approach.

You're not paying attention. The OP said it would take decades to make $1k or $2k; I pointed out it doesn't take that much money to make that in only 1 year. It's not that unusual to have $30k in savings, so that's roughly $1k in interest in 2 years, which is an order of magnitude lower than what the OP was claiming.

High interest checking accounts: https://www.doctorofcredit.com/high-interest-savings-to-get/... Automation for meeting minimum spend requirements: https://github.com/jakehilborn/debbit

I clicked through a few of those offers. Each one has a balance limit (after which interest drops to near zero), monthly fees, sign-up fees, or requires you to generate banking fees through another service.

And how could they not? Finance isn't magic, and we are in a world of all-time low rates. There is no possible way these companies can be paying you 5% on cash without making it up elsewhere.

You'll never net more than $1000/year in one of these accounts given they have balance limits. Some folks sign up for multiple high interest checking accounts in order to park more money.

Anyway, 1.6% is going away given the Federal Reserve just cut rates by 50 bps yesterday. Expect an email from Ally soon.

Are those retirement accounts or taxable brokerage. Because for many people, maxing out their IRA, 401K, and HSA is like 35K a year alone, and putting money into taxable brokerage should take a backseat unless 1) you like the gambling for its entertainment factor 2) you choose to keep your short term savings / emergency cash in the market (*I much prefer a combination of 6 months savings invested a little riskier than it should be + a large line of credit. Then you have the choice of selling stock or borrowing at 10% APR, for something you can hopefully pay off very very soon. A 15K LOC at a credit union is a godsend.) But other than my asterisk, taxable investments are usually an inefficient use of funds. 401K match and HSA are top priorities.

Your probability of having a healthcare expense does not change based on the type of insurance you choose (high or low deductible). Only the timing of the cash flow. But the government gives tax advantages for using an HSA. It's an IRA with the ability to withdraw penalty free any amount you used for healthcare anytime you were covered under an HDHP.

Best case scenario, spend all your health care with cash. Let the HSA grow as long as you can. Reimburse yourself for a decades worth of health care spending when you need the cash.

Any medical expenses you incur while you have a qualifying high deductible health plan (HDHP) can be expensed anytime in the future from your HSA. What I do is invest all of the HSA funds, and pay for all of the medical expenses with after tax money. I pdf all of the receipts for the medical expenses, and now, if ever in the future I need cash, I can withdraw it from the HSA penalty free since I have proof of the medical expenses. If you don't end up having medical expenses (good luck), and you turn 65, then you can withdraw and pay regular income tax like an IRA/401k (if you need the cash, you should of course use up your IRA/401k first).

I don't even understand how the government plans to prevent fraud if people decide to claim the same health expense multiple times, as you only have to keep tax records for a few years, and the law as it currently is lets you deduct health expenses from anytime in the past at any point in the future.

You can spend out of a brokerage account as if its a savings account. Sell your stocks, and youll have cash.

r/fatfire - same thing as above but for people looking to have more than "just enough" to retire (multimillion, mostly full of high earners like SWE's, agents or successful entrepreneurs where this goal is somewhat realistic).

r/personalfinance & r/ukpersonalfinance - well rounded finance forum.

r/frugal - okayish for if you are in a really tough spot. If you are doing ok I generally don't recommend them because ultimately you are trading your time/health using most of the hacks from here.

https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Main_Page

Go out into the late evenings, drink excessively, do designer drugs, party it up, all while mixing locker-room talk and investing strategies.

Reddit can be filtered by subreddit, so I've got a view with no FUD. Also as a personal finance hobbyest, I can sub to finance, personalfinance, financialindependence, and economics without having stories of police overreach or failures in the justice system written to scare people.

Also as a painter, there's another 10 subs I can subscribe to basically make my feed a walk through a museum.

Absolutely fantastic micro culture and I'm thrilled to have found it!

Take /r/ukpolitics for example, back in the day an anarcho-syndicalist could have a debate with a die-hard Thatcherite and while it'd be fairly heated, people tended to know their shit and I'd generally come away feeling like I learned something after reading the board for an hour or so. After 2015 (and even more so after the EU referendum) the subscriber count exploded and now it's a complete echo chamber. Try making an argument that the EU isn't some sort of Star Trekkian utopia or that Scottish independence might cause a lot of economic problems on that board and you'll get downvoted out of sight within maybe half an hour. It's very, very black and white now, the board is so fast that it's all about quick, karma-farming content rather than actual political debate.

I don't know why this seems to be a problem unique to Reddit. HN doesn't seem to have the same issue (at least not to the point it dominates the character of the platform), despite it being essentially a clone of old-school Reddit. It's a problem I'd be interested in knowing more about because I'm working on a platform with user-generated content. It's currently using a very naive "rank by votes, exclude old or heavily downvoted posts" approach but I fear this approach could lead to the same problem as Reddit.

If you look at old HN threads, it feels more intellectually curious than today. But HN today is still very good. I wouldn't compare HN of today vs. 5 years ago, to say, what's happened to /r/financialindependence over a similar timeframe.

That is because PG sets clear rules and actively experiments with techniques to keep HN’s integrity intact, and since HN discussions are usually of the more intellectual variety, it’s harder for shit-posters and bottom-feeders to find traction here with low effort comments.

If you want to read his thoughts, check out his essay: http://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html

I hate to say it, but HackerNews is just another forum. It has its own political bent and biases (sometimes hard to see unless you step outside them). The level of discourse is better than some, and worse than others, but not particularly special in that regard; there are many good subreddits, too.

I think it's a matter of scale.

Reddit gets a couple magnitudes more traffic than HN. When your userbase is smaller, it's easier to keep it civil. Also, HN has a very strong stance against low-effort shitpost comments. They are quickly flagged and removed by moderators with a comment explaining the policy with a link to the guidelines. That's not to say HN is a "NO FUN" zone, but the funny comments are usually at least clever in some way, and not the same damn joke that has been told a million times.

I have multireddits set up for whatever mood I'm in (e.g. gifs of cool things, text stories, finance, news, etc.)

r/multihub has some good collections.

/r/specart has a lot of good stuff.

/r/imaginarylandscapes (and their sibling subreddits) is really high quality.

/r/earthporn if you like nature photography.

    /r/museum  
    /r/contemporaryart  
    /r/BackgroundArt  
    /r/ArtsHub  
    /r/artsphere  
    /r/CulinaryPlating (for chefs, but some of their creations are quite artistic)

Good culture != the ability to substitute the subreddit for Google or your own research.

This is quite normal on Reddit. If questions like this are allowed, the subreddit often becomes inundated with them and there's no room for discussing anything else.

[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/kindle/wiki/faq

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/kindle/search?q=differences&restric...

Censorship is pretty normal in Reddit in general (also in Discord, also sponsored by chinese Tencent):

https://www.reddit.com/r/HongKong/comments/ctyj10/reddit_is_...

http://time.com/5526128/china-reddit-tencent-censorship/

https://ncac.org/news/blog/is-reddit-moving-away-from-free-s...

https://www.theguardian.com/media/commentisfree/2019/feb/10/...

https://www.change.org/p/reddit-admin-stop-censorship-at-red...

"Pretty normal", don't you?

Yeah, it is commmon practice for some subreddits, go find other communities. I've been part of very shitty ones 10 years ago when I didn't know how it worked, for years now I just tailor my usage for what I want, like and need.

My problem with larger communities on Reddit is that prevailing opinions seem to emerge, and anything that questions or disagrees with them gets downvoted to hell. On the personal finance subreddits these include ideas like "You should always have 18 months of expenses saved" and "Any more than $10,000 for your wedding is a reckless and gross waste of money" and "Look how smart I am for having a mega-backdoor roth ira instead of a regular 401k like all the idiot sheeple."

I still think having a relationship with a financial advisor you trust is better than taking advice from strangers on the internet.

I have a couple friends right now that do not want wage raises because "it will knock them into the next tax bracket". Believe me, I've tried to explain how the simple concept of income and taxes work.

I trusted my financial advisor years ago when I started my career. It took me a couple years to realize I was the product, not his client with his best interest in mind. Strangers, especially from more disciplined subs and without skin in the (your own) game, have been more valuable many, many times over.

Everyone who takes what is said literally and in verbatim would be a fool. Validate what is said as it applies within your own context.

There are more perverse options with housing, childcare and income benefits being removed which I believe can lead to a negative income.

In the US the Benefit Cliff is real:

"There is this issue of the benefits cliffs, where some programs are designed so just a very marginal increase in earnings can result in a loss of a very important benefit. And a lot of states, unfortunately, have structured their childcare subsidies programs that way," explains Skinner.

"Typically, pay rises, income rises, but at some point you lose eligibility for a subsidies all together and it's an abrupt reduction in that family's resources," Skinner says.

https://www.theguardian.com/money/2014/jul/20/benefits-cliff...

Strangely, a lot of people don't understand this at all.

Why it comes up in these discussions as something meaningful always confuses me. To me its akin to explaining to someone that squirrels are not harmful to humans and we should not walk around terrified of them and having someone come by and say "but actually, they could have rabies...." I mean, you aren't wrong, but you are essentially spreading misinformation by implying that this is common instead of exceedingly rare and something people should be wary of as they walk down the street every day. Its the exact type of misinformation that politicians use to make disingenuous arguments to steer people into supporting their policies, and the HN crowd should be above that IMHO.

The OP was describing the same thing as you. People don't understand marginal tax brackets and do silly things like not want raises for tax reasons.

It's in Dutch, but the most important columns are the first (gross income), the second to last (net income, including benefits) and the last (effective tax rate on the 1000 gross income increase).

Note the last column tells us that making 1000 gross extra will increase your net income about 100 between 32K and 31K gross income. Going from 31K to 32K will even make you lose money.

It's never disadvantageous except when it is? That sound like the classic anchorman citation: 60% of the time, it works every time

Sure your tax bracket won't directly means less returns, but switching from a tax bracket to another may means having access to less benefits, which may means a higher effective tax rates.

> It's never disadvantageous to make more money (except if you're on government benefits as mentioned, where there are some weird effects).

is essentially equivalent to:

> If you're not on government benefits, where there are some weird effects, then it is never disadvantageous to make more money.

But if the wording was done the second way, you probably wouldn't have had a problem with it.

This is why I would have less problem with the second one. I would still precise that some of theses benefits aren't really a choice, they are tax break that just happens to be offered because of your income, so sure if you already went beyond that income, you aren't on that government benefit... but at one point you weren't beyond that income and you did made less money once you went beyond.

These are different phenomena, generally affecting different people. While (a hypothetical I) could certainly lose out his social security medicaid by going from $0 income to non-0$ income, I'm not the person worried about going from the <80k$ bracket to the >80k$ bracket.

IME, the people who worry about making more money and moving into a new tax bracket are not people who are eligible for any meaningful subsidies to begin with.

Most important part of that picture: "The single mom is better off earning gross income of $29,000 with $57,327 in net income & benefits than to earn gross income of $69,000 with net income & benefits of $57,045."

I considered going into financial advisement once, in the distant past. A family friend was in the field, and took me in for a round of advice. He was quite open that it was eat-what-you-kill, with a serious focus on people with impaired judgement (e.g., elderly), because that was the only way to make up the bulk of your revenue. He said that he hadn't had a peaceful night's sleep since he'd started, due to the guilt of day-to-day work.

(Although, admittedly, mutual fund MERs have dropped substantially with the rise of low-cost ETFs...)

If you want to give it another shot, this article and video from Vox is pretty good:

* https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/1/7/18171975/ta...

is that not a real thing where you live?

It's actually terrifying to me how little understanding the average person has of finance.

> I can contribute $6k for 2020, and the total I can hold in TFSA is $69,500

As of 2020, the total you can contribute into a TFSA over your lifetime is $69500. But it's not a limit of what can exist in your account. Gains you make in the account do not count toward your limit.

It has absolutely nothing to do with your contribution to retirement accounts. You can invest more and contribute more to your tax free retirement accounts with a higher salary (up to a point) but even if you didn't, that wouldn't make a difference.

I'm responding with respect to the OP's comment about beign bumped into a higher marginal tax bracket. Just because you are, doesn't mean you'll automatically end up with less discretionary income.

Candidate X wants to tax you 60%!

https://twitter.com/charliekirk11/status/1231005642413858816

"Facts:

Bernie wants a $15 minimum wage

That would mean a gross salary of $31,200 for a 40 hr. work week

But he wants to tax anyone making above $29,000 a year 52%

That would make gross salary $14,976—$288/week

$288 divided by a 40 hour work week—$7.20/hour

Socialism Sucks."

Not everyone on the subreddit is quite so passionate about avoiding expensive weddings or financial advisors at all costs. In fact, fee-only fiduciary advisors are perceived quite positively[2].

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/wiki/emergencyfunds

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/wiki/financialadvis...

A lot of people would do well to just get through the 'basic steps' (budget, emergency fund, empoyer-sponsored matching, high interest debt, etc):

* https://old.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/wiki/commontopics

> ... downvoted to hell.

I think if you're going to go against the conventional wisdom, then you have have some good justification for doing so. People who think they've found a 'clever' new way of doing something often (a) have not considered all the ramifications, and/or (b) got lucky with respect to the particular circumstances of their success (e.g., investing in TSLA instead of SPY).

> I still think having a relationship with a financial advisor you trust is better than taking advice from strangers on the internet.

Depending on the "advisor", the strangers may actually give you more objective advise.

What financial advisor is going to be able to make a living telling people to buy and hold a target date retirement fund from Vanguard/Fidelity/Schwab?

It's all pretty common sense advice, that hopefully one can verify is correct with some basic arithmetic. And advice for 90% of people should be spend time and energy to figure out how to increase income.

The kind you pay for by the hour and for whom it would be a criminal violation of fiduciary duty sell you an expensive whole life insurance that they get a commission for.

https://i.imgur.com/lSoUQr2.png

It would be the opposite of financial advice to pay someone to walk you through that flow chart and click a few buttons to invest it in the lowest cost index funds. I also don't recommend people hire a plumber to fix their toilet. Just youtube it. Do a few simple searches online, and you will find that you don't need to pay an "advisor", as much of their role has been obviated.

Second, your "few simple searches online" or "youtube it" could just as well land a financially naive person in the clutches of the worst kind of exploitative financial predator, or some disaster prophet telling them to put everything in physical gold, or some hype train telling them bitcoin will make them rich.

It takes a certain amount of knowledge to recognize good advice, especially when it's boring.

For the vast majority of people, paying someone $100/hour to tell them to buy and hold a target date retirement fund from Vanguard/Fidelity/Schwab is a much better option than the likely alternatives (going to a commission-based "free" advisor, or taking advice from random people in the internet).

I do this because of how downvoted comments get hidden and they only show the added total of votes. If one person has this view then others must have the same view. And let's be totally honest here, people aren't going to go through an entire thread to unhide every single comment in every thread they visit. Hiding wrong comments are a missed opportunity to set other people straight. I've learned so much more from the old forums from the early to mid 00's where wrong comments were quoted and set straight further down the page than on Reddit where all those comments were hidden. And because of that back then it was far less of an insult to be called out when you were wrong, because it was natural and normal.

Now when people downvote subjective things, that's where it really destroys the community. Say the up/down vote split on a comment was 900/1000. This is obviously a hotly contested issue with a small percentage of people thinking negatively of it. But if you were to only see the total (how the site does it now) you'd see -100 and the comment is hidden. Looking at this now if you didn't have an opinion before you might think this person is "obviously" an idiot and people start calling them a troll. This isn't just a ding to that commenter either but the other 900 people that up voted their comment. Do this enough and that other 900 people will start looking elsewhere. Now if the sub is some fanclub for something that's another story. But there's subs that are suppose to be more broad that have succumbed to being dominated by a side and drove away any opposing views.

But when you have bad faith commenters (Like echoing Charlie Kirk's claim that Bernie wants to tax everyone making over $29K 52% [0]), or people being just downright rude, I'll downvote, even if they're posting opinions I agree with. Discourse only moves forward if people are civil and truthful. In more extreme cases of rudeness, I'll report/flag.

[0] https://twitter.com/charliekirk11/status/1231005642413858816

Summary:

DO:

> - Vote. If you think something contributes to conversation, upvote it. If you think it does not contribute to the subreddit it is posted in or is off-topic in a particular community, downvote it.

> - Consider posting constructive criticism / an explanation when you downvote something, and do so carefully and tactfully.

> - Actually read an article before you vote on it (as opposed to just basing your vote on the title).

> - Moderate based on quality, not opinion. Well written and interesting content can be worthwhile, even if you disagree with it.

DON'T:

> - Downvote an otherwise acceptable post because you don't personally like it. Think before you downvote and take a moment to ensure you're downvoting someone because they are not contributing to the community dialogue or discussion. If you simply take a moment to stop, think and examine your reasons for downvoting, rather than doing so out of an emotional reaction, you will ensure that your downvotes are given for good reasons.

> - Mass downvote someone else's posts. If it really is the content you have a problem with (as opposed to the person), by all means vote it down when you come upon it. But don't go out of your way to seek out an enemy's posts.

> - Moderate a story based on your opinion of its source. Quality of content is more important than who created it.

> - Upvote or downvote based just on the person that posted it. Don't upvote or downvote comments and posts just because the poster's username is familiar to you. Make your vote based on the content.

> - Report posts just because you do not like them. You should only be using the report button if the post breaks the subreddit rules.

- 18 months in low risk savings (not invested) - seems like overkill.

- I personally think any money spent on a wedding is overkill - we went to the courthouse and saved a ton of money by having a smallish reception (in fairness we were in our mid 30s and on our second marriage)

- 401K - I have no opinion either way. I haven’t thought about the pros and cons.

I don’t trust financial advisors. Unless you have a reasonably complicated situation the standard advice you can find from reputable sites like Vanguard would take you a long way.

The 2nd: I think splurging on a wedding is a frequently valid personal choice and I wouldn't belittle someone for doing it unless they did something insanely irresponsible.

...if you put $1,000 in the 401k and it’s matched up to to $2,000 and then it grows to $20,000 and you’re in a 25% tax bracket then you’ll pay $5,000 in taxes on the $20k, leaving you with $15k.

...in the Roth IRA you put $1,000 and it grows to $10,000. You only pay $250 in tax though, so you’re left with $9,750. But that’s far less than $15k.

So, seems like if there’s a match you should take it!

After the match is used up, the next $1,000 in the IRA grows to $10,000 and you pay $2,500 in taxes on that... 10x more than the Roth.

So it sounds like the rule is use the Roth after the match is used up. (Although that will depend on your tax bracket both at the time of investment and up it expected bracket for retirement)

Mega-backdoor Roth does not need to be an alternative to a traditional 401k.

AFTER you’ve maxed out your tax advantaged opportunities (mostly, employer 401k), if your employer offers the necessary pre-requisites (of which there are many), a mega-backdoor-Roth is a way to put another $30-40k into a tax advantaged account every year.

It’s an absurdly regressive tax expenditure for the 1%, but if that’s where you’re at, I can’t blame anyone for availing themselves of it.

How much did you spend on the first marriage?

But, my now wife and I met at work. The company shut down and we had to scramble to find jobs. She found a job with benefits that paid less and I got a contract that paid more from a firmer customer of the company we worked for.

She suggested we get married four days after I proposed so we could save money on my health insurance I was paying out of pocket.

I wish I could /s this, but I have seen too many folks take a big financial hit during and after a divorce.

This was around 2007, what could possibly have gone wrong...

I've never seen this sentiment on r/personalfinance. It's typically no more than 6 months, usually a 3-6 month range. Your money is (on average) better invested and the only reason to go beyond 6 months is if you really, really need that for some extra peace of mind and numbers/data don't mean anything to you.

> Look how smart I am for having a mega-backdoor roth ira instead of a regular 401k like all the idiot sheeple.

This is also uncommon.

> I still think having a relationship with a financial advisor you trust is better than taking advice from strangers on the internet.

Why not encourage people to do their own research? How much more can you really eek out from a financial advisor?

I do think bankruptcy should be thought of more as a business decision than a personal decision.

The point is to build predictable passive income stream on top of whatever else you're earning. Getting a general idea around predictable expenses will provide a "magic number" where your basics would be covered by passive income alone.

Some people might choose to forego active earning opportunities at that point, but it's hardly a requirement.

That's $10k that could have gone to student loans.