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svelteParticipant[quote=Hobie]What is Canada doing with tariffs re exporting its lumber? Lumber mills in OR and WA have plenty of labor available and trees to harvest. Is this just the industry maybe taking advantage of the current construction boom.
[/quote]This WSJ video takes a look at why lumber prices are up, pretty detailed.
I didn’t know about the US Government encouraging farmers in the south to plant trees, which will result in an abundance of lumber for years to come.
svelteParticipantOne of my now retired bosses spends his time doing Habitat for Humanity type things. That kind of sounds fun and like the manual labor you are considering Scaredy.
Something that sounds fun to me is something like a taco cart on the beach. Get to meet lots of people, get some sun, work when I want to work. City ordinances probably wouldn’t allow it though. Maybe churros or ice cream then.
svelteParticipantI could certainly be wrong, but my impression is that the price increases we are seeing right now are temporary. They are a result of interrupting the supply chains due to the pandemic shutdowns.
Once the supply chains are up and running in some semblance of normalcy, I think prices will come back down. It all boils down to supply and demand as it normally does.
I heard one explanation to the skyrocketing house prices that I think has merit: due to the interruption in the supply of lumber for building new homes, the supply of new homes dwindled. Many of those who would normally have bought a new home instead shopped for older homes, driving up the number of buyers for them and thus driving up prices.
svelteParticipant[quote=gzz]80%+ of active funds under-perform the S&P. If you’re good enough to pick and buy the best 20% of funds in advance, you might be even better at picking stocks.
That JPM fund was ranked 11 out of 600+ funds in its category.
Also, “Front load 5.25%”
Wow![/quote]
I’m not claiming I’m super skilled at mutual fund picking. There are only so many funds offered in my 401K, I look at their history over the long term and select my investments based on that. Pretty simplistic.
I don’t have the time nor desire to put a lot of energy into studying individual stocks.
Front loads usually range from 3.75 to 5.75, so yeah 5.25 is on the high end of that. Need to leave $$ in there long term to make it worth it, not doing buy/sells all of the time.
Finally, I just found out that Warren Buffett has positioned Berkshire Hathaway at 37% cash, 63% stock so I came to about the same conclusion as Buffett independently!
svelteParticipantIn every neighborhood, there is a good old mechanic who works on cars of any vintage. I know where they are on the 78 corridor, have no idea further south.
When my mechanic kicks the bucket and I have to find a new one (has happened a few times), I’ll use my crappiest vehicle as the guinea pig when trying out other places. It usually takes me 2 or 3 tries before I find a mechanic I like.
svelteParticipant[quote=scaredyclassic]
as to the mutual fund being smarter or beating the market, through trading or a sense of what’s coming, in general, they’re wrong. seems like ti would be better to just buy the same stocks as a fund you like and hold them. save the .3 or .5 % a year they charge to do the buying for you.[/quote]Oh, I don’t know. In some ways you are right.
I’ll never forget the series of stories WSJ did in the 90s showing that throwing darts at a dartboard picked stocks as well as if not better than the pros.
However, I do have my money in a few mutual funds that do outrageously well over the long term, even after taking into account fees.
Here are a few of my favorites, alphabetically:
Alger Weatherbie Specialized Growth A Fees: 0.81%
3yr: 27% 5yr: 26% 10yr: 15%ClearBridge Large Cap Growth Fund IS Fees: 1%
3yr: 18% 5yr: 18% 10yr:15%Fidelity Contrafund Fees: 0.86%
3yr: 18% 5yr: 19% Life: 15%JPMorgan Large Cap Growth Fees: 1.04%
3yr: 27% 5yr: 25% 10yr: 17%Now let’s look at what a low fee SP500 index fund returned:
Schwab S&P 500 Index Fund (SWPPX) Fees: 0.02%
3yr: 16% 5yr: 16% 10yr: 13%So – if I’m getting a better return with managed funds AFTER they deduct their fees than I could get with the SP500 Index fund with almost no fees, why wouldn’t I buy the better managed funds?
svelteParticipant[quote=scaredyclassic]I have a question.
With trading fees zero, why buy a mutual fund?[/quote]I guess that depends on whether you want to actively manage your mix of stocks. People who like to hold just a few companies will probably manage the trades on their own. That seems risky to me.
It seems safer to have my $$ spread over a wide range of stocks and have someone who has the time to watch that mix daily for patterns emerging in the market. I don’t have that kind of time. I check in on my accounts every couple of months. That leaves me exposed to major turns in the market.
Besides, most of my money is in my 401K. I can’t buy individual stocks there that I know of.
svelteParticipant[quote=Coronita]
I figure if we have more inflation, companies like P&G can get away with charging more for things like diapers and toilet paper…
[/quote]I’ve been listening to the inflation vs deflation discussions a lot lately. Personally, I think we have more risk of deflation than inflation going forward.
The savings rate is way up:
https://time.com/nextadvisor/banking/savings/us-saving-rate-soaring/Boomers are retiring and slowing their spending down.
And then there is this writeup about how overvalued the market is right now:
That data on Tesla is just jaw-dropping. That can’t last.
svelteParticipantOK. I didn’t go all cash, but I just made the biggest shift I’ve ever made in my 401K.
I went from 15% stable to 40% stable.
My reasoning is this:
– That is about where the Vanguard retirement planning mutual funds say I should be at my age
– I’m over 40% up from where I had projected I would be right now. I made those projections 3, 4 and 5 years ago.
– Most major market corrections happen in the July-October time frame
– I’ve always waited just a few weeks too long to move money out in the past and I don’t want to miss the boat again.
– I may miss out on some of the future up movements, but at least I’ve locked in the 40% upside I already have.Those of you younger probably shouldn’t make such a drastic move yourself. But at my age, it is the right thing to do. Now maybe my 401K account will stop sending me nastygrams saying I’m investing too aggressive for my age!
svelteParticipant[quote=an]
I feel the same way about retirement. Every time I go on vacation, regardless of where, when I get back to SD and experience this weather, there’s no other place I’d rather live. People come here to vacation, so if I can live my life and experience the “vacation” every day, why would I leave if I can afford it here. I’m staying put as well.[/quote]I’ve lived in many other areas of the country. I know where I’m happiest, and that is in this state. As soon as we decided we would retire in San Diego, we put ourselves on a glide path to make that happen. When I retire, house will be paid off and we’ve got enough stashed away to live very comfortably.
If we moved out of state to save a few income tax dollars, all we would be doing is adding to the $ we’ll give our kids when we kick the bucket. We’re already likely to give them a significant amount, so why would we move to an area we like less just to give them more? Wouldn’t make sense.
Early on, we often thought we’d retire on the norcal coast, but the years have changed our minds. We would sacrifice entertainment options, weather, and access to major medical facilities if we did that. San Diego is the better choice.
svelteParticipant[quote=EconProf]
Regarding California’s population—it is declining in absolute terms. If you believe otherwise, your information is old. Census comes out with annual estimates in the first quarter of the year, and then as more data comes in gives us a revised member in July. The very latest figures show a decline.
[/quote]“Californians may have been undercounted in the 2020 Census.
The Census Bureau’s decennial population count will have far-reaching consequences for California’s political representation and federal funding. Three in four Californians belong to one or more hard-to-count groups: children, young men, Latino and African American residents, and renters. Noncitizens may also have been particularly reluctant to participate, given the Trump administration’s actions to curtail immigration and its attempt to add a citizenship question to the census form. The pandemic further upended outreach efforts and affected in-person follow-ups by census workers. Parts of the final count will become available starting in April 2021, but it will take longer to fully discern how disruptions may have affected the count’s accuracy.”
svelteParticipant[quote=gzz]Yes, Gram was born in 1930.
Her mother was born in 1913 and lived to 2016, meaning in early 2016 my grandmother was 86 years old but had a living mother, which I doubt happens to more than 1 in 10,000 people.[/quote]
Congrats on your gma living to 103. That’s something to be proud of!
svelteParticipant[quote=sdrealtor]A great year and the year my mother was born as well. Great Schools changed their methodology a year or two ago. Our schools had always been 10/10 and now they range from 7 to 9. The same is happening in Carmel valley now also. What I beleive they did was stop comparing schools against each other and start comparing them against schools with similar demographics. The new methodology now rewards schools with lower test scores that outperform their demographics and penalizes high test score schools that have very strong demographics. In essence they are rewarding good teaching over good students as they should.[/quote]
Funny you should mention this. I just noticed that San Marcos schools had dropped to 6/10. The explanation above explains it, as I don’t think SMUSD schools have changed much in the last few years.
And it sounds as if 1930 was indeed a great year.
svelteParticipant[quote=scaredyclassic]
It is funny, a guy works for the ca govt, sucks the state teat of State U for half a century, extracts massive wealth and takes off to save a few bucks cuz taxes n shit.Its ron swanson from parks and rec. The anti gov gov worker.[/quote]
Lol. My dad was the same way. There was an uncle-in-law(is that a thing?) of mine that my dad hated. He said he had a weak moral compass because he didn’t believe in his employer (my uncle lived in a house when he was a mobile home salesman, then moved to a trailer when he became a realtor).
My Dad would complain at great length at how bad the federal government was and the inefficiencies he saw in the Air Force. Yet when he retired after 20 years in the Air Force, he went right back and joined the Civil Service for 20 more years. I never did point out to him that his actions didn’t match his words, and how he seemed to have similar actions to my uncle.
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