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Trainguyrom

@ Trainguyrom @reddthat.com

Posts
2
Comments
898
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • Health plan enrollment period is set to be horrifying for everyone this year

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  • The biggest thing insurance does is limits risk. When you have insurance and get a big hospital bill, you generally have more bargaining power with the hospital than if you don't have insurance. When enrollment time comes run the numbers and look at the costs. You can also apply and review options on the health insurance marketplace which usually involves applying for Medicaid in the process. For kids under 18 Medicaid has a family income cap of like $8k/month so if you have kids they're definitely covered by Medicaid

    Personally, I'm not sure what I'm going to do in 2026 if the subsidy isn't renewed. I'm an independent contractor so my health insurance options are entirely limited to the marketplace, and while I currently have a plan that costs $1250/month with the $1100/month subsidy I only pay $150/month for insurance which is quite reasonable. Every plan I saw on the marketplace cost a minimum of $900 or more per month.

    I simply do not make enough (and I'm not allowed to work more hours than I currently am so that's not an option) to be able to afford insurance if the above math is the same for 2026. My plan right now is, keep job hunting and maybe my wife starts job hunting too since my contract work can work around the kids' school schedules (and my youngest starts going to school full time next year rather than half time) so we don't need a non-working parent as long as this contracting lasts for, and we probably won't get coverage through the marketplace in 2026 unless I can get it for about $400/month or less, because at that point I'm probably better off risking dumping more money into my emergency fund and hoping we don't have any medical emergencies (and planning on negotiating with the hospital if we do) I don't like the risk level of no insurance but we may simply be priced out of having insurance if the healthcare marketplace subsidy isn't renewed

  • Fucking math...

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  • See I love quick and dirty rules to get close enough through estimation for whatever I'm mental mathing, because if I need exact numbers I'm turning to a computation device

    20% of 36.23 I'd be going "okay 20% of 10 is 2, 3 10s in 36 so 3x2=6, and 6.23 is pretty close to half 10 and half 2 (from my previous 20% of 10 calculation) is 1 so 20% of 36.23 is slightly more than 7"

    36.23% of 20 I'd be going "30% of 10 is 3, 2 10s in 20 so 2x3=6, 6.23% is close to 5 so half of 3 is 1.5, 6+1.5=7.5 so 36.23% of 20 is a bit more than 7.5"

    Now which is closer to correct? Ehh I'm not sure I haven't used a calculator yet, but I'm mental mathing so chances are my estimation got me close enough that I can just round to whichever direction is safer for errors and call it good. Usually I'm mental mathing to figure out splitting a bill, a tip or to double check some machine computed math that looks wrong, and none of those call for perfect precision, just getting close enough that it doesn't matter

  • Americans can’t afford their cars any more and Wall Street is worried

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  • Some city folks are just as disconnected from the real world as the morons that insisted they need a f350 super duty to run to Costco.

    Actually I live in a town of about 10,000 surrounded by farm communities so I don't think most people would say I live in a city. I did grow up in a much larger city, and I've visited plenty of cities with hundreds of thousands or millions of people in them, but I'm definitely not a "city folk"

    Heck I literally have to drive to the next state for some of my less frequent houseware purchases because that's where the closest place to buy that stuff is

    You’re gonna take your spouse and kids on that ebike?

    I do all of my school pickups and dropoffs by bike. I hook a trailer up that the kids ride in. The trailer was $20 at a garage sale and required a $7 standard hitch that I ordered online (said trailers are sold for about $100-200 on Amazon new too) my oldest is getting a little big for the trailer so I think next season we'll upgrade to a trailercycle for her and hook the trailer up to that.

    You’re gonna do grocery shopping for a family on it?

    My weekly grocery shopping for my family of 4 is about 3 paper bags worth, or two reusable bags worth. Plastic bags always make the amount of groceries one buys look like way more than it is, but I worked in a grocery store for several years as a teenager and learned how to really heavily pack paper bags, and cloth bags you can fit even more into per bag.

    You can get gigantic paniers that will hold that quantity of food, or again, use a trailer that you hook up for grocery runs

    You’re gonna ride an hour in the rain or intense sun?

    Personally, I love biking to replace car trips, but in the current American landscape it's most realistic to bike as a compliment to driving. We've been a one car family for about 1/4 of the time we've had kids thanks to biking, and most of the time we haven't been a one car family has been due to job changes requiring 40+ mile commutes

    So riding in the rain or intense sun? Yeah I do it pretty regularly, but I fully respect folks who decide that's the day they'll drive

    You cannot manage the American urban/suburban sprawl with an ebike. Maybe you can, but the average family cannot.

    If you were talking about an accoustic bike I'd agree. I'm a crazy person and I've been enjoying seeing what my body can do with enough training, so I've been pushing my limits on my accoustic bike, but ebikes are absolutely game changer since they flatten the hills (I live in an extremely hilly area. My school route literally starts with a 100 foot climb!) and allow for one to not work as hard or at all if they're sick, too hot or otherwise just don't feel like putting in as much effort that day

    But most importantly more folks should try bikes because they're freaking fun!

  • Americans can’t afford their cars any more and Wall Street is worried

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  • Henry Ford was a capitalist, racist, eugenicist asshole, but he had one thing the current capitalist, racist, eugencist assholes in power today don't: long term economic planning.

    It's literally just supply side economics. If you have the power to increase the buying power of your customers, your customers can and will spend more money. Also more free time means people will want to spend more money on things to do and things to own, meanwhile if they're stuck spending 60-80 hours a week purely focused on work they'll be too tired to want anything other than food in their belly and a bed to sleep in

  • Americans can’t afford their cars any more and Wall Street is worried

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  • That's one of the amazing things about ebikes is they make the sprawl so much more manageable!

    Sure commuting 10 miles by ebike (probably about an hour commute or noticably less if you go faster than the 10mph average of an accoustic bike) isn't as nice as commuting 2-3 miles by ebike (about 15 minutes commute time at 10mph), but chances are you're already commuting between 30-60 minutes by car depending on traffic so what's making that a consistent 45-60 minute commute with no meaningful traffic jams and wonderful fresh air and sunlight?

  • Americans can’t afford their cars any more and Wall Street is worried

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  • Of course part of the reason those Chinese EVs only cost 15k is because China heavily subsidized their EV market. Basically they did what the Americans and Europeans didn't have the guts to do and poured boatloads of government money into a brand new sector to give their companies a leg up while they ramped up. Guess what's going to happen next?

    These companies have all of the knowledge that making multiple generations of EVs brings you, they have all of the tooling already, they can now start expanding into more markets and start making it really difficult for competition to compete because the competition put in only the effort that they had the financial incentive to put into EVs and therefore they're not ready to compete at all. The rest of the world basically ceded this entire industry to China because politicians were too heavily bought and paid for by the oil companies to do more than a pittance, and now the auto market is about to be heavily shaken up

  • Bazzite surpasses 30k active users, gaining 5k users since two months ago 🎉

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  • Hey that's me! I'm one of those 5k new installs!

    I ran a mix of Xubuntu and Linux Mint full time for a few years but switched back to Windows just a few weeks before Valve started releasing the crazy updates to proton in the lead up to the Steam Deck launch. I have one laptop which still has the same Linux Mint install that I did a few years ago too! But I ultimately switched back because a couple of games I enjoy were either a royal pain on Linux or did not work at all, plus I'd tinkered with my installs to death so they all had some wild issues that I never could pin down.

    Decided with the Windows 10 EOL date that I'd try out Bazzite and see if I liked it, and honestly I expected to have found a blocker by now but everything I keep trying keeps working flawlessly, and I even got a couple of 25 year old games that don't even work on Windows working flawlessly on Linux with just a couple of toggle switches in Proton

  • RFK Jr. Warns Teenagers Now Have Less Sperm Than 65-Year-Old Men

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  • This whole fertility thing is so weird

    The fertility thing comes across as so weird because its an actual problem that Republicans don't want to solve in any reasonable way because that will involve threatening their donor's bottom lines. Basically across all developed nations with easy access to birth control, education and modern mechanisms birth rates are falling and in many countries these rates are already well below replacement rate (2.1 children per couple, not percent like RFK Jr said)

    The United States was consistently staying above replacement rate via immigration but I have a nasty feeling that isn't the case anymore

    The reason replacement rate is so important is Capitalism really depends on growth companies gaining new customers. The stock market in particular relies on new wallets to spend money, homebuilders rely on new people to build homes for, and offices rely on new employees to hire. When populations start stagnating or worse shrinking, Capitalism really starts to fall apart as that causes an ongoing recession as fewer wallets in an economy means less money flowing through an economy. Less money moving through an economy means a smaller GDP which means the the economy ultimately shrinks. Bad economic conditions also lead to people feeling less certain about bringing a new baby into the world so the cycle tends to accelerate before the actual population decline can accelerate noticeably

    The obvious solution is to decouple necessities of life from capitalism and significant state investment into improving existing infrastructure and planning for degrowth so that a long term recession and the effects of declining/re-balancing populations do not negatively impact the masses living through them. This is of course antithetical to capitalist and conservative goals, so as they realize this looming threat is upon them they're getting extremely weird about it and trying to find ways to get more families to have lots of babies to try to reverse the trend.

    In short, these republican pundits are trying to have a serious conversation about what could be an extinction-level event for capitalism without cluing in the masses to the flaws of capitalism or the fact that its an entirely man-made crisis that doesn't actually involve any scarcity of the necessities of life

  • RFK Jr. Warns Teenagers Now Have Less Sperm Than 65-Year-Old Men

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  • Is that the anti-fluoride general from Dr Strangelove?

  • U.S. House Speaker calls Portland naked bike ride [protest] ‘most threatening thing I’ve seen yet’

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  • Women exist for more than your sexual gratification. Objectifying women isn't funny

  • U.S. House Speaker calls Portland naked bike ride [protest] ‘most threatening thing I’ve seen yet’

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  • Naked events like this aren't about showing off your smokin hot body, they're about freeing oneself from the confines of clothing and the societal expectation that everyone cover up. It's about embracing the natural state of nudity and enjoying the feeling of nudity. There's also a shock factor that's similarly effective in protest like this, particularly in illiciting reactions from conservatives while ridiculing them

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    Healthy snack idea

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  • Ehhh depends on the kids. For kids on the spectrum or with ADHD there is actually growing body of evidence and anecdata showing a strong link between sugar and poor behavior

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    Healthy snack idea

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  • Less sugar than most of the "healthy snacks" I see my kids classmates having at school or see in the store at least!

    Honestly I might have to make some of these for my own snacking because I really need calorie dense and nutritionally complex snacks right now

  • Some Texas National Guard troops replaced in Illinois after failing to meet standards

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  • Here's hoping the polar vortex does its thing during one of these deployments

  • Guess I'm sleeping on the couch again

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  • This is good advice but far more technical than I was trying to give. I was trying to give very easily actionable advice for the average person who doesn't know much about personal finance and may not be a numbers person like I and maybe you are. The kind of person I was aiming for isn't going to be contributing more than 10% of their income to retirement and probably has a couple of car loans and some credit card debt and/or personal loans floating around that they should sort out but might not ever get fully sorted.

    If they've worked jobs with 401k retirement accounts but don't work there anymore, they should go to the bank and ask about meeting a retirement advisor to roll that into a IRA or similar and probably make a small monthly contribution to their IRA as well as their current job's 401k retirement account. That's the gist of my advice. If they want to actually put in the work to learning more about personal finance and fully take the reigns your above flow chart is brilliant, but I think that's far more complex than who my advice was aimed at.

  • Guess I'm sleeping on the couch again

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  • Exactly! Some folks simply do not have the financial discipline/knowledge to fully pay off their loans, and for them if they waited until their loans are paid off they'd never have a retirement savings. If they start squirreling away money now they have more options in 10-20 years than they would in 10-20 years without it

  • Guess I'm sleeping on the couch again

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  • If I'm remembering correctly IRA is pre-tax money and rothIRA is post-tax money, and you can do a Roth conversion on a traditional IRA if desired, pay the income taxes now then have no income tax to pay on it when you pull out at retirement and it's gained quite a bit through compound interest

    Edit to add: I mentioned rolling 401ks into a rothIRA or IRA because I see it as incredibly risky to leave your retirement in a 401k account controlled by a previous employer. Employers get to choose what financial institution holds the 401k funds, as well as manages employee and former employee access, so they could choose to cut costs and transfer the 401k funds to an institution with higher account fees for you for example. Also many 401ks when you depart an employer get automatically converted into IRAs and may be converted into an IRA populated purely with low return CDs/bonds and high fees (one of mine did exactly that actually!) so rolling it into a (roth)IRA with a financial institution you trust and can control the trajectory of those funds is both safer and financially smarter! I've even heard of folks having their entire 401k drained by fees from the IRA it got automatically rolled into when they left the organization

  • Guess I'm sleeping on the couch again

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  • High interest savings accounts are still offering 3-4% or more. It's a good spot to park your emergency fund. $600/year just for storing 15k ain't bad at all plus it's all FDIC insured (and you can also invest some of it into CDs if you're willing to lock that money away for a couple of years in exchange for a higher interest rate)

  • Guess I'm sleeping on the couch again

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  • To build off of this, the best thing an average (American) Jane/Joe can do is pile money into their 401k and when they switch jobs move the money from the 401k into a (Roth)IRA

    Individual investors can basically never beat the market no matter how smart they are nor how many hours the pile into their research. Best to just pile the money into diversified fund containing a solid mix of stock indices and bonds. If you want to be extra smart, deposit more while the market is down/super unstable so you can ride the wave up when the market grows again.

    There's generally advise to not invest if you have high interest debt and to instead pile your spare cash into paying that down. My personal opinion is that if you're someone who has a consistent revolving balance of debt just start shoving spare cash into a retirement account (and don't touch it!) because that can at least build up while you slowly get your debts under control and while maybe you won't pay off your debt as quickly, at least you have something already saved and compounding 10 years from now once everything is stabilized and paid off

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  • Last night I realized we're closer to 2030 than 2020 now