There's literally an ad on the front page right now for a YC startup hiring engineers to protect patient privacy. Follow the link? The company exists to better sell ads based on patient data (but in a "compliant" manner).
Gone now -- I don't remember the name (unless this was the fastest pivot ever recorded, it was not Glass Health, which currently has a now hiring ad up[1])
Hah, happened to see this mentioned in another comment today. It was FreshPaint, whose website includes this gem:
"You need to install ad trackers on your website to get the most out of ad platforms like Facebook and Google Ads. Ad trackers can create issues for healthcare marketers by sending visitor identifiers and health information to platforms that aren't HIPAA-compliant."
I'm sure they are good folks, but what an absurd premise. Something about the best minds of our generation selling ads....
My opinion? Read less financial "news". Focus on what you can control and don't try to time the market. Build an emergency fund if you don't have one, then invest in broad market funds and focus on earning money.
If you knew for certain there was a crash coming, you would still have to time the market a second time to get back in before the recovery, which will also come.
This is the answer. You can read all of the pontification and prognostication you like, but ultimately you’re gambling if you’re trying to time the market. You have incomplete information and you will not be able to respond appropriately, you’ll instead be rolling the dice. You can do that if you like, but you’ll be better served by regularly investing in broad market index funds and not thinking too hard about it.
Even if inflation spikes to 10% per year, if you have an emergency fund covering (say) three months of expenses right now you'd still have a fund for 2.7 months in a year. And, of course, there aren't any rules saying you can't top it up to keep it sufficient for whatever time period you set it up for.
It's infinitely better to have a buffer and not need it than to not keep any buffer at all and suddenly find yourself with an income and bills to pay.
You can place your emergency fund in I-Bonds over several years. You can buy $10k max a year, and withdraw with a 3 month interest penalty after a year. Right now the rate is 7.6% I believe for the first 6 months. It should protect that money from inflation.
This is terrible advice, and it seems you never went through a massive crash.
Imagine, market crashes 50%, you lose your job, and what? Are you going max out your cards with 20%+ APR? Are you going to realize your losses?
Emergency fund is there to help ride out bad times, so you don't have to take shitty jobs, realize losses in your investments, sell your home or not undergo medical treatment due to financial stress.
Maximizing your savings/investments isn't a bad approach when your young as every $ made ads cumulative value over time. I wouldn't recommend it when you have a family.
I feel that having a certain amount of physical and liquid cash assets is almost mandatory for basic financial survival. I use credit cards for most purchases('selling' my data to the card companies for reward points, too), but cushioning matters.
If life were 100% predictable, and I never had to worry about a sudden expense, or a bill being higher than expected, or gas/grocery prices rising, then I'd totally be down to invest my entire net worth and live off of a portion of my paycheck, maintaining minimum balance in my checking account, and sweating bullets whenever the market dips.
I went through several weeks of unemployment last year while I was between jobs. I was fortunate enough to receive the covid+standard unemployment payments, but still had to supplement that with cash from my savings to skim by. The alternative would have been to break my lease to live with my parents, incur bad credit, potentially have my car repo'd, etc. It would have set me back several years, and wrecked my self image.
I've never had an emergency fund because I purchased my first home as soon as I could with all my salary going into my savings account which also served as an offset account with the full amount offset against my mortgage to keep the interest down, so I had access to my savings whenever I needed it & when I didn't, the full amount would be used to reduce the interest on my mortgage repayments - in effect maximizing the full amount of my savings.
Since the demand for programmers has always been good wherever I've lived I've always opted for higher paying contracting gigs since I was never concerned about job security, i.e. before kids, I'd most likely be more risk averse and look for permanent roles after starting a family.
After I paid off my mortgage my expenses came down and after saving ~6 months of living expenses (easy w/o rent/mortgage) was able to take the leap to quit my FT job and go off on my own to create a commercial product which I worked on tirelessly until achieving my financial independence goals.
The closest I'll get to that for a while is when my car payments finish, in about 18 months. I should have 2 complete months of my gross salary saved and liquid by then, so I can justify putting an extra $200/mo to investing, and use the remaining $100/mo for spending, to account for cost inflation and such. Naturally, that first month of no-payment will be used for wasteful celebration.
I still have some student loans, but am quickly approaching/may have already reached Zero Net Worth(hooray!) when everything is totaled up. Buying a house would be a smart move, but I'd rather hold off on that to let the market cool down, and try to find a partner who would share it with me.
Emergency fund should always be first but adjusted for your age and obviously cost of living. No kids and living with parents? Sure, invest anything you make.
What happens when the crash occurs and your bank nixes your line of credit? They are well within their right to, at least it says so in the fine print.
Then you’re broke, and left holding a very baggy looking portfolio.
Yes, people seem to forget that HELOCs are usually callable too.
If you have a $500k HELOC and have used $200k of it for something, the bank usually has the right to force you to start making principal repayments (not just interest), to change the interest rate, and/or even in extreme circumstances to “call” the loan and ask you to repay everything ASAP. Read your fine print.
That said (and this goes counter to my previous comment) I think HELOCs are probably the safest credit source, purely because if the banks started calling them there would be an economic meltdown. Obviously if you’re going to overleverage yourself, a HELOC makes the most sense because of low rates, so I’d assume anyone who is overleveraged is doing it through a HELOC.
However, if you can get a HELOC, you own property and are therefore much better off and less precarious than people who don’t. Ceteris paribus, I’d rather lose my shirt in a house I own rather than a rental.
Similar boat. I wanted a line of credit just to have it. With considerable equity in the house and savings and stock that exceeded the credit amount and with a high paying job and with excellent credit, the bank rejected my application. Apparently because I said I might use it for repairs at some point. Ffs.
I'm doing what the parent comment suggested. The line of credit should be margin - you borrow against your stocks. If you use Fidelity, you can call them and ask them to lower your interest rate, and it can actually get really low.
Home equity line of credit (HELOCs) are pretty easy to get, assuming you have some equity built up in a home. Works like a credit card. The rising interest rates will make using it pretty painful though.
The difference is that the metaphorical credit card of a HELOC has the house as collateral. A normal credit card has no collateral. If you go bankrupt, the HELOC takes the house, but the credit card doesn't.
Darn, I rent (in NYC). I'm still not sure if buying an apartment here is a good bet long term, but I do wish I had gotten in on something when prices weren't going so crazy. I would only consider it right now if I found an amazing deal. Either that or wait for something to change with the housing market. From what I can tell, though, things are just going to get harder for individuals who want to own a home in major cities.
Banning or severely taxing homes which aren't occupied by the owner means banning or severely taxing homes which are occupied by someone other than the owner... aka. rentals.
Sure, you can make rental accommodation illegal if you want your community to consist solely of homeowners -- some HOAs do exactly this -- but it's the most vulnerable who will suffer under such a policy.
The 'most vulnerable' rarely are living in single family homes. They are living in either public housing, a trailer, or crammed into illegally over-occupied studios.
That said putting more restriction on housing (even more taxes!) isn't going to improve the situation. Housing needs deregulation, not more regulation to distort the market even more.
I don't agree. We're in a supply crunch right now, more houses == lower prices, and low income folks can always get government subsidized housing (or should demand more of it if none is available).
There's a supply crunch, sure. And if you reallocate from rental to owner-occupied, you reduce the crunch somewhat on that side... but you make the supply crunch even worse for renters.
It's a popular policy decision for many politicians, since owners vote at much higher rates than renters; but I wouldn't call it good policy.
In general, you pay enormous interest on unsecured credit.
House? Mortgages have single-digit interest.
Car financing? More complicated, but often free, or even negative (I bought my car for less with financing that it would cost me outright).
Credit card? Tens of %.
I guess a "line of credit" is essentially the same as a credit card. A bank can in principle recover your credit card debt off your house, but it's difficult.
Many fairly safe investments make approximately what we are dealing with in terms of inflation right now. Your emergency fund might not be MAKING money but you won't be losing it either.
Of course this is a slightly different type of emergency fund (your money will not be able to be withdrawn that same day) but a balanced approach between multiple investments can work well. And of course it probably would not hurt to own some gold and silver safely secured as well if you are really worried about inflation and needing to quickly physically move your assets.
Adding to the chorus. I used LastPass until 2018. I received a similar email from LastPass (and had forgotten that I never got around to actually deleting the account after I migrated).
My master password was a long multi word phrase with numbers and special characters, and was not used for anything except LastPass. I find their claims of credential stuffing suspect.
Edit -- Also had MFA enabled and received the email in November.
It's not the most scientifically accurate method, but a few people and I are trying to rule out / determine which software in common all of us might have. Thanks!
As long as we're giving personal anecdotes, I lived in the mission (the "good side" near dolores park) for 8 years and experienced most of that list. I was physically assaulted last fall while walking back from Noe Valley at 2pm in the afternoon. Nobody answered the police non emergency number while I followed the assailant (who threw a right hook that I only partially dodged as he walked past me on the street).
Sure, you get better at dodging feces and ignoring the drug use, littering, and theft, but let's not pretend it's confined to "downtown, the tenderloin, soma, etc".
I've lived and worked in Manhattan and DC, and spent time in many international cities. I've walked all over all of them, and never felt less safe than I regularly did walking to work in soma.
SF has a unique political situation, a climate that makes homelessness "bearable" and a huge number of absentee landlords (thanks, Prop 13).
We were sad to move out in January. SF is a gorgeous city filled with kind, interesting people. "Horrible dystopia" is certainly an exaggeration, but the situation is bad and has gotten much worse in the past few years.
Jury duty's a pretty important function. It's not a particularly large gathering and keeping people detained for longer without trial (as would be a necessary consequence of stopping jury duty) is a considerable imposition.
It's not an inconceivable measure, but it's not one to be taken remotely lightly - probably not until you ban all gatherings altogether.
Agreed and clearly we start infringing on pretty basic american rights if we wait until summer to stop convening jury's.
That said, reasonable people are avoiding being in closer quarters with sub-1000 people, and it seems like some assurance besides "call if you're so symptomatic you should see a doctor" might be prudent until a little more is known about the virus.
Maybe I'm just salty that I have jury duty this week (:
Fidelity also offers this in a "Cash Management Account" which you can tie to a brokerage account. It's possible to maintain a $0 balance in the cash account and use margin or some funds (generally money market) to cover each debit. Works great. I wouldn't be interested in a system that automatically sold equities from a taxable account; too volatile and too likely to cause a tax nightmare.
