Balta1701

QUOTE (Cali @ Feb 6, 2013 -> 04:55 PM) Really? Cause thats their normal... right around .500 every year. They've averaged 82 wins from 2006-2012 (the worst 6 years you can pick), 85 wins over the last decade, and 85.1 wins since 1996.

QUOTE (Jake @ Feb 6, 2013 -> 04:52 PM) So...what is the optimum time to switch phones? ATM, I'm on an iPhone 4 and I'm planning to go Android unless Apple blows my mind. Of the phone makers, I probably trust Samsung the most but I'm willing to play the field. I'm waiting on the Samsung GS4 announcement to decide my next phone, and I'm also on an iphone4 and approaching upgrade time.

QUOTE (Harry Chappas @ Feb 6, 2013 -> 12:50 PM) This is probably good for the conference overall. OSU and Michigan actually being competitive with the SEC would be legitimately good for the conference overall, yes.

QUOTE (iamshack @ Feb 6, 2013 -> 04:49 PM) I am involved in a commodities market, yes. I suppose due to repetitive experience that might give me some advantages in understanding how some financial markets work, but to be honest with you, most of what made me a good trader was common sense... My application of common sense is different than yours is though. My version of it involves knowing to ask questions like "Hey, this is a slope, is there a fault nearby that I should ask about?" when buying a house. Yeah, it seems like common sense...but if it isn't pointed out to you that you need to ask that...you're not going to realize you just built a $1 million dollar home 500 feet away from the San Andreas. (Citing a specific house in CA, btw).

QUOTE (Jake @ Feb 6, 2013 -> 04:46 PM) It does not take some crazy amount of change to have a society that both rewards smart investors and savers AND protects those with only adequate competency or those that lack the means. Worth thinking about though...the replacement of pensions with 401K's is a legitimately crazy amount of change.

QUOTE (iamshack @ Feb 6, 2013 -> 04:45 PM) If more of my money was being taken due to an increased social security program, than the percentage of my earnings dedicated to my own investments would be decreased. So why does my income need to go to subsidizing your 401K plan?

QUOTE (iamshack @ Feb 6, 2013 -> 04:43 PM) It is not a part-time job. It takes a few minutes a week, if that. Most of the things that affect the stock market and other markets are all over the news and are almost impossible to escape. If you're not willing to spend 10 minutes a week on your future financial health, when I know you spend hours a week posting on Soxtalk, then I honestly have no sympathy for you. A few minutes a week? I've spent easily the equivalent of that trying to figure out the gobblygook I receive from my retirement plans and I still feel completely incompetent afterwards.

QUOTE (iamshack @ Feb 6, 2013 -> 04:41 PM) Because maybe I want more control over where my money goes? Maybe I would rather have the ability to use the considerable education I have paid for (and continue to pay for) to increase my money over time rather than allow the government to do so? When has anyone attempted to stop you from doing so? If we eliminated the 401k entirely tomorrow, you'd still be able to do that.

QUOTE (iamshack @ Feb 6, 2013 -> 04:34 PM) Depends on what you define reasonable as. By it's very nature, investment involves risk. Otherwise, it would be called saving. No one can know exactly how things will turn out, but most folks with 401(k) accounts have the ability to watch the market daily, buy and sell their funds within a business day of making that decision, read reports and gauge risk tolerances, etc. It isn't as if you just put your money in there and then it's stuck there for all eternity. These websites offer quite a bit of research tools to educate you on what risk/reward tolerances you are comfortable with and how to act on those tolerances. And now we're at the real issue...if I want to do this effectively, at the level required for success, I need to be in a position to respond to new events in a matter of days. It literally needs to be a part time job, based on your description here. If a person doesn't do that much, then they're doing what I am, putting it into a higher-risk vehicle figuring I'm only 30 and hoping that I understood the fee levels well enough to have figured out where I put it. I'm simply never going to put that much time into managing a retirement account. And I figure...if that's the level of commitment it takes, the level of knowledge it takes, then basically, 99% of the population is going to be screwed.

QUOTE (iamshack @ Feb 6, 2013 -> 04:23 PM) I love that SS is claiming this is impossible for the average person to figure out, meanwhile Balta is claiming he understood the housing bubble better than the Wall Street folks And I haven't a clue if I've done the right thing with my 401k/retirement plan. I've put away the money to gain the matching options, but I haven't a clue if I've picked reasonable investment vehicles or not.

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Feb 6, 2013 -> 04:23 PM) So you don't think that there's a segment of our population called "suckers" that buy into crap like subprime loans, bad auto loans, overpriced goods at specific stores (instead of shopping at other places), etc etc.? They're called "Wall Street executives".

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Feb 6, 2013 -> 03:53 PM) Because at the end of the day we have market collapses but the market continues to grow and expand. Look at the market indexes over the last 60 years. It goes up, even with the dips here and there. And I don't think make-em-up investments = subprime mortgages. One is idiotic on its face, the other is just an unknown. Yes it does...but it does not expand at such a rate to substantially outpace inflation + management fees unless you get very lucky with your investments.

DUI for Todd Helton.

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Feb 6, 2013 -> 03:44 PM) No, the government could have insured those losses instead of just paying the companies off. I was fine doing that in some situations. But again, the vast majority of those investors that lost money in the collapse really only lose 2-3 years of growth. That's why you can't look at these things in 10 year chunks. It's a lifetime of investment and there's really no reason not to come out ahead. Of course, the basic underlying point is...Wall Street, people who are paid millions of dollars to make solid financial decisions...on the whole understood less about the mortgage market than a random geology grad student in california. I didn't have all the details down about how Credit Default Swaps nearly destroyed the world, but I pretty much nailed where things were going before 2004. Even expert financial types can't make decisions that can be counted on, yet you're willing to declare that's a basic skill on which people's long-term livelihoods should be almost entirely based. You're willing to criticize someone who takes out a mortgage they can't pay off...but the most knowledgeable financial professionals in the world were happy to make that loan and buy it up like it was going out of style.

QUOTE (Steve9347 @ Feb 6, 2013 -> 03:30 PM) Better, but I want Ryan Braun disgraced in there somewhere! It's in the subtitle!

QUOTE (StrangeSox @ Feb 6, 2013 -> 03:33 PM) That's not true for a lot of the lower-tier law schools these days. Of course, they've actively lied to students about graduation employment rates, but the courts said that students should have been able to figure out that they were lying on their own and that they're not liable for the misrepresentation. Like I said, not true for every place. I should add as well that the for-profit schools are effectively a government subsidized scam, that holds down the overall numbers as well.

QUOTE (StrangeSox @ Feb 6, 2013 -> 03:27 PM) For a while, an investment in a college degree was a good investment and great planning. Especially something like a law degree. Today, and especially since the last 4-5 years? You could be coming out of school with a mortgage-sized debt and no job to show for it and few prospects if any. Obviously not every degree is the same, but there's still a very large premium associated with extra education, in terms of both the availability of employment and wages. It's shrunk as college costs have screamed up, but it's still quite big.

QUOTE (Steve9347 @ Feb 6, 2013 -> 03:21 PM) Let's change the title of this thread to something all-encompassing involving guys who matter like A-Rod and Braun. Come on, admins. You're better than this. Happy?

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Feb 6, 2013 -> 03:21 PM) No, it's not. Good personal finance habits through your life provides you with late-life retirement benefits. If I had irresponsible personal finance habits, I could have had another $100k in the bank right now. I considered buying property as a grad student on one of those liar loans, and I didn't do so because I thought that it would be impossible to predict the time the bubble was going to burst. 2006 rolled around, people started giving away priuses to keep housing prices looking good, and the peak of the bubble turned out to be so much more obvious than I'd ever have imagined.

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Feb 6, 2013 -> 03:20 PM) Absolutely. The people we're talking about here don't understand money and finances. They spend too much. They buy s*** they can't afford. They over extend themselves. They're the idiots that think buying a 250k home with a 5 year arm is a good decision because they can pay for it right now. Or a lower monthly payment on a car but for a longer term with high interest is the right decision. And they make those mistakes for 60 years. Hell, the most basic one of all is that education = more money. The mortgage one is a great example, because that $250k ARM would have been sliced up and sent off to half a dozen different wall street firms, loaded with financial professionals, each of whom bought into the same crap about how housing prices were going to permanently skyrocket. Yet...they had an ace in the hole...a bailout.

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Feb 6, 2013 -> 03:17 PM) PERSONAL FINANCE is the basic skill of survival. Not really sure how you can dispute that in today's world. But that is fundamentally different from being able to establish a long term retirement plan.

QUOTE (StrangeSox @ Feb 6, 2013 -> 03:00 PM) What good comes of tying retirement to how well you invested your money over the past 30 years? The real answer, of course, is that wall street firms eat up 1/3 of an average 401K plan with fees...and that's good for the important people.

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Feb 6, 2013 -> 02:49 PM) The last 5 years of life being the key there, basically nursing home care, which you don't directly pay for. Either your SS or Medicaid pays for it (and you're provided everything you need). You don't need an extra 1500 bucks to play checkers in the home on weekends. Like I said, someone needs to give you a lesson in financial literacy, because you're in deep denial about how big health care costs are.

QUOTE (iamshack @ Feb 6, 2013 -> 02:39 PM) Right, because you really thought I was referring literally to 401k management. But now, that is literally the case. When you could get a job with a pension, your ability to decide which stocks to trade, which mutual fund company was raping you with the largest fees, your ability to effectively predict the future was pretty irrelevant except as far as you were investing beyond your pension. The pension plan, with people doing that work non-stop, were the ones managing the 401k. Effectively it was in the hands of people much closer to experts on the system. We've basically replaced that with a system that requires everyone to have that level of expertise. If you don't, then that leaves you open to an incredibly vicious system.

QUOTE (Soxfest @ Feb 6, 2013 -> 02:36 PM) You can count on 3 DL visits a year! Seems difficult since he won't start the year on the DL unless he signs with a team.