Stock Market

Im finding it hard to find the balance between doing/enjoying things now and work all the time/saving. Like I literally haven’t done much of anything for 5 years now trying to save and invest as much as I can. I’ve always been super financially conservative and thats all great and everything but I also feel like I need to back off some and start enjoying things. If y’all got any advice for a guy in his mid 40’s on how to balance all these things, I’m all ears. It’s not easy when you got bills, aspirations, kids, college, weddings to save for and on and on and on.
Nobody can answer you, really, without knowing how much you have invested, your income and savings ratio, and, most importantly, your goals for the savings. Spending levels, etc.

It may be that you can back off. Or it might be that you are behind and need to save more.

If I could make a suggestion, it would be to go over the Mr. Money Mustache forum and read some of the case studies. It will give you a good idea of what some others are doing, and suggestions folks have for improvement or relaxing.

I would also encourage you to read this article.
 
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Donny is outdoing himself. 104% on China. Brilliant. This "multi-dimensional chess-master" is an absolute genius. Apple moving to India, that'll bring jobs home. The "Republican" grumblings are growing louder. Musk and Navarro bitch slapping each other in public is a class act. Only thing this group is missing is a tiny little car and rubber noses. 2028 is going to be a rout. Outstanding.
 
I got some good orders filled yesterday and ended up getting some longer dates calls. I’ll sit on them for awhile, but they’re already deep in the money. I will probably sell 75% of the calls, and exercise 25% and steal those shares.
Good luck with that. Another awesome day in paradise.
 
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WTF is he doing? Now he is pausing tariffs? I’m sorry stand your ground, wait for people to negotiate or don’t do anything. This makes us look weak imo.
It is 100% illustrative of Donald J. Trump's inability and unfitness to lead. It doesn't make the US look like anything. The whole planet is looking squarely at Donny. It was all just a "trick". :rolleyes:
 
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Neither really. Just pointing out that he put a hint out this morning. I am learning that you have to really read his social media posts carefully to find little Easter egg type info.

The man announced tariffs guaranteed to panic the entire planet, waited a couple of days and then shared a post on his social media Saturday saying he was "intentionally crashing the stock market."

Then after a few more days (including a false rally on Monday from a rumor that he was delaying tariffs), he gives out hints this morning to "buy now" and a few hours later announces a move guaranteed to cause a massive rally. Not exactly easter eggs.

Now imagine what someone with a few million to spend and a couple of days notice of how severe the "Liberation Day" tariffs were going to be could have made over the past week in the market.
 
So he's draining the swamp by insider trading with tariff policy to enrich himself and friends. Is America great again yet? Looks like everyone if off your bonds.
Yep, and now we're going to hear (it's already everywhere on the news etc.) that we need to stock up on staples and make all those big purchases in the next 87 days before the tariffs kick back in. The first article on Yahoo this morning "You have 87 days, what to stock up on now!" Every major news outlet has stories on what you should stock up on now. Retailers will have a great Q2 sales boost from panic buying. Banks will love that people are going to rack up even more debt on 20+% credit cards cause consumers are idiots as a whole.

So he tanks the market for a couple weeks, tells all his buddies about him reversing it ahead of time (The volume of favorable options placed the morning he reversed prior to the announcement are massive) then just pauses knowing many stocks will come back 20+%. Now you can make a case that a lot of investors might look at a market drop that big as an opportunity to buy (I know I did) but you know if Trump is willing to send out social media messages that it's time to buy, his buddies and their buddies and 30 minutes later probably his enemies all knew it was happening long before the announcement.

Whenever this happens all the politicians all have the exact same excuse. "My financial advisor makes all my trade decisions for me". Well at least those that don't keep their investments in a trust so they are not public info.
 
I pulled profit of $5500 on Bitcoin four years ago after 8 months of a $20,000 investment which got me started. Then bought metals which have increased, one quite a lot lately.

A friend told me in November to buy XRP crypto when it was .58 cents and I thought no I'm not sure I want to go the crypto route anymore because it's so volatile, but when he told me it was up to $3.00 a couple months ago I got interested. His $2000 turned into a nice amount of value if he sold it but he's just gonna hold it.

Two days ago I bought XRP/Ripple at $1.96 and it's up to $2.12. This crypto has utility because it's 1000 times faster and 1000 times cheaper to use than SWIFTCOIN for the space of digital funds transfer and XRP is constantly innovating into new ways to make transactions more efficient and soon ETF's will be made to sell. A bunch of financial experts believe it'll be the next Bitcoin and will be adopted by many banks, ect.

It's one of those things that one could put a 1% investment of your portfolio and it could be worth 10 times that in a year or two, or half as much, but I'm taking the chance.
Eh, look up XRP/RIPPLE because it's got a strong following and is staving off fear sentiment well compared to much of the stock market.

I have no idea what I'm doing but have been pretty fortunate so far. Just the last few months I decided to try to learn more on investing but it's a slow process. Buy low and sell high?!, lol.
Latest report;
XRP went down for a week or so but it went up from the $1.96 when I bought it to a high of $2.24 this morning. It's been a very robust Crypto during this recent fall in the stock market.
I wouldn't be surprised if it was up to $2.35 in a week.
 
If you don't hold it, you don't own it.
Yup… Sold off a lot of my physical gold bullion back in 2011 to buy my dream car when I was stationed in Germany, but have been slowly rebuilding our stores by adding to our actual physical gold and silver over the past several years; typically one ounce coins.

That said, now that I’m twice-retired I’m finally at the point where I need to start thinking about divesting the “paper gold” assets and using the proceeds to pay off our house and/or buy more physical gold or other real assets.

I can theoretically withdraw the equity from my Sprott account as actual physical gold once I have enough in there to = one standard trade bar; or 400 ounces (25#) of gold. I’m getting there, but nowhere near that level 😆. Or rather, I should say I was getting there. Now that I’m on a semi-fixed income, the chances of me getting the rest of the way to $1M+ (actually $1,342,000 as of today) just in my gold account is…well, highly unlikely.

Just happy I started down this path almost more than 10 years ago… But that 10% backstop I was putting into my retirement accounts has grown disproportionately large (shrunk less I suppose) vs. my other investments, and even though I’m benefiting from this turn of events, it still makes me nervous to be so imbalanced.

Or maybe this is the right approach, and I need to just roll with it…maybe even go farther down this path.

Will ponder this a bit…
 
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Latest report;
XRP went down for a week or so but it went up from the $1.96 when I bought it to a high of $2.24 this morning. It's been a very robust Crypto during this recent fall in the stock market.
I wouldn't be surprised if it was up to $2.35 in a week.
It's been two weeks but XRP hit $2.35 for a few minutes today.

As of late lot's of good news about XRP and Ripple, one of which is a 1.25 Billion dollar acquisition of Hidden Road and more XRP ETF approvals.

At the dip I had bought Bitcoin, XRP, plus three other Crypto's, and pulled almost $3600 profit out of them in 3 weeks time. I blew it one day by getting greedy hoping for a tad higher selling price as a whale bought a bunch, then the whale sold, thus dropping the price down where it was before within a few minutes. Ha I could have made $600 more that day so I learned a expensive lesson.

One other Crypto wasn't doing that well so I sold it at a $30 loss because I got tired of waiting.

Edit, I think I'm going to buy more silver because many think it's value is "held" down and it could move up fast once the dam breaks, whereas Gold is high right now.
 
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It has been interesting watching investors make decisions based on forecasts made by people who literally consume corporate excrement media as if it was even remotely-accurate.

The legacy stupid media has been wrong about so many things, and is used by the upper tier financiers to manipulate the upper class (way low compared to ruling class) to divest at times of opportunity for the ruling, and buy at times that benefit the ruling.

The fundamentals are rarely understood by the “upper class”, so they get used and abused as a normal part of the brokerage and media cycles of information manipulation.

Most of the “gurus” consume the corporate media excrement and base their forecasts on those assumptions, which is almost hilarious to watch. They aren’t familiar with things that governments and corporations can or can’t do, but instead talk about political philosophy and government initiatives. Look at how Net Zero worked out for Spain and Portugal, for example.

Look at how modernizing military industrial capacity is working out for Europe. These guys think modern technology can just be ordered off a shelf somewhere, after their parliaments treated defense like the enemy for the past 40-70 years in most cases. Their fighters are still powered by 16,900-22,200lb thrust class turbofan designs from the 1980s. They haven’t even moved up to US 1970s class turbofans, let alone what we did in the 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, 2010s, and what we’re doing now with 43,000-47,000lb+ class motors with variable 3-airstream paths and stealth features.

Demand for US aerospace and exclusive industries is only increasing. The US remains the #1 destination for Direct Foreign Investments for 13 years straight, but the talking heads are running their mouths about detachment from the US, even as the UK and Germany double-down on their multi-billion orders from the US.

There are tiers of market knowledge, and the top tier is exclusive to only a few people.
 
But opportunity is always available to anyone you just have make a judgement and accept the risk. Yes the insiders have the edge, the know the laws government is going to pass ahead of time, contracts government is going to sign ahead of time, options to buy before the fact, but trends are available to the little guy if you don’t let the short term spook you.
 
Access to exclusive tier ruling class economic data is priced out of reach for the common upper class investor. Why would the ruling class jeopardize their liquidity when they can just scare or con upper class investors into financing their runs and pick-up games?
I agree but it is what it is and I don't see a way out of fighting inflation otherwise.
In my case I'm too old to do the physical labor I used to do in my career and I'd rather die than be a walmart greeter or similar.

To me increasing ones wealth is like going surfing, like when one wishes to time and ride the best waves they can.
Investing - one rarely gets in at the perfect time and out at the perfect time but trading techniques can be learned which increases the chance of catching the waves right.
If the ocean is calm then you are just sitting on your board, but normally there are some waves, and sometimes big waves, and if a Tsunami happens we're all SOL anyway.
But opportunity is always available to anyone you just have make a judgement and accept the risk. Yes the insiders have the edge, the know the laws government is going to pass ahead of time, contracts government is going to sign ahead of time, options to buy before the fact, but trends are available to the little guy if you don’t let the short term spook you.
Raising my hands as that little guy.
When I was young I was a "put all my eggs in one basket" person and I learned the hard way that baskets can fall over so I keep my eggs in different baskets to avert some risk. And unfortunately I don't have much time left to go "long term" at this point.
I guess I'll make some money or I won't but at least I tried.
 
Latest report;
XRP went down for a week or so but it went up from the $1.96 when I bought it to a high of $2.24 this morning. It's been a very robust Crypto during this recent fall in the stock market.
I wouldn't be surprised if it was up to $2.35 in a week.

Most of those Crypto's I bought at the recent crash went up, but faltered, and I sold them at a decent enough profit. I made around 20% off a relatively small investment of $8000. Then took all those funds and layered into XRP when it was lower at times so I have quite a bit now, as well as a fair amount of Bitcoin/BTC. XRP hit $2.42 today and BTC went to $104,000-ish so I've been pulling in some embarrassingly high profits(for me that is).

Wouldn't be surprised if XRP went to high 2.50's in the next few weeks. If XRP acquires Circle it could break the $3.40 record and then it'll likely go parabolic possibly 3x=ing what I have now before years end.
If not I'll have my stop loss set in case of bad news, let XRP settle, then buy in again. Why?? because Ripple/XRP is 1000 times faster and 1000 times cheaper than SWIFT is at digital funds transfer and more and more institutions are adopting it day by day.
 
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