By paying 17k for wedding food?

Sure, I'll make a poll about what the best pizza topping is instead to blend in with the rest of the forum.



After gifts I was only out $8k and my wife and I split the cost. We didn't want to put the burden on our parents. The whole wedding was under $20k. That $17k number included alcohol, food, venue. Then we paid our DJ about $800. A few photographer friends offered to do it for me for free.



Tbh, that's the main reason why I post about real life things like work, finance, taxes, stocks, etc. Not to mention, I work in business and I just enjoy learning and sharing and talking about it. To me it's no different than someone who finds another activity interesting.



I always do my $5500 into a Roth IRA for sure. If the government wants to let me have tax haven growth, I won't turn it down. Then I put 15% of my pay into a Roth 401k. You can put up to $17k into a ROTH 401k, which will make your paychecks suck because it's all post-tax dollars, but the money and growth is entirely yours. People don't realize that when they retire and have a fat stack of $1,000,000 that's more like, $700,000.



Well yeah it depends on what you can put your money in. In a Roth IRA your money is 100% flexible if you want to put it in an index fund or a specific stock, anything you want. Then my 401k obviously doesn't have flexibility beyond what my employer offers, but they have a good bit of index funds. Right now I have 90% of my 401k money in an S&P 500 mimicking index fund and 10% in a Vanguard bond index fund.

I can grow that money quicker in an index fund than putting it against my mortgage potentially, but I have my 401k majority in stocks, so this is a guaranteed return/risk mitigation. Paying down my mortgage twice as fast seems like a can't miss option



Lol, I've never spent a single penny on this site. I don't have very good star upgrades and the few I have were purchased purely with fg star upgrades/donate for me. Doesn't mean I think donating to the site is a bad idea, I just never have used my own cash to do it.

This post was edited by AspenSniper on Jun 29 2016 07:03am

It would make you less dislikable, so I could live with that. Right now, most of your threads are all about thinly coated bragging. It would be okay if the bragging was about interesting stuff (such as a talent of something you've done work), but throwing dollar signs and numbers around at random is just boring.

Boring to someone who probably doesn't understand it.

I get that it comes off as bragging because I use my own career and investments when giving examples and talking about recent stock trades and business mergers and stuff I'm interested in. IceMage isn't wrong though. I see a lot of people I went to college with that are making close to what I'm making that can't afford anything beyond their $2000/month apartments because they have no clue how to save, no clue about the value of compounded interest and why that matters in a 401k or IRA, etc. Call it cocky, but I'm just saying, there's zero reason that someone who I graduated with that works at the same company in a similar role as me should have a net worth that is half of mine.

Fact is, because I care about investing and do it wisely, lets say I have $3 million when I'm 60 and ready to retire. Someone who made the same salary as me may only have $2 million purely because they didn't care about investing when they were younger and I think that's really fucking stupid.

So yeah, I'm sure it often falls on deaf ears, but I get a few PM's a week with JSP users asking me about investing and telling me their company offers a 401k and should they participate, etc. I like to think I help people from time to time and put them on a smarter path so they can retire at 55 with a high net worth instead of having to work til they're 65 just to have social security to live off of (if it's still there).

Call it cocky, call it arrogant, I just enjoy talking about business/finance/investing and I REALLY enjoy helping people who are interested in learning about it. It's not cocky when someone goes into the Motorsports discussion forum to learn about cars and some guy shows off pics of his awesome car and wants to help people on what is wrong with their cars, what they should be paying for a car service, etc. It's no different.

For whatever reason, money has a bad connotation as if people must've screwed over someone in the lower class to become wealthy. People are uncomfortable talking about money. I think that's just fucking bizarre.



Yeah, I think it's a shame really. People don't take time to understand it because it doesn't interest them, maybe it doesn't interest them because they don't understand it. Most of these people are the same ones that would whine and say it's silly that we have stupid elective classes in high school but no classes that teach us how to buy a car/mortgage/how interest works on student loan debt/other useful skills.

It makes me mad personally because i'll have to pay higher taxes down the road because people never bothered to learn how to save/invest their money. It makes me mad for them that they're going to wake up and be 40+ years old and be in a spot where it becomes much harder to save enough for retirement or for their kids college funds, etc. All 100% preventable, but they didn't bother because "it didn't interest them"

This post was edited by AspenSniper on Jun 29 2016 08:12am

So what youre saying is that I can bum 1.5k fg to change my user name?

If I were to guess, I would say that the OP has some inferiority complex regarding his own intelligence and success.That being said, I hope you sort out your issues because we all have them.

Haha honestly man, I just like talking about money/investing and how to acquire more and I like helping people understand the world of finance/investing because it can be pretty daunting if you don't know a lot about it. That's pretty much my main reason in talking about what I do here.

I think people are just insecure talking about money, so they deflect that against people who are comfortable talking about it and immediately say it's arrogance, regardless of how much either person has.

This post was edited by AspenSniper on Jun 29 2016 08:23am

I think most people are quite happy to talk about money, they are just objecting to perceived self gratification.

Btw, as someone with an educational and work background in economics I find your posts in pard to be quite ignorant for someone with an MBA

Let's backtrack for a moment. This thread's title: I Spent $23,000 Today.

I call it cocky and arrogant because it is cocky and arrogant.



I'm aware of the fact that you're knowledgeable about business and finances. I see people recommending you for such advice on weekly basis, and your opinions in business related threads are usually a good read. I have this opinion of you because of these things -- not because of any of the numbers you've ever mentioned regarding your personal finances and achievements.

Personally, I frequently help people with questions regarding programming, IT, music theory/performance/recording. Most of them have never heard any of my own music or seen any of my own IT projects, and none of the people I've ever helped have the slightest clue regarding how much money I make. That's because I can convey useful input without needing to brag about what I have done myself. Interesting, isn't it?