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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   2480 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for July 19, 2023

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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Again, nothing is necessarily safe in a 3-5 year time horizon with the exception of a savings account, CD, federal bonds, or a money market account (others may quibble with the last one, but it’s generally true). So I think you need to have a better idea of what you’re saving for. If you think you may buy a house in 3-5 years, you can certainly invest your money in the stock market, but there is a risk that you will lose money. Now if you just have an amorphous idea of I want to have more money in 5 years but there’s nothing I really plan to buy, then going for an overall index fund may be the move.

Think I'll go for a fund that has beaten the index over the last 5 year period.

You do you, everyone has a different risk tolerance.

Past performance does not guarantee future results.

Clearly not, but it is generally the case that past behavior is a predictor of future behavior. So if I have the choice between funds that have regularly failed to match the index and funds that have regularly surpassed the index, I'm picking the latter.

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