Man, I hate identity politics. It really has been an extremely useful tool to get the wealthy to divide us so that we won't care about our own deliberate impoverishment.
At the same time, whenever someone is mean to my trans homies I want to punch them in the throat.
My plan is either soon the lotto or die before retirement. Now, I've been in a corporate job for nearly 2 decades, putting money in a 401k and Roth IRA. But given the rate that the value of the dollar is just tanking and the cost of everything is skyrocketing, I honestly figure everything I saved will be worthless. I've had my AC off for months at this point, turned it off towards the end of winter early spring. The electric company is telling me that I'm at best on par with some of my neighbors with other neighbors using less than half. Insurance for the car is going up. I love when I ask about why are my rates so high, they blame other drivers and somehow that's my problem. In 2017 my bill was $335. 7 years later it's up to $634. Same vehicle, no accidents. $100 for groceries does not go very far anymore. I'm pretty sure there was a picture on Lemmy just the other day showing someone with a receipt buying the same stuff and it was like three times more now than it was just a few years ago.
Use one of those inflation calculators and between 2010 and 2024 we're at 44%.
I still have more than two decades to go before my supposed retirement date. And I have no faith in our economy.
I feel like those calculators are lying or intentionally ignoring things, because just from 2020 to 2024 alone, products have gone up by 2.5x their original cost alone. The only things that somehow havent are the subsidized products like milk and gas (still around $4 per gallon somehow, and it used to be $2.50 for milk before 2020)
A couple of years ago my kid took a funny picture of the cat and put some white text on it and said "look I made a meme!" I told her "No, you made an image macro. it's not a meme unless it goes viral." and even her mother who's older than me told me I was being pedantic and any picture can be a meme.
If you want to be pedantic, it'd be good to know that that's not what a meme is. A meme is a unit of cultural information—analogous to a gene being a unit of genetic information. A meme may not go viral, just like a gene might not be successfully copied onto other generations, but it's still a meme nonetheless :)
A meme is just "A unit of cultural information, such as a cultural practice or idea, that is transmitted verbally or by repeated action from one mind to another."
Anything can be a meme. I mean, the entire first Shrek movie was a meme, just like the bee movie.
I would have some choice words for my past self if given an opportunity to say anything to them.
Buy stock in Apple, and pick up any stock you can in an little startup called Tesla when it is founded.
That Bitcoin thing that will come along? Yeah, it's dumb, just mine a couple of Bitcoin for the fun of it, put it in a safe place and document everything you need to know to access it, then forget about it for about a decade.
Houses, they're expensive right? Ha. Ok. Buy one anyways. Like, as soon as you can. Just do it.
Don't buy that, or that, or that, or that, or that either. It will only lead you down a path towards lifelong debt. Just don't do it man.
Oh, and the girl isn't worth it, stay living at home for a while longer, don't get kicked out because of some broad. Dump her, and go spend your money on a house.
Go play this Geo game in (nearby city), you'll meet an awesome girl you'll want to marry, on that app. Just trust me on that one.
Only on bisq.network via a Monero swap for some pricy "donation" torrent site once in a while. Like I'm some stupid sucker who gonna broadcast my financial status to everyone, everywhere, for all the future.
Try to budget as best you can, and contribute what you can afford, if anything, to broad, market-cap weighted index funds that focus on the entire global economy, not just the US.