The concept that someone could just forget about hundreds/thousands of dollars in a 401k is… well, I was going to say unbelievable, but understandable for certain people…
So, YES, if you’re the kind of person* that’d forget you’d put a hundred bucks in your sock drawer, check your (multiple?) 401k’s!
*Not me - I can tell you without looking that I have $57.50 in my front pocket, a just-in-case 20 in my card holder, and an emergency fund of 200 in my closet.
I once forgot an entire bank account in California in the 1980s.
I moved to PA and a year later the bank contacted me.
I think it was around $500.
I never did that again.
Although I have a bunch of bank accounts and need to consolidate a couple just to avoid forgetfulness in my dotage.
It happens like this:
It’s out of sight, out of mind, and then you move. You don’t update your address with that place since you’ve forgotten you own it. And when they try to contact you, the USPS forwarding has already expired. So that letter arrives at where you used to live and the new residents throw it away without a care.
The key thing is all of us remember more things than we can recall. If after 3 months in PA, someone had said to @Ellecram “What about your account at X back in CA?”, she’d have bopped her forehead and said “Oh yeah, shit! I forgot all about it”. But with no reminder, there’s no recalling.
Back in the day, every account you had snail mailed you a statement at the end of every month. It was darn hard to forget about Bank X or Investments Y while that blizzard of paper was showing up. Nowadays when they snail mail nothing and expect you to self-service your statements by visiting their website, it’s a LOT easier to forget about something. 401ks don’t even have anything like a 1099 that you’d get annually at tax time to remind you.
It would actually be a public service for the Feds to require that all 401k providers snail-mail a statement of your balance to your last known address once a year. It’d cost 50 cents per year per account for the industry to be required to do that. Of course they’d fight it tooth and nail as an outrageous expense, but I bet the first year they did it one hell of a lot of people would be surprised / reminded about accounts they’d forgotten.
Yep. Wise move. There’s not much reason for a retired person to have more than one investment company and one bank.
I am not quite retired but getting there …
I inherited a few bank accounts from my father and just kept them open pending some estate litigation that went on forever. It’s all done now. So I just need one or two accounts instead of multiple.
For a place like Vanguard or Fidelity, with millions of accounts, it would be a real expense. Of course, it would be a small fraction of a percent of their total expenses.
Right.
Losing $50 on the street would hurt. But with pensions it’s money I can’t touch for decades and is actually supposed to be something you put away and don’t need to concern yourself with. Plus, when you change jobs it’s typically a time where you’re needing to do interviews, maybe move home, do new induction processes, get up to speed etc, and it’s pretty hard to suddenly think about one of the benefits of the past job.
Of course, one could argue that when the new job suggests you sign up for the pension that would be an ideal time to work on moving the previous funds. But the setup here in the UK seems almost designed to hurt procrastinators like me…
Most employers can’t / won’t offer you a pension from day 1. You need to have been working there for 3 or 6 months say. So you fill out all the forms saying you want a pension when starting the new job. But you can’t start moving funds over until months later. And even if you remember, you’re probably already a ghost to the previous provider.
Welp, we learn something new every day. TIL that there is such a thing as LED bulbs that are specifically rated for fully enclosed fixtures. I knew that heat tended to kill the driver circuitry inside them but not that there were bulbs specially made for unventilated fully enclosed fixtures.
This is good to know as in my decrepit state with a bad leg I’m not about to climb up on ladders very often, if at all. The bulbs rated for enclosed fixtures are actually fairly hard to find and more expensive than ordinary bulbs, but well worth it. I don’t think places like Home Depot carry them (at least, not here) but I just ordered a box of them from Amazon.
Pay the Ukrainian plumbers to come by once and replace every bulb that you’d need a ladder or stepstool to access. That’ll last the rest of your years in that house.
What makes home handymen unaffordable for those tasks that stymie the older folks is how small they are. Get them (or anyone else you know of) to knock off a bunch of such tasks at once and suddenly their minimum charge becomes much more reasonable.
And when they’re done you’ve (probably) avoided bulbish vexation for life.
Just saw an ad in Factual Questions for the Illinois Municipal League’s “Civility Pledge”. I can hardly wait for it to appear in the Pit.
Fuck that shit.
A great sentiment for 30 years ago. But that horse is out of the barn and into the next time zone already. And is still picking up speed.
What kind of sadist makes a bathroom fixture whose mounting screw has a hex key head, requiring one to remove and reset the fscking allen key every half turn?
At my place of employment we have random fire drills maybe once a year.
We had one today.
Guess where I was when it went off?
On the toilet.
I considered that maybe maintenance was simply testing the alarm because it has been wonky the last couple years but then I heard the shuffling of feet and conversation headed to the exit door.
I was apparently the last one out but we still passed.
It’s Benign…! It’s Benign…!
Good advice. As it happens, I need all my wired smoke detectors replaced, and since the new ones use different plugs, new plugs will have to be spliced in. This will attract the Ukrainian handyman brothers and while they’re here I’ll get them to do bulb replacement.
On this subject, my journey of learning continues. It turns out that LED bulbs rated for enclosed fixtures are not necessarily all that rare, but it’s not always a highlighted feature in the same way that, say, “dimmable” is. I went down to Home Depot today for a look and the high-end Philips “Ultra Definition” dimmable bulbs state on the back “suitable for use in enclosed luminaires”. I don’t think “luminaire” is a legit English word but l get the idea. In fact on a Q&A for that product on Home Depot, an official response from Philips confirmed that it was indeed suitable for fully enclosed fixtures. Possibly other quality bulbs are as well, but not likely the ones selling for 99¢. These are $19.95 for a pack of three.
I have no idea how well this will turn out, but since everything is a calculated risk, I’d rather go with a reputable name brand than with a somewhat more obscure brand from Amazon, so I bought a couple of packs of the Philips bulbs and canceled the Amazon order.
Better yet, dump thick marinara sauce into the fixtures. It will act as a heat sink and keep the bulbs from overheating.
This sort of cruelty is uncalled for! Hey, I spill my guts out here to this forum about my trials and tribulations even as readily as I pour mushroom and sausage marinara sauce down my kitchen drain, and all I get for it is grief!
But now there’s a new development. On further review, apparently some folks have found even the high-end Philips LEDs to be failure-prone in enclosed fixtures, despite the manufacturer’s claims. Aaargh! Is there no solution to this?
I’ve mostly used Philips LED bulbs in the past and found them to burn like the inextinguishable Eternal Flame in tabletop lamps, but go out like shooting stars in enclosed fixtures. I was hoping that the high-end ones would be better due to higher quality driver electronics, but now I’m not so sure.
So back to Amazon. I ordered a pack of Maxlite 60W equivalent 2700K bulbs which will arrive on Sunday, whose prominent feature is “Rated for Enclosed Fixtures”. It’ll be interesting to see which performs better but now I’m betting on the Maxlite.
I think the reason this whole conundrum isn’t generally a big deal is because changing a light bulb is the proverbial trivial task. Except when a ladder presents a life-and-death challenge!
So the extended family has been enjoying a theme park vacation, and has been documenting the experience on social media. Very cute! Today one of the cousins created this long post about how much one of her kiddos had wanted to go on a specific ride, but of course there was a height requirement. They actually thought about stuffing he kid’s shoes for some extra height…but then they prayed about it, and left it in the hands of The Lord, who in His almighty wisdom saw fit for the kid to go on the ride.
It’s taking every bit of my self-restraint to not post about how the engineers who designed that ride put the height requirement in place for a reason, and that it’s something you absolutely do not fuck around with. Kids have perished horrifically because height (or weight) requirements were ignored.
This is exactly what I need for the spare bedroom. Thanks for posting!
It’s all done with affection.
Also, I forgot about the sausage and mushroom. It makes it even more heat-absorbent.
The Centennial Light is a bulb that has been running almost continuously for nearly 125 years.
Maybe there’s a clue there?