I was under an awesome plan where I could put almost anything into it and it would have been matched by my employer. I put in about 40k over two and a half years. I was set to retire when I was 50 and three months. I had a 740 credit score, unlimited credit, I owned a house, I did everything my mom and dad told me to do credit wise. I was kicking ass. I learned to live off of very little but I made more than my parents did. I threw it back into my retirement thinking that was smart…
We got notified that the 401k took a shit and was essentially worthless in 2008. I put more into it over time but when I got laid off, it was only worth 14k, and when I cashed it out to live on in 2010, I got 8 grand back. By then I was waiting tables. I had arranged to sell my super awesome Silverado to my neighbor but Compass bank lied to them after they drove 5 hours to pick it up and sign the paperwork and said it wasn’t there, even though they parked next to it. They reported it “repossessed” and my credit took a bigger shit than it already did, which was lame because I had payed so much ahead it wasn’t underwater and I was selling it to my neighbor for pay off amount. I had bought an 89 Astro Van to replace it with some of the cash I got from my retirement. I went to the Houston area for a job interview at another college and spent a week there on a friend’s couch. When I got back, all the drywall was knocked out of my house, all the appliances stolen, all the wiring was pulled, the heater was robbed. The pipes in my house burst. The insurance guy didn’t do shit about it because he said it wasn’t forced entry. My home was foreclosed on. They stole everything in my house except for an antique Martin D18 guitar that was given to me by my father and my grandfather’s comic book collection, because it was in a safe that they couldn’t open. I’m not sure why they left the Martin, other than they might have gotten spooked, or they knew me and wanted to leave me with something. I dunno. I had three pairs of jeans and some t shirts. I had to buy underwear when I got back after the police came and did a report and helped me shut off the water that was pouring out from where they ripped the hoses out of where my washing machine used to be.
The story goes on and on but its in the past, and as of 2020 or so, it will all be off of my credit by then. My wife is friends with a film maker from California and he wanted to make a movie about it.
I forgot to add that when the 401k died, they told me first by pulling me into an office separately from everyone else because most people didn’t have that kind of money in there, and I got the whole day off to adjust to the news.
There are always those who proclaim any incoming administration as either the greatest thing ever or the worst thing ever, and then the self-styled “realists” who say that it won’t make much difference and life will just go on as usual.
Both are a little bit right, and a whole lot wrong.
The progress of life in the world doesn’t ever “go on as usual”, because there is no “usual”, and the increments of trajectory that are set by global leaders affect us all, like course corrections on a powerful rocket. Sure, it’s easy to exaggerate the anticipated immediate effects of any one US presidential administration. The problem is that the momentous changes that happen in the world are the result of cumulative incremental circumstances, so that we tend to overestimate and over-hype the short-term expectations of our election choices, but we easily ignore and underestimate the long-term consequences.
Does anyone really doubt that a different set of policies over time, nudged just a little differently, might have prevented Europe being overrun by Nazis in the 1940s? Does anyone really doubt that a different set of policies could have prevented 9/11 and, more fundamentally, prevented the general rise of terrorism as a global factor?
We always underestimate the cumulative power of the incremental in the long term. That’s why it matters.
And, occasionally, the consequences really are immediate. Like Iraq. Like Vietnam. Or like if a different president, with a different temperament, had been in office during the Cuban missile crisis, we might all be radioactive ash today.
If it’s Bill we’re talking about, it was because of the Assault Weapons Ban that he pushed for and signed. It didn’t technically take guns away from people, but made it so they couldn’t buy new ones of the types that Feinstein thought looked icky.
Hillary made gun control a frequent theme in her campaign. She talking approvingly of Australia-style gun buybacks (which was mandatory). That, to me, is textbook “take people’s guns away”. YMMV.
You were almost certainly mistaken. First off, “rounds bigger than 50 cal” are generally considered “destructive devices” and are already heavily-regulated by the ATF. You sound like you may have mixed up two separate ideas together: a .50-caliber ban and a micro-stamping requirement. As far as I know, there hasn’t been a micro-stamping bill proposed anywhere in the country that would apply just to “rounds that were bigger than 50 cal” or even just .50-caliber rounds. And I don’t believe Obama got into specifics of gun control enough to focus on .50-cals or micro-stamping. He usually stuck to fairly vague pronouncements like “weapons of war that belong on a battlefield”.
Also, people can and do hunt large game with .50-caliber rifles.
Man, there’s a lot to unpack here. What happened to your 401K? If you mean it went down when the market tanked, it would be back up to its previous value if you had just left it alone (unless you invested it very badly). And, no, the market and economy did not keep going in the same direction. You seem to be a very factually-challenged person.
Or was it that you raided your 401K for the cash when the economy tanked (in which case, there is no way to expect Obama to magically restore the money in your 401 K).
Never mind, I see you subsequently did answer although those answers are confusing. If your 401K took that big a hit, you must have invested it extraordinarily badly…and you can’t really expect to Obama to magically cure all your mistakes.
Look, I feel bad for your hard luck story, but you can’t expect the President to magically cure what ills you. However, perhaps if we had a better government that actually regulated the financial industry, the economic collapse that did you in never would have occurred.
You are wrong and I am forcing my correct opinion on you and if you resit I will repeat myself over and over and over and I secretly hope you do the same so I can call you bad names.
That really does make everything worth it. I just wish I had more to give to multi-billionaires.
Thanks. Yeah, it sucked but luckily my unit didn’t lose anyone in Iraq (although I really should’ve been killed over there. That was a crappy night. Kinda messed me up for a bit).
But what really sucks is we took our attention from Afghanistan to screw around in Iraq. I blame my best friend’s death partly on that (which I talked about here right after it happened. God, I’ve been on this board way too long).
So yeah, it’s very important to me who is president.
Well, they are not going to try to crash the economy…and, in fact, in the short term, I imagine it will probably continue to do pretty well, maybe even improve if Trump gets some of his stimulus. However, these people are captive to their ideology and their ideology is one of getting rid of regulations, including those that prevent the excessive risk-taking that led to the meltdown in 2008. Furthermore, these are people who believe that the best way to help the economy is to give the rich lots of tax breaks that we can’t actually afford in the long run…So, who do you think is going to end up losing out when the bills come due?
You should not feel too about your current situation. I didn’t even start saving for retirement until I was 32 because that’s when I got my first real job (after grad school and a couple of postdocs). And, now I am in quite good financial shape. So, there is hope…but you want to make sure that you learn from your mistakes of the past. I.e., you never want to invest your 401k in the high risk way that you apparently did.
It went down when the market tanked. It went from 95k to about 12 when they pulled me into the office. We had a system to where you could pick “conservative” or “standard” or “agressive” but thats all the adjusting on the 401k you could do. I thought it was under “standard”, but it was under “aggressive”. I rolled a lot into it when I stopped working at Raytheon in college and started working at the college, and then threw a ton more when I was working in the college, because my mortgage and most of my bills were offset by renting out half of my house (I owned a duplex.) The interaction I had with my 401k was largely pulling out the money I needed to live on for the month (I got paid once a month), and then manually moving the money into the 401k with the online tools that my employer had set up. Then I just would read the quarterly letters that came in the mail to let me know how my money was doing. I was largely following the advice of my father and much older brother at the time and doing what they said, I’ve never been good at money. They sure were though, or used to be. My brother is still a millionaire, but I don’t get money from him or really interact with him much. He lives 2200 miles away.
Its a little foggy since its been so long and the news was really dramatic. We had a dual system of retirement, half of it was the 401k and half of it was a pension system. I got laid off so I lost out on the pension thing.
I don’t know what you meant by “raiding” the 401k for cash. When I was laid off I had the option to roll it into an IRA, but I needed that damn 14k so I cashed it out then and lived off of the 8900 or whatever I got after 6 weeks of waiting on it.
I didn’t think Obama was going to fix it. Quite the opposite, I am having a hard time thinking the president does matter at all. I am reading the comments on here though and it seems to matter in ways that I didn’t consider before, though.
You probably know more about 401k things than I do though. I would defer to your good judgment.
Honestly I didn’t think about it from that perspective. It would seem that some of my ignorance is getting fought. Thanks. I’m glad you made it home. I’m sorry about your friend.
I appreciate all the perspective people are putting out, it gives me things to ponder, and thats why I love this place so much. Sometimes I feel like I have a hard time understanding these types of things because my talents lie in making machines work and building them and doing machine type of stuff, and I don’t get politics and money and things like that like “normal” people do.
In OP you admit that you don’t follow the relevant news much; this is a good example. Cheney ran his own intelligence operation out of the White House, contradicting the CIA or making sure it told him what he wanted to hear. Bush-Cheney had decided they wanted to attack Iraq before 9/11 and made sure it happened.
If you don’t want to read dry webpages, start with the based-on-fact Fair Game film with Sean Penn.
Since most Americans — even Senators — did not have access to raw CIA intel before it was replaced with Cheney’s lies, many made the wrong decision not because they were as malicious as Cheney, but because they didn’t suspect the White House was lying to them.
Even with the lies the Iraq invasion was a bad idea, and Al Gore was one of the few who figured that out. He strongly opposed the 2003 invasion. Your vet friend is very very misinformed.
More generally, your OP ignores what huge power POTUS has, and how urgent are the issues facing our country. It sounds like some of these issues (women’s rights, rights for trade unionists, gay rights, rights for brown- or black-skinned people, climate change, overseas wars, etc.) may not seem to affect you personally.
I’m really surprised how many people here in Australia care who the US president is.
It’s important information, useful to know, be aware of etc, but it’s not something I think most people here should passionately have an opinion on - yet they do.
As I pointed out to one of my acquaintances who was sharing a lot of anti-Trump stuff on social media - “We can’t vote in their elections. Nothing you can say or do will have any impact on who wins. And no matter who wins, it doesn’t really affect you anyway.”
You’re wrong here again: Trump at the time of the invasion is quoted on a few occasions as being generally supportive of the invasion. When he ran for President, he basically lied on countless occasions – even though he was frequently fact-checked by the press and independent organizations – by telling people that he always opposed the war. Trump lied about his position, period.
On the larger issue, the next President could have a substantial impact on abortions. If Trump is able to appoint a justice that opposes Roe v. Wade – which is not a certainty but seems quite likely – it is very possible that a woman’s right to obtain an abortion could be very substantially restricted. Already, certain states have made up new laws for flimsy reasons that have resulted in many clinics being shut down. In some states, a woman might have to drive hundreds of miles to exercise a right that the Supreme Court decided a few decades ago that she has. These state laws are ending up in Federal courts, and due to who the President may appoint in future years to the bench, could be the determining factor if these laws are thrown out or strengthened.
But if you’re a guy, well, maybe you just don’t care?