Red Lion

I agree, I was referring to the multimillionaire early retiree comment. I have no immediate plans to retire, really looking to take back my quality of life and focus some more on hobbies and travel and continue to pursue money making ventures. But if I was part of the FIRE crowd planning to travel the world and never work a job or entrepreneurial pursuit again, I'd need closer to $10 million to sleep well at night. I'm sure that number drops quite a bit when there's not a 25 year gap until medicare/ss eligibility, but the longer out of the workforce I'd imagine the harder it is to actually earn a significant income.

Most of my savings have occurred at a ~45% tax rate due to swings in earnings. Retirement accounts help, but if you have a variable income and have a big year there's not that many good places to invest a significant percent pretax. One of the biggest differences country to country I suspect is the ability to get social healthcare upon early retirement. If you're 40 and want to pull $100,000 a year you might want an investment portfolio of $3-$4 million depending on risk tolerance. But if you have a family in the USA you can expect to spend $30-$35k in health insurance premiums. Then probably $20k in property taxes and insurance (assuming you've managed to payoff a home in one of the coastal states). Then another $15-$20k in groceries assuming you're cooking healthy food at home. Then you'll be paying capital gains and dividend taxes on your investment portfolio. Probably about another $10k. Since you're a multimillionaire your kids are going to get hit with full price on college education which you either need to pay yourself, or set your kids up at a significant disadvantage to the 70% of kids that get huge subsidies. You could obviously reduce these numbers if you didn't have a family or if you want to live in Oklahoma. Anyway, in the above scenario, I'd be sweating a $500k unrealized loss not to mention a $million.

This seems like solid advice, and I agree even though I'm less practiced than you. I've certainly reached a net worth where I would have thought pre-covid I could retire (at 40), and I realize now that I'd need to tighten the belt, and I'd really be sweating if we had a REAL market downturn (which will certainly happen several times before I qualify for social security/medicare).

I'd argue that multi millionaire early retirees have far more to worry about, but I guess it depends how many multi-millions you've had. I'd be sweating if I was retired at 45 with $ 4 million in a high cost of living state and kids still living at home. At $10 million it wouldn't be such a big deal. About 5 years ago it felt like $80-$100k of income a year with a paid off home would be plenty to live an upper middle class type lifestyle, today it would be VERY tight with health premiums and rapidly increasing property tax and homeowners insurance costs. And that's before any tariff uncertainty.

We are on the same page here for the most part, but again the majority of the population in Canada and the USA think we are in some type of trade war when the reality appears to be something different. Certainly seems like bad communication and a great deal of unnecessary ill will between longstanding close allies. It will be interesting to see if there's any widespread coverage about the actual effective tariff rates by the news media, I personally doubt it.

Doesn't it kind of feel like that with Canada? All the press about trade wars, fentanyl and the 51st state, but factoring in all the tariff exempt trade through USMCA agreement, isn't Canada now at effectively the lowest rate worldwide?

Maybe all the increased volatility in the markets, makes selling options more attractive. I did shave a few percent off my losses vs. just staying long. Someone perfectly timed some OTM put options for hedging, wish I'd taken that approach instead haha

Got put APO and AMZN, so my little put selling experiment came to an early conclusion since I don't have any great interest in selling covered calls at these levels.

Congratulations. I’m tempted to buy a few shares of MSTR to send you good vibes, although I don’t understand the investment and have already lost enough money today!

Down 25 basis points since January 1 in my stock investment accounts. Was sitting at 3.59% YTD as of close yesterday. I've got a lot tied up in illiquid real estate, so who knows how that goes this year, rates are headed down and replacement cost is heading way up, but we might be headed into a recession.

The group becomes a useless echo chamber is what.

You’ve been one of the most useful (and profitable) posters that I follow here, so thank you.

American politics 101.

Agreed that it works two ways. That was what I was attempting to express.

I’m suggesting that it can and has lead to higher inflation of certain items (housing being an example). Not that they lead to higher inflation overall. I specifically didn’t make a comment about whether they lead to higher inflation on average. do you believe higher interest rates never have the capacity to lead to higher inflation in any circumstance?

Well two factors with the increase in interest rates are inflationary, they increase the price of building and buying housing, and also created their own "supply shock" on the existing housing supply with the mortgage lock in effect. The increase in deficit and debt service : GDP. Neither one of these would have been as significant factors the last major hiking campaign where overall debt levels were substantially lower.

Rolled my APO $139 4/4 short puts to $138 4/11 for a $0.60 credit.

Added to CP

By having a court trial with no jury and yanking the ability to run for office? I don’t profess to know anything about the case, but one can imagine how this setup could be used to control elections quite easily.

Sold KKR $112 puts expiring 4/4.

I'm not saying that brk is overvalued, but the cost of constructing houses has structurally gone up since 2020 and seems likely to continue to go up with the current trade/immigration policies. They definitely appear far more overvalued on an affordability basis.

Rolled my $141 APO puts expiring today to $140 puts expiring 4/4 for a $0.79 credit.

I’ve been thinking about this myself. Fairly happy with my car, but it might be time to get retired to one of the kids.

I think it’s probably not worth the effort but I enjoy trading. This is not a huge percent of my net worth. I only have about 10% in retirement accounts. I’ve earned good nominal returns in the past writing weekly puts on margin, but the risk:reward looks way less attractive when paying close to half in taxes on short term gains. I’m sure switching this strategy to my tax deferred account is a guaranteed way to lose money and get losses I can’t utilize

I probably should have started with covered call for APO. I’ve done way more with put selling than covered calls. The idea is to roll these close to expiration or exit with covered calls. Stupid move on my point not to look at this.