Ask

screenshot, a 40 second video or a looping gif above the fold - what do people actually look at

Numbers to make the format decision less about taste. The current pass mark for largest contentful paint is under 2.5 seconds at the 75th percentile of real visitors over a rolling 28 day window. A multi-megabyte gif sitting above the fold will fail that on mobile all by itself, and unlike a design opinion that one shows up in your search console.

Separately, on unattended autoplay, attention falls off a cliff after roughly ten seconds. Your 40 second video is realistically a 9 second video with 31 seconds of hope attached.

96 · in/sunset-or-sell ·

Pension at 25 years plus a deferred comp balance, how did public safety people bridge the years before Medicare

There is a separate rule worth understanding on the qualified plan side, which is that leaving service in or after the year you reach a certain age lets you take from that employer's plan without the extra early distribution tax, and the qualifying age is lower for public safety employees than for everyone else. It applies to the employer plan, not to an IRA, which is the part that trips people. The IRS page on exceptions to the tax on early distributions lays it out in a table and is worth ten minutes of your evening. I am a colleague, not an adviser, so run your actual numbers past someone who does this for a living before you file paperwork.

75 · in/early-retirement ·

I spend money literally every single day, is a no-spend day a real thing or is it budget theatre?

Disagreeing with the whole framing, politely. £180 a month is real money, but it is a rounding error next to the three numbers that actually decide your savings rate: what you pay for housing, what you pay for a car if you have one, and what you earn. I spent two years optimising small spending and moved my savings rate by a couple of points; I moved it by fifteen points in one afternoon by changing where I lived when the lease came up. Do the small stuff if it is fun, but do not mistake it for the lever.

187 · in/money-basics ·

Is it normal that my first year of investing has basically gone nowhere

Completely normal, and the maths of why is more encouraging than it sounds. When you're contributing monthly, your average pound has only been invested for about half the period - so after thirteen months, your money has an average holding time of around six or seven months. A flat-to-slightly-up result over that window is well within ordinary.

The more important thing: at year one your returns are dominated by contributions, not by growth. £6,000 contributed and £110 of growth feels bad, but at year fifteen the growth is the story and the contributions are noise. There's no way to skip that first stretch, and everyone who's been at this a decade went through exactly the same year feeling exactly what you're feeling.

1.1K · in/index-investing ·

customer #1 sent a 92-question security questionnaire and i am one person with a laptop

Time cost, since that is the thing nobody prices in. My first one took about seven hours spread over two evenings. The second took forty minutes because I answered from the document I had already written. The third took twenty.

The other number people will bring up is a formal audit. Ballpark for a small shop is well into five figures once you count the auditor and the compliance tooling, plus an observation window measured in months, not weeks. That is not a 79 a month decision. What I would do is ask them plainly what deal size would justify it on their side, and put a note in your file. If three prospects in a row give the same answer, you have a real number to work with instead of anxiety.

88 · in/first-ten-customers ·

Cousin says he clears $150 a day trading with a $6k account, is anybody here actually doing this?

Fourteen months, real money, roughly $9,000 starting. I finished down about 11 percent before you count my time, and the interesting part is that my trading was near breakeven - commissions, spreads and two very bad days accounted for almost all of it. I was up in month three and completely convinced I had found something, which is the phase your cousin is probably in. The single most useful thing I did was keep a spreadsheet of every trade from day one, because it removed my ability to remember the year as better than it was.

249 · in/money-basics ·

Taking the package at 55 and then consulting two days a week, what actually breaks

The second thing that moves is your income figure, and a lot of what you buy in the years before Medicare is priced off that figure. Two days a week of consulting income is not neutral, it changes what you pay for cover and it can change how much room you have for tax efficient moves like conversions in those years. I am not going to give you a number because the rules move and my situation is not yours, but I would model three scenarios with an accountant before you commit to a day count. Deciding you will work two days and discovering later that one and a half would have been much cheaper is a bad way to learn it.

156 · in/early-retirement ·

raising from $19 to $39 next month - do the 22 people on the old price stay there forever

It stops being free the moment the old plan constrains the product. Grandfathered price, fine, forever. Grandfathered plan with unlimited anything in it - seats, usage, storage - is the one that comes back and hurts, because the cost of serving those accounts grows and you have promised it away. If the old tier has an unlimited in it, put an end date on the plan even if you keep the price.

28 · in/pricing-tiers ·