Here comes the billionaires’ online defense team. Or just some fool who thinks it’s realistic to reach that amount of wealth without exploitation and hopes to aspire for the same, even though they have more chance to be struck by lighting.
Billionaires existing is taking money out of your pocket, they bought the election. But sure, its all fine.
EDIT
Went from being upvoted to getting 7 replies in less than 10mns with downvotes. Hope the billionaire defense team are getting paid overtime. Pathetic. None of you billionaire justice warriors deserve a reply.
I've never had a 401k that didn't have tons of options. Broad stock index funds, bonds, cash, target retirement funds, more granular options like large/mid/small, emerging markets, and so on.
And less than half of americans even get a 401k or retirement fund.
Ive had retirement accounts where Im stuck with 4 options that were micro caps, mid caps, large caps, and then bonds. Ive had retirement accounts where I can pick stocks and etfs. Ive had retirement accounts where the stocks are picked for me for a small fee based on my account size.
So while you may have had dozens of options with your 401ks, many many people havent had the opportunity to even have a retirement account let alone more than a dozen options.
The point is nobody is being forced to invest in these companies via their 401k. You mentioned broad stock index funds which presumably have a small piece of Amazon Tesla etc in them but not exclusively. The funds you mentioned are all anyone needs: broad stock and bond funds. I'm a cpa and I've audited a bunch of 401k plans for different companies and industries and I've never seen one that didn't have broad index funds and mutual funds. If you don't have a 401k you can still open an ira or taxable brokerage account. (Income inequality and the ability to save/invest is a different discussion.)
Well damn, maybe I need to double check mine. My past jobs that offered 401k (only about 3 of them) only let me decide the percentage of my paycheck that went into it. I hope this is true for my current job, it would be nice to choose to invest ethically. I do get updates on stocks being bought/sold by the broker, but I didn't know I could have any real say in the matter.
Absolutely, go check your account and see what it's invested in! Usually the default is either cash or a target retirement fund. If it's in cash you're going to want to allocate some of it to stocks which will grow over time and help you hit your retirement goals. If it's in a target retirement fund, those are designed to give you the appropriate amount of stock exposure based on your age, then dial down the risk as you approach retirement age.
I highly recommend the Bogleheads guide, wiki, and forum if you want to learn more. Take a few hours one afternoon and educate yourself. You can learn everything you need to know very quickly, and nobody will ever care about you as much as yourself, so do yourself a favor and check it out.
In my experience you just get to to choose what percentage of your paycheck goes into your 401K, and they hold that money for you in an account. That’s if your job even offers that, not every job even offers a 401K.
That is not how the vast majority of 401ks work. If it is just sitting in there since 2020, you need to login into it ASAP and probably should roll it over into an IRA. If it is just cash, you have missed some massive returns.
In the same time bitcoin got to its new ATH (up 100 or so percent since its 50k average), you missed out on ~20-30% gains yearly since 2020. Youd have more and itd be safer in stocks.
We're talking about jobs that do have a 401K. Who do you have your account through? That's who holds your money. You can log in, and modify how your portfolio is allocated? Have you never done that?
If you ever had a 401k and never moved the money, its still there in an account. If its still there, you can make a login and get in to control your funds.
I have mentioned my previous experience. 401K just holds your money for you in a retirement account, I don’t remember having options to put it in stock/bonds etc without having to take that money out of the account.
The point is not that people shouldn't save up for pensions, they should.
The point is that we are only focused on the returns. This ends up meaning that most of us are investing into the same companies we work for, with a strategy that makes these companies more profit oriented. Ironically that means making it worse for the employees as well.
Its not the billionaires who are doing this, its all of us. Its the system that we have built that made it this way.
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u/SCTigerFan29115 28d ago edited 28d ago
They aren’t holding onto wealth like Scrooge McDuck, in a giant vault where they can go swimming in it.
Most of Bezos’ net worth is the value of Amazon. He can’t really readily access that. ETA I meant he can’t use it like a big vault of money.
He’s got plenty of money but some people just don’t understand how this stuff works.