[anotherhue]

What exactly can an individual do? For many their accounts have limited fund choices and if you don't want to pay high ER for fund manager's pedicures then you end up on an index, which (S&P500 excluded) have now bent the knee. Mine are on russel indexes so I have no choice.

Short spacex is the only answer I've heard but I'm wise enough to know I don't have the mentality for derivatives.

[_--__--__]

The vast majority of American employees are not maxing out every tax advantaged retirement account instrument, and putting everything in a 401(k) past the employer match level is not advisable exactly because of the limited investment choices.

[bdangubic]

except if you self-employed. I have maxed the shit out of my 401k (i401k, self-managed) and after 3 decade career have more saved than I can spend in 8 lifetimes

[satvikpendem]

I too love solo 401ks. Saving 70k tax free is a beautiful arbitrage.

[lesuorac]

Well don't know your life but I suspect for a lot of people then it would've been more advantageous to not max out the 401k and retire pre-55 and spend the non-401k funds until 55.

This largely being my gripe about the Trump accounts in that you're allocating funds into them that can't be touched without penalties until like 50 years later. And for most people this probably isn't even a benefit because you can lifetime gift ~$15 million so like unless you're Bezos just invest the money yourself and gift your kid whatever large value item they wanted.

[ozozozd]

I don’t follow why retiring pre-55 is a good idea. Can you elaborate?

[lesuorac]

When you retire is a personal decision (and also a financial one but I think for most people on this forum it's mostly a personal one).

That said, if somebody is say counting the days until 55 so that they can retire then it's likely they also wanted to retire pre-55. If the money is "stuck" in a 401k and so they are unwilling to retired beforehand then it probably would've been better for them to have stuck some portion of their 401k contributions into a taxable brokerage account and then retired pre-55.

But in this specific example, the guy I responded to was self-employed I'm kinda guessing their "hobby" is their job and so they kept working despite not needing to.

[HWR_14]

Shorting SpaceX when you own the same amount of SpaceX in an ETF doesn't require any derivatives and is a fairly safe play. The amount of interest you have to pay will vary a little bit, but it should cost a very small amount net.

The biggest issues are the effort and tax implications of balancing the SpaceX short.

[whiplash451]

You can buy the companies making up the index instead of the index itself.

It was proven to be a good strategy on the SP500 [1, 2]

With 500 companies, it's work. But you can probably approximate it with a top 100.

[1] https://rodneywhitecenter.wharton.upenn.edu/wp-content/uploa...

[2] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0015198X.2023.2...