“That’s as good as money, sir. These are tokens.”

2big2slop

Actually a very valid question. This is how they get you.

That’s the neat part, you don’t!

I pulled all of my retirement out of the stock market. Ill probably be screwed later, but at least I know that nobody is using my money to make themselves richer.

You check what you own, especially your bond fund (government bonds are safe, if it has anything else look closely) and your investments in financial firms (see if any of them have been buying up this bad debt). Company-run pension plans are usually scams (a financial institution sells them a bunch of expensive actively managed products not a few cheap index funds) but picking the best of a bad lot still has big returns and sometimes it just takes one or two employees to get them to add something much better to the list.

The few US equities in my retirement fund don’t track the S&P500 or Nasdaq. They track an index by Solactive in Frankfurt and are weighted by float (the value of shares available for public trading) not market capitalization (the value of all shares, including the ones owned by the company). They also require that a stock be at least ten days after IPO to be included. I think they will be a more resistant to bending the rules than an American index although I would not put it past German banks to buy tranches of bad debt from the Amerikaner.

I sold most of my index fund and bought SCHD. It’s an etf that holds shares in companies who pay the biggest dividends. This doesn’t entirely shield you, but those bullshit “growth” bubble companies tend not to pay large dividends to their shareholders.

Nice side effect of the etf is you get dividends every quarter too