My dad is 61. He worked at the same manufacturing company for his whole career and through their employee stock purchase plan, he quietly bought shares every month. Never looked at it and barely talked about it. Last month he was filling out paperwork for early retirement and asked me to help him log into his account: $11.2K invested over 22 years, and the current value is $341K. He sat there staring at the screen and then said, “so I can retire?”
I’ve been trying to get him to actually look at his finances for a decade. He never needed to. He just kept buying and ignored it. It made me rethink how I separate my own money. The long-term bucket probably needs to be boring enough that I can ignore it for years. If I want to have a view on a specific outcome, I’d rather keep that separate in something like a small prediction market position on moomoo, than let every short-term opinion mess with the retirement money.
He’s retiring in August. The plan was always “65 or when the house is paid off.” The house isn’t paid off. He’s retiring anyway.