Comment by kurikuri
9 months ago
> For example, going to college for 4 years to get a physics degree doesn’t make much sense at my age, because there’s not much time left for the payoff.
That is tragic! Learning more about things is fulfilling in and of itself. If your only concern is about growing the number, and you limit your choice to those which are within a time horizon that you can reap the result, then getting older becomes even more bleak than it is.
You're right that learning can be its own reward.
But the point remains, doing things that won't pay off in your expected remaining life are not worth doing.
For another example, I was looking at when to start receiving social security benefits. If I start them earlier, the payments are lower. But, if I invest those lower payments, then the built up portfolio will be generating investment returns.
Where is the crossover point, where you're better off taking the earlier, lower payment vs the later, higher payment? For me, that point was at age 83. So I decided to take the earlier payments.
The weird thing is nobody ever mentions this when discussing the option of when to start taking the payments. Except my accountant, who figured this out for himself, too.
People just don't understand the time value of money.
If I make it to that age, if Social Security is still paying out, if I'm still a US citizen, I'll tell people that the creator of D gave me the idea. It'll be funny
I use D to write little programs to do calculations for me. I never did figure out how to use a spreadsheet.