One investing question you want the answer to

Along these lines, I'd be interested in a general formula of how much you'd have to earn on an investment to make it worth your while to remove the investment and still account for capital gains tax.  For example, if I invest and get an 8% return over 2 years and now want to take the money out and spend it, how much needs to be set aside for taxes based on different income brackets? 

oooh - Gautam Kanumuruand Chad Becker --- this feels like very fertile territory. All of the "gig economy" stuff, more and more people working for themselves and/or having side hustles -- I haven't done the research, but I'm betting that the financial investment/advice world hasn't quite caught up to this, in terms of offering comprehensive advice?

We actually kind of talk about this in our first lesson! Essentially the interest rate that you get from your bank account (checking or savings) is always less than the actual inflation rate (which is around 2% every year). So by holding your money in the bank, it actually loses value over time. This doesn't mean that you should take all of your money out of the bank, since you should have some cash put away for emergency situations. It's more about making sure to not think you are okay by just keeping your money in the bank.

In terms of inflation adjusted returns, I like that. I think I'll try to add that to our first week's lessons. Thanks!

I really like this... tax implications of investments. We'll be sure to cover this!

Risk is always interesting because it changes from person to person (and from period to period for the same person). This is something that we'll definitely think about though.

We have a plan to talk about Bonds as part of our first course, and so we'll mention CDs as part of this as well. Thanks Darius.

This is super interesting. The general rule of thumb is that you should put money towards investing if you believe the rate of return that you would get with investing is higher than your interest rate. Now the hard part here is knowing whether your rate of return will actually be high enough. In the current market this has been the case, but I've been hearing from more and more people (and generally believe myself) that this hyper-growth market isn't going to last too much longer.

That being said, I want to combine this with Rebecca's and Margaret's question, and I think we'll make an entire set of lessons around applied saving/retiring (kind of giving more actionable examples with some math to help people think through things).

Thanks Melissa!

Yep, this is super interesting. We have a couple of things we want to talk about related to retirement, so we'll definitely include this as a topic.

This is huge, and super relevant to the time we're in today. Thanks for this Rebecca! We'll definitely include something like this as part of our lessons.