How to invest your money? Some principles for me

• Invest in where you plan to stay in (if you want to stay in California, invest in US stuff)
• Always let the institution take the downside risk (like using your lab's GPUs, people working for a quant firm or playing on investor money). You always protect your own capital and avoid risks yourself.
• Always have some instant money like 1000-2000 Dollars in your regular checkings account, even if it's 0%. The bank must be physically located down the street. (you have to spend hours on the phone for an online bank or Fidelity as customer service in the US is terrible, and you might still not get your money back)

Basically I can think of 3 options

• T bills/T notes/Treasury/CD
• SP 500 Index
• Real Estates in good zip codes

Treasury

Note 1: T-notes is not "compounded interest". If it says "5%" for 20 years, it's not compounded 5% every year. You have to worry about reinvestment every year, and you might be stuck with cash while the interest rate crashes. To have compounded interest, you have to buy the STRIPS.

Note 2: Taxes are annoying. If you buy treasury with a low 0.5 coupon, you will be paying like 0.05% taxes and then pay a discount tax at maturity. If you buy treasury with a large 6.0 coupon, you will be paying 0.6% taxes and probably get a positive tax at maturity. If you buy STRIPS, you have to pay a "phantom tax" every year, but no tax at maturity. But the taxes are minimal if your income is low.

Note 3: About tiny percentages: IBTH/IBTI/IBTJ charges 0.07% management fees. SPAXX is liquid but charges 0.42%, SGOV charges 0.09%, XHLF charges 0.03%.

And here's the perfection problem. If you care about to put the money in Fidelity to SGOV (0.3% difference between SGOV 4.2% and SPAXX 3.9%), why not XHLF for 0.06% more? Why don't you just buy longer treasury (put some in 4.7% in 5 years) to get a little more? If you go on Fidelity's secondary bond market, just by clicking on different bonds at different times of the day, there might be a 0.2% difference (4.4% vs 4.6%). And honestly this hurts your brain way more than losing more money in stocks.

Tip: just don't use Fidelity and use your bank's brokerage with DRIP (like JP Morgan Self-Directed) since I only want to buy SGOV and SPYM. It can take up to 10 days just to transfer the money to Fidelity. Also, they can lock you out with no physical branches to walk into.

What is Inflation Anyway

What actually matters? "General inflation" (bread, shirts, phones) is not relevant.

• Housing in a good zip code
• Healthcare costs
• Education/private school costs

The people working and living in these places (California, Shanghai), and the GenX homeowners are your "inflation benchmarks". They can invest in anything you can invest in, and you cannot hope to "beat them" just by investing. And you don't need to beat them, not losing is good enough. On the other hand, if everyone loses, taking a reasonable loss yourself isn't too bad either.

I don't get the "Gold ETFs" or a million other random ETFs. Gold is supposed to be something you store physically yourself, designed to withstand absence of the rule of law, instability, and hyperinflation (like Russia) - not an ETF that requires stable internet connection and is vulnerable to some brokerage like Fidelity suspending your account.

"Но если есть в кармане пачка сигарет,
Значит, всё не так уж плохо на сегодняшний день.
И билет на самолёт с серебристым крылом,
Что, взлетая, оставляет земле лишь тень»."

If you want to live in the US and believe in the US, you should invest in the US. Rumors say you should just put your money into SP 500 and never sell.

Managing Money Might Be A Full-Time Job

It turned out that if you have a high-income, your income gets taxed heavily, and your investment gets taxed heavily again. Technically can fight taxes, but these all things seem very marginal and it seems like fighting taxes would be a full-time job. (figuring out Roth, managing real estates, putting money in things that locks up until retirement, claiming something is wrong with your house, selling some stocks to lose money somehow, or only claiming some investments that requires you to move out of the state)

How to manage your money when you have a lot of money is completely different compared to when you don't have a lot of money and your salary is low. Anyway, things change every few years. We don't worry as we don't have money!

Then there's the ETF (SPYM, VOO) vs Mutual Funds (FXAIX, SWPPX). I learned that when the SP 500 index changes, ETFs swap the old stocks without triggering taxes while Mutual Funds might "sell it". Anyway it's very complicated.

Conclusion

• Instant money: Around 2000 Dollars in Checkings (A physical bank down the street)
• Short-term/mid-term (buffer money for the next 5 years): Put in one Treasury ETF (probably SGOV)
• The rest of the money: SP 500 (probably SPYM)