Should You Use Reddit for Retirement Advice?
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Version 0 of 1. Let me start by saying that although I'm old, I mostly get Snapchat and Instagram. I don't, however, get Reddit. Some years ago, my then-teenage sons tried to show me how I might post my articles about retirement to one of Reddit's subchannels, retirement (https://www.Reddit.com/r/retirement/), just as I do on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook. Alas, for reasons I still don't understand, I'm unable to post my articles about retirement to that website, which claims to offer "financial advice to help you to retire with confidence." (It seems that others have to post what I've written to Reddit. Apparently, self-promotion is forbidden?) What I did come to understand, however, is that there is a vast community of people out there who use and rely on Reddit for news, guidance and advice about money, as well as #GoT theories. So, I got to thinking. What do us boomers need to know about Reddit's retirement and other related subchannels? What's the best way to go about using Reddit for retirement? The best place to start (or so I thought) was with those experts whose names I recognized on Reddit, including Jim Blankenship, a principal of Blankenship Financial Planning, author of A Social Security Owner's Manual, and author of the financialducksinarow.com blog. Blankenship (who is more boomer than millennial) seemed (to an outsider looking in, like me) to have a handle on this Reddit thing. His articles are plastered all over Reddit. So, I ask him: What gives? And what gives is this: "I don't use Reddit myself much, so I'm afraid I don't have any recommendations to provide. Sorry!" OK, I think, maybe I ought to ask for advice from someone who was just elected to serve as the 2018 president-elect of the FPA NexGen community of the Financial Planning Association, which is the community serving the needs of this nation's youngest financial planners. Autumn Campbell is a senior financial planning analyst with The Planning Center in New Orleans who, among other things, spent several years in education as an elementary teacher and high school counselor in Dallas. Campbell, surely, must be among those who can help me (and my readers) decide whether and how best to use Reddit, if at all. "Reddit certainly has a lot of information and useful commentary within it," she said. "For the do-it-yourselfers, this can be a great tool to get thoughts from various financial planning professionals and others on specific topics." Indeed, the Reddit retirement readers were recently discussing stable value funds, Roth IRA recharacterization, and the best way to save for retirement. One reader recently shared a worthwhile and personal story that will surely benefit others: "A while back I transferred some of my target date 401k funds to stable value," wrote self.retirement. "I felt the market was a little overheated and I wanted to lock in some profits while I opened another trading account within my 401k. I planned to trade these funds there. But now it turns out I cannot transfer my funds out of stable value directly to the new account unless I hold them in a non-competing investment for 90 days. The only non-competing investments are exactly the kind I wished to avoid with this money when I chose stable value. What the ..." This kind of commentary, or sharing, as some might call it, will surely give others pause before they invest in a stable value fund. Still, it's a mixed bag. "Reddit's platform is an interesting concept but it's debatable to what extent it can be used for retirement planning," said Alexander Rupert, a certified financial planner and an associate portfolio manager with Laurel Tree Advisors. "This is because the Reddit articles are selected by people who aren't necessarily financial professionals, or at least that is my understanding." For his part, Rupert likes the fact that there are articles available from many different sources, whereas other sites only have articles available that are self-published. "Being exposed to many different authors of several retirement topics, consumers can choose which article is best per topic and that topic will usually end up toward the top of the Reddit page," he noted. |