You mean I have failed to provide anything except for insider information into an opaque industry, while you insist that there exists just as good public information on an opaque industry?

Both of your central claims are weasel worded so that when you find out conflicting information, you can claim you were right.

Oh, the company you used doesn't only look at X? It must be part of the 10%. What, your credit score went up? Well, you're a rarity.

You don't think knowing something about someone is a prerequisite for giving them good advice, or evaluating whether advice is good?

That's a rhetorical question. Of course you don't, it's the entire underpinning of your argument - what you found on the Internet after 8 years of searching must be better than any advice that anyone could give to you.

People knowing who you are is an integral part of getting advice into opaque industries. That you've shown zero interest in it is indeed weird - you've made zero attempts to identufy my personal situation or the nature of a friend I apparently trust and instead post3d a bunch of articles from the Internet.

As I asked before, what if it turns out my friend wrote one of the articles you quoted? Is it suddenly OK to listen to him?

Can't you just game the dealership by getting the front end discount and financing then pay in full on your first payment? Is there some pre-payment penalty?

It's not insider information. This is public information. The distribution of weightings are published directly from the source. The fact that 90% of lenders pull FICO scores is a claim that FICO makes, Forbes makes it, Motley Fool makes it... I have idea how you can say that this is insider information.

As it has been from the very beginning.

(Edit: I can even change the "can increase your debt-to-credit ratio" to "will increase" and still be 100% on board with it.)

This is simply a matter of actually being aware of what's going on. It's absolutely false that closing credits cards will ALWAYS lower your credit score. Edit: Just as it's absolutely false that closing credit cards you don't use will ALWAYS raise your credit score.

LOL -- You're still moping around because you're insulted that I didn't know who your "friend" was when challenging the idea that closing credit cards you don't use could be bad for your credit score.

I'll put it this way. I don't care who your "friend" is if they say that in general it's a good idea to close credit cards you don't use to raise your credit score. Here's a list of situations where that can be harmful to your credit score:

* You close your credit card with the longest history and your other credit cards have a short history.
* You close your credit card with the largest credit limit and it significantly hurts your debt-to-credit ratio.
* You close several credit cards all at once.

All of these things are unintentional consequences of following generic advice to close credit cards you don't use in an attempt to raise your credit score if you don't know anything about the person's actual credit history.

I don't need to identify any of your personal information. I'm not giving you direct advice regarding your credit score and how you might change it. All you had presented was "my friend in financial services told me..." and "I don't know anything about this formula. Shrug." (Edit: And, presumably, "it worked for me.")

It's your money. You can listen to whomever you want and do with it whatever you will. So it's okay for you to do anything with it. I'm not in any position to stop you. (You can buy whole life insurance if you wanted.)

If your friend wrote one of the articles that I quoted regarding credit scores or one of the articles that I'm relying on for information regarding how credit scores are impacted by various types of behaviors AND your friend is saying that it's generically good to just close credit cards you don't use to raise your credit score, then your friend is giving contradictory advice and maybe isn't the best person to be getting advice from.

At this point, I'm mostly convinced that you're fighting to defend the honor of your "friend" but without your "friend" having reviewed a single word you've said. You might want to give them the bullet point version of my two claims and ask them whether they think it's true or false. And then report back.

As of 2014, the FTC was warning consumers about it.

https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/blog/20...ment-penalties

To my knowledge, pre-payment penalties are illegal in Minnesota but not in other states.

Last car I bought - Nissan's tiny putt-mobile - otherwise known as the Versa w/ all of 102 H.P. I financed half of it. I now know why, having told them I wanted a three year loan, they kept pushing the five year. I paid it off w/i a year, though, no pre-payment penalty.

Yes, some banks and/or manufacturers will stipulate that you can't pay it off before 6-24 mos w/o a penalty. I know Acura (so maybe Honda as well) had some sort of penalty if you financed w AFS and paid too early. For HF, this didn't apply and it was a win/win for him and the dealer. Once the car is registered and burning gas, dealer doesn't care if someone's a stiff and defaults, or pays it off immediately.

The "deal sheet" pigforbill is referring to is a another way for sales to maximize profit. It's often a 4 square that helps sales determine whether you are a payment buyer (financing), or a price buyer (cash purchaser).

So if you let them pigeonhole you into just talking payments, they wont even mention the price of the car. They will give you a payment, w K's in profit added in, including the bumped up interest rate and all the stuff the finance manager will try to sell you once you get in the 'box'.

If customers accept first pencil, there can be so much extra 'leg' in the payment that the finance manager will tell you in the box that "included in your monthly payment of $487 for 60 mos is a warranty, remote start, first 36 mos of service". They have to disclose this and get your permission. If they don't, big trouble w the state AG. That's why there is an a/v recording of every session in the box at most stores. Take out all the bs you don't really need and that $487 drops $50+ per month.

Finance managers are expected to earn 1200-1500 per deal in the back, at least. They hate cash buyers, bc there's no interest rate to bump. Even if the 'buy rate' (the terms which the bank agrees to service the loan" matches the 'sell rate' (what the finance manager tells the customer they are getting for an interest rate), so the store can close the deal, finance will get a commission from the bank, called a 'flat'.

The trade is also a huge aspect of their ability to make profit. If they can give you 6500 (trade allowance) for a car that books out at 9k private party and 10,8 retail and it needs minimal recon ($500 or less), they are extracting value, as the ACV (actual cash value) of that example car is prob more like 7800. Clean Carfax 1 owner w regular service and no major body damage is what they're looking for. If doesn't have it, the pre-owned mgr (my job when I was in that biz) will pick apart every imperfection in front of the customer to let them psychologically process the assumption that their car isn't worth **** and they are lucky to be getting what they are getting.

No matter if it's a crappy $500 deal for the store or a $5500 deal, they will always act like they really had to stretch to make the deal work, so you feel special and happy. The happiest customers are usually the ones that we made the most off.

I could go on and on about how dealerships use each and every trick to exploit their opponent. Kinda like how a casino operator will pump oxygen, no clocks, windows, etc

It's not really a dirty business, but they are out to make the most BB/100 they can, no holds barred (within the law), and are constantly doing internal research to figure out ways to improve their hourly. I enjoyed the cutthroat competitive nature of the business, but the hours are long and you work every Saturday and some Sundays. I'd rather make more money in less time and not answer to anybody.

That's the minutiae that might be interesting for some people, but for the customer who is only buying a car once every 5-10 yrs, my first post is simpler and easier to remember and should allow you to beat 20/40. If you really want to work w the solvers and learn the GTO way to buy a car, then you can put in some extra research to squeeze out a better WR.

I haven't slept in long time so I'm gonna try that. Didn't mean to interrupt the intellectual HU4rollz battle royal. gl all

Have you read the Sklansky book DUCY? Supposedly it has GTO advice on buying a car. If you've read it, what did you think of his advice? I haven't read it, so I can't paraphrase.

I find this kind of funny and reasonable at the same time. On some level I imagine the price point no longer matters to a customer and it comes down to providing great service and giving or discovering what the customer wants.

Sockdrawering your credit card is usually > than closing it for the reasons Aaron W mentions. Closing your credit card to directly improve your credit score is bad and misguided advice. The best you can do is have a 0 (non negative) score impact with standard FICO model.

Some exceptions where you should consider closing your cards:
- You have a spending problem and can't manage your money. Closing your card will prevent you from spending what you don't have.
- You have bad credit and signed up for a credit card with a low limit which charges an annual fee. Once your situation has improved, you should consider closing it out and opting for cards without annual fees.
- You have solid credit and want to consolidate your credit limits on several cards from the same vendor (AMEX, Chase, BofA) due to annual fees or something else.
- You have a lot of credit cards and just don't use some of them anymore.

I think everyone needs to have a general understanding of how credit works, how FICO and most vendors evaluate credit, and basics dos and don't. Investing a few hours to know the basics, pulling and review your credit history is well worth it. If you ever plan to sign up for a credit card, car / home loan, or do churning, then it's a must.

The dirty secret is it's far easier to tank or hurt your score than to improve it. The FICO score isn't really for you, the consumer. It's for lenders to measure risk and for better or worse ding you in clear measurable ways. Being 30-60 days late on payments will HURT your score and have a strong impact for at least two years. Going into collections will HURT your score and could have a strong impact for several (up to 7) years unless it's removed through a pay for delete or similar.

Depending on your situation, the only real way to improve your score and history is to do the following. Open as many cards as you can reasonably manage. Your score is going to take a hit, but you need to start somewhere. You don't need to carry a balance for your score to improve. You do need to have a solid history of paying on time and never being late. Occasionally ask your vendor for credit limit increases without hard pull requests. Once you have a history of paying on time, managing limits, and growing limits, you're solid. When you apply to a new card, they'll typically match the limit of your other vendors. Again, all this doesn't happen over night and takes years of just managing your cards.

Credit Karma does have tools to simulate your score if you did things like open or close accounts, pay down or add to debt. As an aside credit is just a tool. Every now and then there's an article about people having or chasing perfect credit scores. That's pretty silly IMHO. There's nothing you can do with a 850 score that you can't do with a ~720. The benefits really cap off with respect to lowest interest rates or insta approval.

On a side note, there is some crazy stuff once you're familiar with everything above. Some people sign up new cards for the credit card bonuses and game that through MS (manufactured spending). A long time ago, the US Mint allowed you to buys dollar coins with credit cards to circulate more coins in the population. All you're doing is buying coins, depositing them, paying your card, getting points, and cycling. That's easy money. The same thing happened to gift cards and a few other deals.

Signing up for 0% APR $0 Fee balance transfers and maxing out the card and depositing it to yourself, CDs, stocks, or stable investments is something else people do. It's basically a loan with no costs. There's other topics like 5/24, pay for delete, repairing credit, backdoor recon numbers, CLIs, Amex Financial Reviews, getting blacklisted due to MS, highest point redemptions and point devaluation if you're interested. Also handling debt collections, BK, and zombie debt are interesting. Basically the collection industry is cutthroat and employs shady tactics.

A couple other car buying notes: I don't have a financial calculator, so I wrote up a sheet using online payment calculators with various likely interest rates I'd be offered. Then I would know how much payment per $1k financed I should be paying, just to make sure they didn't pull a fast one with the payment calculation.

Here's another trick they tried to pull on me: I took my buddy with me to look over cars. While in the salesman's office, he left, saying he had to get manager approval. I noticed he left the phone off the hook so he could listen in on any discussion I had with my buddy. We didn't say a word until he came back.

It basically consists of getting a price from one dealer, telling them you're going to present that number to another dealer across town, and then going back and forth until one of them won't go any lower.

Theoretically it makes sense, but in reality I think a lot of dealers will just say "**** off", and it's way too much work. You can do stuff through e-mail now, and that's basically what I do online -- just get a bunch of quotes and go through them all pitting them against each other, telling them what the other guys are giving me.

You should read the part you quoted. I'm the advocate of insider information, not you.

This would be a pretty convincing argument to anyone who has been claiming something with the word "always."

My argument is almost the opposite - I think there are very few general rules applicable to everyone, and that the specifics of the situation, as evaluated by an insider, should trump general rules that people put together from public information.

Is that what they said, or what I claimed they said, or is that something you've kind of invented to justify thinking you kn9w more than they do?

LOL

I'm fighting to defend YOUR friends, not mine. You're overestimating your importance more than I already think you do if you think I'm going to bring the rantings of an Internet stranger and ask them to evaluate it.

But YOUR friends, the one who mean YOU well ... what do YOUR friends think of your advice? Or have you dismissed them all as self servicing hacks?

Let me go back to the JTs example I briefly brought up earlier. Let's say someone has a question about whether to raise JTs preflop.

There's the method I advocate - ask a trusted expert with the specifics of the situation.

There's also the method you advocate - go to public information, e.g., equity calculator, to get data for yourself.

And many times, both are going to give the same answer (raise it). As a matter of fact, you could say that raising it outside of a few exceptions would be a good general rule, and I would agree.

But the person who asked the question probably has a specific scenario in mind. We don't know what position he's in. We don't know who else is in the pot. We don't know how he plays postflop. And as much public information is available, the three things above can't (or can't easily) be quantitated. You're going to get a numerical equity answer (27%) and then still have to make a judgement call about whether that's enough.

This is why, for the most part, when people ask super general question, the first thing we do as a forum is to be more specific and put it in context. Because it matters, and generic advice tends to be useless.

I agree that as a general rule, if you put a bag over my head and dropped me into a random poker game anywhere in the world at any stakes, and let me see nothing but my cards (not even my position), I would look at JTs and raise it. That's probably the right move. But I were playing in a game where I knew the stakes and my position and I had the option to phone a friend, I would call an expert poker player with strong personal ties to me, and do whatever he said, even if it were to fold (*especially* if it were to fold, if I trusted my friend knew the same general rules I know!).

---

So that all aside, I'd say the dismissal of friends and experts is one of the most dangerous societal trends.

First, there's the categorical dismissal of entire classes. "Don't trust anyone in the financial industry, they just want your money." Really? Would you ever say that about poker - don't trust a poker player for poker advice, they stand to gain from your mistakes?

Second, there's the idea of homogeneity within the industry. "Everyone is greedy. Everyone is out to screw you." And there's some truth to that, the average poker player is bad at poker and often gives bad advice. But many buck that trend, this whole board exists because there are some bona fide experts for - whatever their motivations are - post free advice, or have lunch with people they like and give out free coaching. They are outliers but if you find people like that you should disproportionately go to them for advice.

Third, there's the hubris that someone else's job is easy and that with a little research you can do as well as they do. "I don't need a financial advisor, I can invest in index funds myself," or "I don't need to pay some coach to tell me to raise JTs, I can figure that out with an equity calculator." That the statements are partially true is probably worse than if the statements were totally false. Because when people get a little reinforcement - they hire a financial advisor and they confirm index funds are the way to go, or they see Phil Ivey raise JTs on TV - it just grows their little Dunning Krueger complex. "I knew it, personal finances are easy, poker is easy."

And it's to this last point that I tried really hard to make all the words avout CE stick in your mind. In the poker world, I'd rate chasing EV as the classic Level 2 mistake. People see others making EV- decisions and sneer with disdain: "Folding a hand with equity edge, what a sucker. Racking up in the middle of an orbit, what a sucker." Sometimes - probably even most of the time - they are indeed suckers. Sometimes - admittedly probably rarely - they just know themselves better than you know them.

Which only adds to the confusion and suggests that you really aren't arguing with integrity any more. You're just trying to win. Insider information is not the same as personal information. As far as I can tell (since you haven't revealed anything), at best you had personal information.

https://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/s...postcount=1138

Insider information "such as this"? This isn't insider information. Your next sentence (not quoted here) is utterly bizarre and conspiratorial. That's the context in which I'm reading what you're writing about me and insider information.

Then you're *really* not paying any attention at all to what's being said. There *are* general rules that are applicable to *most* people. Closing credit cards on the basis of not using them is a generally bad rule. Maybe you were in the category of special people who opened far too many credit cards and it helped you to close out a bunch of them. Good for you. That doesn't negate anything here.

Here's what I'm working off of:

I pushed back because I know for a fact that this is generally bad advice. There are LOTS of ways this goes poorly and only a few ways it goes well. I didn't want anyone to read that and think, "Maybe I should do this." The *logic* is faulty. Maybe in your case, the credit cards you didn't use happened to be ones that you have relatively short history and small limits on and your friend dumbed it down for you so that you wouldn't screw it up and close the wrong ones. I don't know. And I don't care. This plan of action may have worked out for you and that's fine. But the advice taken as written is not something that people should do.

You also gave no information at that time that they had examined your credit situation before offering this advice. In the next post (or maybe two posts later), I even opened the door for that possibility. And in fact, I've given you TONS of latitude that your friend may have given you personal advice based on specific knowledge of your credit situation. But you don't care about that. I can quote maybe 4-5 times I've explicitly indicated that personal information may change the situation.

But nah. You don't care. You just want to win the argument SOOOOOOO badly.

LOL -- My reply is this:

Have you finished winning the argument yet so you can move on with your life? Your friends miss you.

Dismissal of "my friend told me" is fine. Dismissal of "My friend, who specializes in credit and evaluated my credit history, told me" is not.

I have no interest in responding to the rest of your societal analysis. So have full access to the soap box.

I'm not sure, have I adequately conveyed that there are limits to your knowledge that you should go and make some trusted friends to ask about?

Or is it the case that you're going to be back again with your Googled links and your insistence that nobody besides you be trusted?

Because, exactly as you pointed out, it only took about two posts from you to go from "don't trust your friend" to "there may be scenarios where your friend is right."

That's more or less when I agreed I won the argument. Everything after has been primarily for your benefit.

pope's got nothing to be upset over. I'm the one who could've had a hit thread in BFI.

Come to think of it..................

You can keep chasing that windmill if you want. It makes little difference to me.

Yup. That's exactly what I said. Bigly.

How thoughtful of you. First you were thinking about my friends and now you're thinking about me. What sort of self-ego massage have you been missing in your life that you have to frame this as an exercise in magnanimity?

-----

When you start with making three statements about credit, two of which are wrong, and then say that "My friend in financial services told me" followed by terrible advice...

I have a hard time believing that you were getting truthful information. Call it a bias towards observable truths. It may have been honest information, in that your friend completely believed what he was telling you. It might have been right for the right reasons, or accidentally right. I don't know. But the available evidence suggests that the information was not good.

You may be loyal to them to the very end. And they may be loyal to you to in the same way. And because of that, you might be fighting a battle more over your pride of loyalty rather than a pursuit of truth. And that's fine with me.

Edit: "Trust, but verify." When friends give me advice on something important or complex, I don't focus on the conclusion as much as I do on the explanation and rationale. I use the same critical thinking skills that I use in any other important/complex situation. I do some background reading/research, just like I would for any other important/complex situation. And then I ask them to re-explain things that don't make sense. But in the end, I am the one who owns my decision and the consequences, so I try to be as well-informed about it as possible.

And this is among the reasons why we're butting heads so hard. You're happy with "My friend told me to..." and I want something more like "My friend explained it to me." That's probably why you went to "loyalty" so early in the conversation. You value that trust more than you do the logic side. That's fine with me. It's your life. Live it how you choose.

Your way is fine when it is a relatively simple, transparent answer. For complex answers into an opaque field, it becomes difficult to verify. (And to be clear, the financial world is complex and opaque.)

This is why trust is more important than self-education in these matters. You can give me ten reasons why I should keep my cards and five why I should dump them, but ultimately you can't tell me if the sum of the five is greater than the sum of yhe ten. And you'll use all sorts of weasel words so that you can claim you were right whatever my situation turns out to be.

My way is the exact opposite of some sort of ego massage. I admit when I don't know something, and I find out. You're the one who's going to ask your friend to disclose algorithms or selection criteria so that your intellectual curiosity can be satisfied.

Unlike you, I have no qualms admitting what I don't know.

To be clear, could I know more about credit scores? Probably. But to what end? How often will it matter? Once every twenty years? Maybe it'd be more often if I financed a Tesla every 3 years. But against the backdrop of the leo doc rule (borrow to buy things that appreciate, pay cash for things that depreciate), you're simply not borrowing enough to justify an 8 year crusade to crack the industry code.

This is the importance of loyalty. Come the next financial crisis, maybe all the rules change and your research becomes obsolete. My method will still work.

The belief that it's so complex and opaque that you cannot understand it is a self-fulfilling prophecy. While you may not have access to the fine details, it's not so incredibly complex that normal people can't understand it. The basics of credit really aren't that complicated. You can learn it in an afternoon or two of thoughtful reading.

But if you want to plead self-imposed ignorance, be my guest.

LOL -- This is a perfect space for the "YOU DON'T KNOW ME!" retort. Because really, you don't. Your analysis of my understanding of credit and finance makes it sound like I've obsessed over this for years. I've just paid attention. I've learned things. I've watched, listened, and then learned some more things. This is the effect of pursuing knowledge over time. You discover that you know stuff.

Unlike you, I've taken time to learn about some of the things I don't know so that I *would* know. At no point in this entire discussion have you ever successfully challenged the content of my statements. I have provided references for the claims I've made, and an actual analysis of things I've put forward. All you have is "my friend told me..."

I know what I know, and I know when I don't know. I know enough about credit to know that your friend's advice was generically bad.

You don't know enough to know that you picked the wrong topic to try to have this argument on. You don't know enough to know that you made false claims. You didn't know that FICO scores were used for the overwhelming majority of loans (you thought it was inside information even though it's well-known public information reported by all sorts of reputable sources). So you instead made a convoluted and weak argument about loyalty. Good for you.

Except that your "trusted friends in the financial industry" are among the people who were the most deceived during times of financial crises. Just look at the savings and loan crisis in the 1980s and 1990s and the Great Recession just a decade ago. People trusted people that said that deregulation was going to make everyone more money. People trusted people that no-down-payment mortgages were good because house values were increasing so rapidly that you could flip it in a couple years and pocket the profit.

People have friends who made money in Ponzi schemes. And those friends encouraged them to invest because things were going well for them. They trusted each other, and they even had checks coming in to prove how well it worked. And that trust brought financial ruin.

And you trusted someone that "specifically said to close any credit cards we didn't use but keep any we did." And that's just bad advice. Without a more detailed analysis I have no reason to believe that your friend was any smarter in this area than anyone else, but I do have reasons to think that they weren't.

I'm glad your loyalty seemed to have worked out for you. It makes me wonder, though... how much did your credit score *actually* change after you did what you did? Over what period of time? I still have plenty of room to doubt that it was as successful as you believe it was. You clearly don't know enough to be able to tell the difference.

Just as with managed funds, you might think you were successful because you got a positive outcome. But you aren't realizing that your outcome is worse than if you had made better decisions, like passive investing in index funds. Results-oriented thinking isn't restricted to poker.

Edit: I am absolutely stunned that the basis of your argument comes down to "I'd rather be ignorant."

I haven't even unsuccessfully challenged them either. I can't remember exactly what you claimed your two main points were but they seemed pretty good. Vague enough so that basically no matter what someone told you, you could claim you're right, but I assume that's a feature, not a bug.

Despite you trying to make this about me, it's really about you. If you had deficiencies in your knowledge, would you admit them? Would you turn to your friends and trust them? Or are you going to end up arguing at the bank, telling them what your score should be and how it doesn't make sense, and some stupid ass idiot like me just shrugs off your analysis?

I choose to spend my time educating myself on things where the effort I put in creates a large delta.

Read a book and become a modest 20/40 live winner, which I can play every day? Let's go. Learn Python, make a sim, derive GTO HUHU to crush online 30/60 which I'll play 3 times in my life? No, thanks. If I have a question, I'd rather drop a grand an hour for consulting.

If I never admitted deficiencies in my knowledge, I would not know all the things I know today. I've learned a lot because I've sought to learn a lot. I don't accept complexity or difficulty as a reason to not try to understand.

You can attempt to characterize this in all sorts of ways, but it comes down to this: I pursue knowledge. I value understanding. I trust my friends because they do the same and are willing to help me accomplish those goals.

You must have the most amazing "friends."

You got me Aaron W.

I just suspected many of the posters had the capability to if I can and friends of mine who used to be semi pro poker players are able to beat the market.

That article was a poor choice on my part as will this one but I respect Jared Dillian greatly and his Street Freak is a solid read as well as his investment / trading recommendations although I would be lying if I said I follow all of it.

Use what I can with a grain of salt personally and I've done fine with index funds, mutual funds, ETF, stocks, etc but certain things like options and commodities do require experience, knowledge, and capital which I figure poker players in 2+2 possessed.

Regardless of what others say AaronW., I truly appreciate your detailed analysis whether it be on the market, credit scores, borrowing, etc you have explained to us in great detail.

Feel free to flame away. Market has been too busy for me at work but I would encourage at least listening to brief 2 min analysis by Jares Dillian


Why 'Fees Aren't the Most Important Thing in the World' https://www.bloomberg.com/news/video...he-world-video

Here were his two arguments about fees:

1) "You don't just get the return of the index, you also get the volatility of the index, and there are a lot of behavioral problems around that." -- This is true. But the the volatility of an index is going to be smaller than the volatility of a subset of the index unless you're successfully able to drop the most volatile funds. But that's a lot like timing the market. It seems very hard to do. We can look at the behavioral problem in a bit because that's part of his second argument.

2) "With certain actively managed funds with a sales charge (say 3%), if you experience a draw-down, you're not going to take your money out." -- I'm skeptical that this actually influences behaviors the way he thinks it does. I would like to see some data comparing funds with a sales charge and funds without a sales charge during the recession. I'm doubtful that there's much difference. I could be wrong about that, and only data can bear out this claim one way or the other. But if you've already lost 30-40% and you're panicking over losing more, that 3% charge probably isn't going to faze you.

So if people are pulling out of the market either way, the sales charge does not have the effect he's claiming.

But he did say this: "The key is to keep compounding." -- Yes. There are a lot of people who freaked out when things were going down and pulled out of the market, and then they weren't comfortable getting back in until after the market had rebounded above where they pulled out. That's really bad.

Staying in until it recovers (assuming you have time) is definitely better than doing that. Pulling out before it crashes and buying in before it rebounds is optimal, but good luck timing it.

I wish I could find the post, but it's super-old now. But there was another money discussion that happened probably 6-8 years ago on in another NC thread, and I made the comment that I was slowly and steadily investing in the market for retirement (I was in my early/mid-30s then) because my horizon for retirement was 30+ years away and I'm getting a great long term discount. I wasn't concerned that I was putting money in as it was going down because I didn't need to catch the absolute minimum in the market to reap the benefits. Time does so much of the work for me that it pretty much didn't matter.

The rest of the interview was interesting. I don't know enough to speak to it in any reasonable way.