Cedar Fair revenue and attendance down slightly in 2023

I think the results speak for themselves. If basic finance education was better in the US, there would be less need for the Ramsey's of the world. But its not.

In terms of debt, I think some of his advice goes more to human nature than economics. He recommends you pay off your smallest debt first and then move to the next largest and continue. From a matter of economics, it makes more sense to pay the debt with the highest interest rate first. And move down from there based on costs of the debt. But many people seem to come to Ramsey already in a lot of trouble. Often with a sense of hopelessness. I think his goal with paying the smallest debt first is showing progress which provides encouragement. Easier for some people to see a list of say 5 debts that are now down to 4 than to see the most expensive one reduced somewhat saving interest costs. You are better off from a cashflow stand point paying off the higher priced debt. But not if you give up out of frustration from a lack of tangible progress.

On a mortgage, its better to make monthly payments and invest the difference in terms of extra payments you could make. But many people just spend the difference. Or they invest the difference in something that returns less than their mortgage interest rate.

For a lot of people, the measure isn't something that would be better, its compared to doing nothing at all. Easy to tweak certain aspects once you get started and understand more.

Dave is fine while you’re in debt, but his stuff later on is downright looney and wrong. Active investing, 8% safe withdrawal, never using credit cards not helpful at all, and potentially flat wrong.

Saving and paying off debt is all well and good, and for many people in debt I doubt they would disagree that they need to save and pay off that debt. However in a country where housing and basic living costs are spiraling out of control relative to average incomes, saving and paying off debt simply isn't possible for a large majority of the people in debt and unable to cover those emergency expenses.

Dave Ramsey can preach all those wonderful ideas, but the root cause for many isn't that they just choose to waste money on other things that are frivolous or unnecessary.

This is all why I bought each of my kids the "Index Card" book as a college graduation present.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wi...Index_Card

And to be completely honest, I didn't even follow all of those. I saved 15% in my 403(b)/401(a), not 20%. I did not otherwise max out my tax-advantaged accounts. Those moves were arguably not smart. I also preferred a low-fee straight-up stock index fund to a targeted-date one, but that was mostly because I have more risk tolerance than most. It's only recently (within about 10-15 years of retirement) that I am starting to change my allocation.

But I pretty much stuck to the rest of the book, up to and including advocating for better social safety nets.

Thank you for the link to the index card book. I will be ordering 2 of those for our kids.

In regard to the target-date funds, my 401k started out offering lots and lots of funds to choose from. Over time they discontinued pretty much all of them and replaced them with the target funds. To try and get more aggressive funds I picked target date funds that were well beyond my retirement. In my mind that helped.

I’m a Boglehead myself. Stick to my three index funds, US total stock market, Total International stock market, Total Bond fund.

GoBucks89:

I think his goal with paying the smallest debt first is showing progress which provides encouragement.

There's a lot of truth to this. When I started paying attention to Dave Ramsey, my wife and I had already seen the light and taken steps to start getting out of credit card debt. Seeing those smaller balances go away was a nice motivator. I'm not sold on everything he preaches by a long distance, but it at least confirmed for me that we were headed the right direction. We built up and maintained decent emergency funds, we paid off a lot of credit card debt and avoided them altogether for nearly a decade, we haven't been upside down on a car since and I drove a car to more than 200k miles, we looked for side hustles. Listening to his radio show occasionally was good for me because it showed me that, as bad off as I thought we were, there were people in far worse situations. We were never in danger of losing the one car we owed money on or our house. On the opposite end, we haven't maxed out investments, we used a debt management company to get the credit cards paid off in a reasonable time (3 and a half years) and it was the best money I've ever spent at less than $30 a month, we used 401k loans to replace a/c in both houses we've been in because paying interest to myself made more sense than draining our savings or financing it at 20%, we still finance cars because I've never had an interest rate higher than 1.9 until the one vehicle I purchased after COVID. Dave Ramsey's methods can help, but they're far from ground breaking and not everything he suggests makes sense for everyone. And you're not an idiot as he so enjoys implying if you don't follow his advice exactly to the letter.

Well, like I said, if you ever talked with him behind closed doors, he’d probably be a bit more lenient on some things than he “acts” on the show. However, he can’t really do it there, because then the financially inept of the world would immediately take it as justification for their own dumb financial decisions without ever considering the context. It’s smarter for him to just draw some hard lines in the sand.

It’s important to remember that he’s really just trying to help people make wise decisions with their money. I’ve read some criticism of his outlook on rates of return and things like that, but when it comes to at least digging yourself out of a hole or preventing yourself from ever getting in one in the first place, his reasoning is solid.

Also, when it comes to investing and things like that, remember, he’s advocating for safe approaches. He’d be the first to tell you that his method isn’t necessarily the one with the highest possible reward, but again, I think it goes back to him just not wanting people to waste their money. Now, there might be other low-risk options with still-greater rewards than his investing strategies, and not being a financial expert myself, I’m not going to say if he’s brilliant or not in that regard. I honestly don’t know. I just look at him as someone offering advice that could very well keep people out of self-inflicted financial destruction, and I appreciate him for that.

Active investing is not a safe approach, every year only 10% of active funds beat the index they track. Just because a fund is in that 10% one year does not mean it will the next. When you factor in fees (much higher for active funds) that winning percent is much much less, guys like Peter Lynch and Warren Buffet are famous because of how rare it is for a fund manager to consistently beat the index. You are far better (and safer) just buying the index fund. Why search for a needle when you can buy the whole haystack? You have a 90% chance of beating an active fund by doing just that.

Ramsey’s debt tactics are sound, he’s helped a lot of people but once you got your self out of the debt trap it’s time to stop listening to him.

Touchdown:

every year only 10% of active funds beat the index they track

And it's usually not the same funds year-to-year.

Why search for a needle when you can buy the whole haystack?

I read a fascinating analysis of why index funds tend to do better than active traders, and it was exactly this observation. In any given year, most of the market's returns are from a relatively small number of stocks. An index investor is pretty much guaranteed to have those. Granted, the index investor also has other things too but they always have "the good things."

The active investor, by necessity, only owns a small slice of the market. Even with a lot of work and elbow grease, the active investor is unlikely to consistently discern which few stocks are going to "pop Pop POP". So, the fund managers who don't have the few great performers in their portfolio are doomed to under-perform the index---and that's most of them.

TheMillenniumRider:

However in a country where housing and basic living costs are spiraling out of control relative to average incomes...

There's more nuance there than I think most people are willing to believe. If you look at numbers adjusted to inflation over several decades, this is true. In the last three or four years, however, wage growth has (mostly) outpaced inflation. So I wouldn't say that it's "spiraling," more like gently moving in the right direction, if not fast enough for what anyone would like. Wage versus housing cost is also more nuanced, because it depends entirely on where you are, and which parts of the country you include. California and Florida will skew the results because they're so big. But the reverse is true in places like Indiana, the rural south and up and down the non-coastal east. Unemployment is at a historic low, too.

I bring this up because the perception in the US is just completely wrong. I'm sure it's because our lack of civic involvement resulted in a presidential rematch between two geriatrics, one fraud and one impossibly boring, that no one wanted, but the trends are mostly good.

Touchdown:

I’m a Boglehead myself.

The excitement I feel when two of my favorite nerd websites intersect. :)

I’ve not seen the Boglehead thing before, but am basically moving from a single large cap index to a mix of low fee index funds that looks very similar to that.

John Bogle founded Vanguard and was a big advocate for low cost index funds (of which Vanguard has many). Many fans/followers call themselves bogleheads.

I remember reading a number of years ago that the actual returns for many people are significantly lower than the returns of the market (which ever proxy you use to measure that). Big reason was when there was a correction, many people sold (selling low) and they remained out of the market until it had recovered (buying high). Bogle was a big fan of what many call lazy investing. Don't worry about the ups and downs. And definitely don't make kneejerk decisions based on what the market is doing.

That more or less is exactly what I did: I set up my 15% monthly contribution to a low-fee S&P500 index fund, and then ignored it. I didn't even open the quarterly statements. It wasn't until I got to "I might retire in as little as ten years from now" that I decided to think about a different allocation mix than 100% large-cap US stocks. Over the course of ten monthly steps, I've been moving from 100/0 to 80/20. After that I'm planning a 1% shift per year, eventually getting to 70/30 at the beginning of my "I might retire then" window.

The target bond allocation is an even split between a total US bond index fund, and a very broad US corporate bond fund. The corporate bond fund is actively managed, and I feel a little dirty about it, but its long-term performance has been good in spite of the higher expense ratio. I suspect that's because the underlying asset mix has a higher risk/reward position, and I'm not getting the full benefit of that risk courtesy of the expense ratio. So I'm thinking hard about moving entirely to the total US bond fund. That would give slightly lower returns, but also provides lower risk which is the point of the bond allocation.

The target stock allocation is all in low-fee index funds: 70% SP500, 15% Russell 2000, and 15% international. I'm debating combining the SP500/Russell 2K split into a single total market index, but as they say in northern Wisconsin, it looks like a horse apiece.

And just in case people didn’t get the reference, there is a very active message board of DIY investors at Bogleheads.org, along with a wiki that explains the basics, they also have a podcast, and do conferences. The organization is non profit.

I've mostly got a bunch of index funds these days (and 8,000+ shares of my former employer that I should have sold at the IPO 🤦🏼‍♂️). I don't really pay attention to any of them except to see what the net change is from year to year. It's not a strategy, but it's more or less in line with the market, maybe a little better because of some large cap bits.

Cedar Point is shooting itself in the foot by reducing Live E.

Cedar Point got the 2nd best new show at the Golden Tix, and the show at the Aldrich is pretty great, and won year before.

I am not surprised Forbidden Frontier got axed, cause it was more involved then Ghost town is these days at Knotts.

The Festival did get axed, but that was because of multiple stupid decisions.

I think Bands in Residence is staying, and a better way to staff, and reduce cost. Whereas when I went to KD there was practically nothing.

Also when last at BGW the show where just ok, and not numerous.

I know it’s not new but personally I think that Celtic Fyre at BGW is my favorite regular season theme park day show. Yes over Dreamland at Dollywood or Lion King at Animal Kingdom. Those shows are both amazing, and wow me every single time I see them, and I never miss them anytime I’m in those parks, but no other show leaves me with such joy. The dancing is amazing, the show so up beat it just makes me happy. I’ll often see the show multiple times a visit. The cast is huge too, the two leads dancers, 6 other Irish dancers, 2 tap dancers, 6 singers, 3 musicians. I hope that show never leaves.

Dreamland edges it for me because of the whole hearstring-tugging thing. I would watch the original Nemo musical before Lion King, for the same reason.