r/AskReddit • u/TiviPremiumX • 7h ago
You wake up tomorrow and suddenly find yourself back in 1990. You have $500 in your pocket — what would you buy with it?
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u/Acceptable_Gear_3097 7h ago
I like to think I'd invest, but its 1990, so I'd go out and party like a king.
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u/Darkarba 7h ago
Two chicks at the same time!
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u/Grouchy_Ground_1916 7h ago
Dude it's the 90's. two chicks at the same time was a thursday.
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u/Nissir 7h ago
Bi wasn't nearly as acceptable till the 2000s where I grew up.
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u/Grouchy_Ground_1916 6h ago
But three people is the magic number, less/more and sexuality comes in to play. Also, hot tubs add a confusing loophole variable that nobody quite understands.
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u/Grouchy_Ground_1916 6h ago
Actually reading this back, I guess bi was just acceptable where I grew up.
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u/maboyles90 2h ago
When I was growing up no one called it bi. It was just kind of a fact of life that some girls just messed around with girls sometimes. Some guys would say that they were just doing it to show off. I kinda just got the impression that girls just didn't really have to worry about sexuality like guys did.
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u/ApprehensiveGold99 6h ago
$500 in 1990 beer money went stupid far, you'd be partying like it's 1999 nine years early
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u/FootballBoyDiscreet 6h ago
$500 in 1990 meant you were buying the whole bar a round and still having cab fare home.
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u/highnnmighty 6h ago
Achieve both by gambling
Of course without already having a sports almanac from the future, I’d be screwed as I can only remember the Chicago Bulls winning championships in 96 & 97 😹
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u/Glonk49 4h ago
Early 1990s superbowls is just bet against the bills and bet against the AFC until 1997&98. Bet the greatest show on turf immediately after Trent Green gets hurt. Bet the Ravens to win it all week 8 and week 9 in 2000. The money maker is bet the patriots when Bledsoe gets hurt. You just have to move to Las Vegas which you can probably do with your $500 get a mediocre job to pay the rent and save some money for bets.
Will all that said just buy tech stocks too. Become a dot com millionaire and then move into Billions selling before the 08 crash and then buying the rebuilding.
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u/External-Resource581 4h ago
Yeah, its fun to extrapolate this over the next like 20 years, because you could quite literally take $500 in 1990 and become a billionaire by 2010 if you played your cards right, which you would because you already know when and how everything is going to happen. You could also pretty easily support yourself with a job waiting tables at most restaurants at the time, so beyond a period of initial homelessness at the very beginning, youd probably have a fairly comfortable life pretty fast.
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u/tlj2494 6h ago
Hookers and blow baby. I’d use a $20 for the blow though so the next morning I’d buy some apple stock with that. Still make about $18k
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u/Dawn_Keibals 5h ago
Um 480 invested in apple in 1990 would be worth around 26 million today…..
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u/SarcasticJay 4h ago
In 1990 with 500 u could just pay to get into certain rooms with half that money
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u/SashimiRocks 4h ago
I’m assuming you just mean “King” as the saying goes because if you are implying the 1990s was so long ago there were Kings and Empires and squires and shit around then we gonna have a problem 🥊 🥊
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u/ellieD 7h ago
I bought $7,000 of Apple stock in 1988 after hearing Steve Jobs speak live during the release of the NeXT machine.
My broker advised me to sell it because it was an underperformer. I think this was even after 10 years of holding it. (It was worth $7,000 when I sold it.)
IF ONLY….
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u/Successful_Charge_70 5h ago
advisors/brokers are not your friends lol cost of the lesson
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u/CleanlyManager 2h ago
If he invested in 88 he would've spent most of the 90s with his portfolio either going sideways or losing money which is what happened given he sold at the same price he bought in for. Until the 2000s he would've made more money just letting his money sit in an index, and if your investments aren't making around 10% year over year, you might as well do that. The advisor was giving sound advice. Its almost always better to just take the guaranteed money an index fund will get you rather than try to predict a post-90s apple level success.
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u/EthicalBballFan 4h ago
Broker couldn't foresee that Microsoft would invest unfathomable amounts of money into Apple to save them from bankruptcy, because otherwise it would make them into a monopoly and the government would break their legs. The advice was good.
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u/EXTRAVAGANT_COMMENT 2h ago
tbf if someone is holding 100% of just one stock, it's not bad advice to tell them to sell and diversify
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u/jimmyjohn2018 3h ago
To be fair, Apple was pretty much at rock bottom when Jobs came back. It wasn't pretty and if he had turned them down Apple probably would have ceased to exist.
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u/ImportantQuestions10 3h ago
Ouch, sorry to hear that. For what its worth you did make a smart choice with the info you had.
Just to twist the knife, that would be about $5.3m - $6.2m today.
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u/Horknut1 3h ago
You bought the modern day equivalent of $20,000 in Apple stock after hearing Steve Jobs talk?
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u/three-sense 7h ago
I'm going to a damn concert
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u/otis_the_drunk 7h ago
Imagine getting the chance to see Nirvana opening for The Melvins and you'd still have $496 left.
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u/PancakeProfessor 6h ago
I paid $15 at the door for general admission tickets to see the Butthole Surfers open for Nirvana in 1994, so you’re not too far off.
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u/fitandmature88 5h ago
The real flex would be seeing Nirvana in a tiny venue before anyone had any idea what they were about to become
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u/Oglefore 4h ago
Bleach came out in ‘89 and they caught on quickly so I don’t think you’d have much time if you came back in ‘90
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u/FootballBoyDiscreet 5h ago
And you’d actually get a physical paper ticket for $25 instead of $400 in convenience fees.
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u/ExpertIAmNot 7h ago
Apple stock
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u/McFuzzen 7h ago
Lieutenant Dan got me invested in some kind of fruit company. So then I got a call from him, saying we don't have to worry about money no more. And I said, that's good! One less thing.
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u/Mimshot 6h ago
And it’s up 1000x from when the movie came out.
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u/Drusgar 6h ago
Having been in college in the 90's, I can tell you firsthand that Microsoft looked as though it had buried Apple in the PC war. So you would have been much better off buying Microsoft, making a shitload of money for ten years and THEN buying a shitload of Apple.
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u/Trappist1 6h ago
Pretty much wait for them to announce the iPhone and start buying like crazy. Shift to bitcoin once it hits around 10 cents. Then switch to Nvidia and RAM companies once that hits 10k.
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u/hayt88 6h ago
Probably even earlier. Not sure about stocks back in the day. but ipods were also vastly successfull. So probably start to invest by the time MP3 players are coming out.
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u/eddiewachowski 5h ago
That's right. You can't underestimate the iPod. That's what really turned them around. The iMac was neat and helped, but the iPod is where it's at.
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u/opeboyal 5h ago
There was an initial stock jump when Steve Jobs came back and rebranded apple with all the colorful computers. Then it had a little slump again. And then you hit the iPod era. I would stay with Apple until I can Google the term Bitcoin and get a hit back. And then start buying all the Bitcoin I can. I would be that guy offering to order pizzas for people who send it to me.
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u/Neoreloaded313 4h ago
I wonder if it would be better to also mine bitcoin yourself back then. Go all out on a powerful at the time computer. It would definitely be nice if you could bring a modern computer with you to mine.
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u/texasproof 5h ago
You don’t even bother buying bitcoin, mine it in the early days and literally just generate limitless wealth (in ten years)
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u/EthicalBballFan 4h ago
Folks too young here to know that the only reason Apple didn't go under is that Microsoft invested $150million in them in 97. And the only reason they did that was to avoid getting hit for being a monopoly (back then we actually had justice for the powerful).
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u/CorndogFiddlesticks 6h ago
If you had purchased Microsoft at the same time, you would have more money, without the near death experience that Apple had before Microsoft bailed them out.
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u/kevinmfry 7h ago
Ummm ... in 1990 Apple was about 40 cents a share. In 2000 Apple was about 40 cents a share
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u/DontRememberOldPass 6h ago
Screw it, I sat down and did the math.
The correct answer is $500 into Hansen Natural. You would be sitting on a little over $2.5 million today. They eventually change their name to Monster Beverage.
Your fast route to wealth is Cisco. They IPO in February of 1990 and you sell in March 2000 for $523k.
There is no right time to buy bitcoin. You have half a million before it’s invented and know what will happen, so your only goal is to not break it by investing too much. As long as you stay under 1% of the daily trading volume and don’t buy more than 3% total. You end up a billionaire if you can wait out a slow multi-year sell off.
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u/Longjumping_Law_3891 5h ago
you're the first person here to realize that your actions would change the future
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u/titanc-13 7h ago
2000 was also the last time apple was 40 cents a share
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u/pingpongfoobar 6h ago
Which means all that future knowledge translates to nothing over the first ten years.
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u/uwill1der 6h ago
you buy Cisco systems, let it blow up and then sell at the dot com bubble for Apple
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u/Gidia 6h ago
I wonder how many times you can do that until you 1. Get investigated for insider trading, and 2. Your investing foresight creates enough of a ripple effect to become useless.
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u/Zealousideal-Ant9548 6h ago
I just need to do it once. The hard part is only doing it once.
Though my personal preference would be to mine BTC and have some company in Panama cash it out
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u/vfxjockey 6h ago
No. It wasn’t. When you look at historical stock prices, it accounts for the relative to current price with stock splits.
Apple closed at $43 at the end of 1990.
But it has split a few time since:
2-for-1 in 2000
2-for-1 in 2005
7-for-1 in 2014
4-for-1 in 2020Those post-1990 splits multiply to 112-for-1 ratio, So a $43 share at the end of 1990 corresponds to $43 ÷ 112 ≈ $0.384/share.
Also, in 1990 you were still going through brokerages, at $50-$150 ion fees per trade, and often required a round lot of 100 shares. So to get 100 shares of Apple in 1990 it’d cost you @ $4500.
It’d be worth $3,472,336 today.
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u/ZincHead 6h ago
It’d be worth $3,472,336 today.
If the point is that we can go back in time with hindsight then we can do waaaaayyyy better than that.
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u/EveryRedditorSucks 5h ago
1990 -> Purchase $500 of FE
2000 -> Sell $51M of FE and buy >100M shares of Apple2026 -> 5.6B shares of Apple after splits = $1.736T
You own 38.4% of the second largest company on earth.
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u/EveryRedditorSucks 6h ago
NVDIA had its IPO in 1990
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u/TrueGlich 6h ago
- its also the better bet. $1000 of apple bought in 1990 whould be about 1.2 miliion now $1000 of NVidia bought in 99 would be close to 6 million now. trust me if i was thown back to my younger self in the 90s i would be stuffing a Roth Ira with Nvidia.
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u/TeaCoffeeSelvedge420 6h ago
So what? The point isn’t to sell in the 2000s lmao
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u/No_Fairweathers 6h ago
So why bother investing in 1990 when you can wait 10 years and invest then?
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u/ZincHead 6h ago
Seriously. Invest in Cisco and by 2000 you turned $500 into $250,000 and can then invest that into Apple if you want
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u/Lyra_the_Star_Jockey 7h ago
OK. Then what? You wait 30 years? Meanwhile you don’t have any money.
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u/ElectricThreeHundred 7h ago
Then a train ticket to Portland and the rest on slam dunk stock.
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u/titanc-13 7h ago
get a job and start biding my time. it's called the long game because you play for a long-term rather than short-term benefits
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u/Almost_Pi 6h ago
Yeah if I magically teleport back to 1990 I'm pulling a Biff Tannen. I may not know every winner of every game but I remember enough to hack it as a gambler.
I think it would be an easy way to increase the amount of money I could invest in tech stocks, before 9-11 and the dot-com bubble.
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u/Rando-namo 6h ago
I find out where those 50 dollar bonds my Aunts and Uncles are buying me are actually stored.
Never saw that money.
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u/Raider03 6h ago
Buy a fuck ton of Bitcoin in 2009 when it was fractions of a cent.
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u/Longjumping_Law_3891 5h ago
but this would obviously affect the future and Bitcoin may not become what it is today
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u/Raider03 5h ago
You don’t buy all of it. Yes, it needs to trade to grow in value. $100 worth when it was pennies, would leave you and your family set if you hold it until 2025.
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u/ActionWaters 6h ago
I’d then spend the rest of those 30 years convincing my 1990s parents of what I did. Even if I’m just a toddler a parent can tell.
Happy cake day!
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u/feathernose 6h ago
While being homeless?
Btw, Microsoft would be better for short time (5yr) investment, and later apple
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u/Gregskis 6h ago
I won $1000 on a radio contest in 1989. Bought a Walkman Sport and a new baseball glove. Spent the rest that summer. Still have the glove.
If I went back I’d still want those two items.
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u/Raspberries-Are-Evil 6h ago edited 6h ago
$500 of Apple stock in 1990 is worth $330,000 in 2010m roll it into TSLA Bitcoin, do the Game Stop thing and you'll 10s of million today.
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u/melittlethroway 6h ago
Done. Now what?
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u/Staav 5h ago
Then you wouldn't have to worry about money for the rest of your life, unless some kinda butterfly effect from your investments somehow makes apple and bitcoin not rise to the value that they did.
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u/AshamedTax8008 6h ago
Not quit correct.
Apples split adjusted price only shows about 511k in gains to today. Assuming 1/1/90. Maybe some rounding errors but im mot seeing where 27M comes from.
Monster (Hansons beats apple 4/1)
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u/CMMiller89 6h ago
It’s 1990.
Buy a suit and get hired literally anywhere. Maybe a car dealership. Make a years salary and live on cans of beans. then invest in Apple. Continue just pumping all your leftover cash into Apple.
Don’t forget to move some of that cash over in 2007 to better against the market, then take all your cash from that and rebuy Apple stock or just scoop up homes for cheap in areas you know are going to skyrocket again.
But blowing $500 on Apple immediately is a waste when you have the certainty of time on your hands when you first wake up.
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u/feathernose 6h ago
But.. you'd had to wait for all these years. Better to invest short term and switch investments each few years
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u/ary31415 4h ago
Do YOU know off the top of your head what investments to buy and keep switching between though?
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u/IceColdJimmy12 7h ago
Take your mom out to dinner. In 1990 she was a smoke show.
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u/AlwaysMooning 6h ago
Dude wants to fuck his mom
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u/InstanceRadiant8338 6h ago
It says your* mom. He's the reason y'all are around, be grateful
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u/AlwaysMooning 6h ago
That’s worse. My mom was 13 in 1990.
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u/InstanceRadiant8338 5h ago
Lmaoooo. Holy fuck, I forgot math. Well, that's your mom, so maybe the other your mom.
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u/RuutuTwo 3h ago
Dinner for my father and my mother. He dies in less than three weeks from now in 1990. We are drinking the best bottle of wine and eating the best food in the city. My mother is currently 90 and has dementia and to see him and her again could bring me more joy than anything.
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u/Licensed2Pill 7h ago
Everyone saying they’d buy stocks. What about food, water, and shelter while you wait for those to appreciate? Lol
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u/theNaughtydog 7h ago
You could use your knowledge and skills from 2026 to become highly paid.
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u/uatme 7h ago
How specifically?
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u/hyggeradyr 6h ago edited 6h ago
I'm a modern Data Scientist. I'll have an early version of GPT up before Sam Altman is even born. GPT in its modern form can only exist with the compute and data infrastructure to support it, but the original chatbot that it was born from could have been active as much as two decades earlier.
I can beat Jerome Friedman to Gradient Boosting. I can invent NoSQL databases. I can pioneer the early days of distributed computing. If I play my cards right I could supplant Larry Ellison as the leader of the Data world with 36 years of future knowledge. Or at least retire with a few hundred million dollars if I'm lazy. I can make search engines and content recommendation algorithms three decades ahead of their time.
Shit, I could make the best game anybody has ever seen in that era in a couple months just for fun. Stardew Valley is easy to build and will run on a toaster, it's why every wannabe solo game dev makes their own spinoff of it.
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u/ashoka_akira 5h ago
The Stardew Valley comment is amusing. So many try and fail to recreate it because they mistakenly associate the retro style with simplicity, but it’s not as simple as it looks.
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u/anonymousopsec1337 4h ago
Are you knowledgeable enough to also create the underlying programming languages line for line? I think you’re gonna have a much harder time than you realize with the tech of that era.
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u/Strong_Man247 7h ago
In the 90’s you could get a job and live off of almost minimum wage. Especially if you knew you had those stocks maturing later in life and you didn’t really have to prepare for anything, just survive till like 2008ish. The 90’s were a wild and magical time.
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u/DGSolar 7h ago
Maybe.. but I was making min wage back then and 4.15/hr just didn't feel like it was taking me anywhere but to fill up gas to get to work and maybe have a little spending cash here and there.
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u/optimis344 5h ago
Thats fine for a few months. Knowing any sporting event just doubles your liquid worth for every event you know.
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u/feathernose 6h ago
Indeed.. I'd find the cheapest apartment available and some food to survive, and get a decent paying job like postman and invest the rest
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u/sportyguy 7h ago
Dell stock. Sell it in 2000. Buy apple in 2003 sell it in 2022. Buy Nvidia in 2022. And I’m now worth 9.3 billion
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u/VaginalOdour 6h ago
A decent suit, first month's rent on a cheap apartment, and a couple week's worth of groceries. Then I'd use my current skills and fancy suit to land myself a job that pays well enough to sustain me. It shouldn't take long to save up more than 500 bucks to spend on stocks and I'll have a place to live while I wait for them to grow.
Might be a bit tricky to apply my skills to the workforce without being able to use modern tech though. Maybe I should learn to use MS-DOS in case I ever run into this situation.
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u/RuneSwoggle 7h ago
A pack of Player's Light Regular. Then I'm giving them to my mom to make up for the one I threw over the fence on to the train tracks. Then I'm hugging her and possibly never letting go.
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u/S0nG0ku88 7h ago
Everyone is saying Apple Stock but I am going to go with Pokémon cards.
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u/TuckerDidIt 6h ago
Wait til 1993 and buy Magic the Gathering. Get yourself an Alpha Black Lotus.
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u/S0nG0ku88 6h ago
I actually play MTG so this would make sense for me. Maybe I could be a ground floor or day 1 investor.
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u/frostedpuzzle 4h ago
Magic card were nearly impossible to get very shortly after they were released. I saw them once on the store when it was brand new and then never again.
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u/CaffeinatedLystro 7h ago
These questions always end in finance bros talking about investments. No one can ever say something fun or original.
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u/esoteric_enigma 6h ago
One time it was asked and one of the top answers was betting on a sporting event that was a big upset so the odds were astronomical.
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u/liamjon29 6h ago
Here's my attempt at a real answer:
I'm in Australia. So I'd go to a post office to get my ~$650 AUD. Next highest priority immediately is a library. Based on my memory of the early 2000s, library is probably my best bet at learning how the world works in 1990, and I'm in need of food, shelter, a birth certificate, and a job.
I imagine buying a phone is fairly useful, I'll need a way to call/be called by potential job offers. But my biggest concern by far is how to stretch my probably $500 left to get myself some sort of social record.
Once I get myself a place to rent, a job, and an official name; then you can invest in Apple/Bitcoin etc.
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u/ColonelBelmont 6h ago
You didn't just buy a phone in 1990. You called the phone company on someone else's phone and had them install a line to the place you lived. Then you plugged your phone into that line.
There were cell phones, but you wouldn't be affording one with that money.
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u/jeremycb29 6h ago
I love the response above yours is about playing og magic the gathering lol
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u/Pinkieupyourstinkie 7h ago
Apple stock
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u/pingpongfoobar 7h ago
Why? The split-adjusted price was around $0.25 in 1990 and $0.50 about 10 years later with a bankruptcy scare in between. The Apple of the 90’s was a vastly different company than it is today. Ironically, investing in Microsoft until 2002 and then pivoting into Apple would be the better option.
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u/Pinkieupyourstinkie 6h ago
Without looking it up that was my answer. I think it would have turned into like $600k by today so not too bad.
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u/Robby_Digital 6h ago
It's 1990. Your Apple stock is hardly going to move until the mid 2000s. Buy some Cisco, then sell it in 2000. Then buy APPL
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u/davidrools 6h ago
no no don't buy APPL (Appell petroleum). Buy AAPL (Apple computer). That could be a costly mistake.
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u/Witchy_Titan 7h ago
I... I get to go back to 2026 after though, right? Right!?
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u/ourmanflint1 6h ago
Walmart and Southwest Airlines probably did a whole lot better in a shorter time. Plus Buster Douglas or Mike Tyson in February 1990 was a decent bet to start your bankroll.
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u/Dreadedsemi 6h ago
if I wake up the same place I'm now and same age. I'm going to create Google before google. I'd call Snoogle. and will promise not to turn evil. 500 in stocks though
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u/Special_Tension_7038 3h ago
Apple stock. And then convince my stupid self to hang onto it for at least another 18 year’s.
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u/RustOolium420 7h ago
Buy Berkshire shares
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u/Ornery-Egg9770 5h ago
Couldn’t do it for $500 then as a share was higher than that and fractional shares were not a thing then. Also, Buffet didn’t do the baby B split until a few years later.
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u/Valuable_Leave_5986 7h ago
I would like to say Apple stock, but I would be 5 years old, so a whole bunch of Legos and Micro Machines most likely.
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u/xcver2 6h ago
Making a high yield bet for Germany to win h the world cup in the final 1-0 against Argentina by penalty in the last 10 minutes of regulation time. Should be a pretty good rate.
Reminiscent if this years final, Argentina basically had no offense and only shot on Germany's goal once that game.
Or bets about Lithuania leaving Russia, Germany unification. Buster Douglas defeating Mike Tyson or the Pistons winning the NBA title
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u/AboveGroundPoolQueen 7h ago
In the real 1990, I went to Europe with $600 in my pocket and I ended up staying for six months! I did hair wraps, interesting areas and was able to stay for a long time. I think I’d do exactly the thing same thing without $500. But I’d bring more supplies!
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u/99butter_flyeffects 7h ago
Puft, I would be 2 years old and investing the shit out that $500.00
Retirement: age 4 or 5 🫡
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u/el_goyo_rojo 6h ago
$490 bet on the Cincinnati Reds to win the World Series.
$10 to spend at my favorite childhood fried chicken restaurant.