Bogleheads.org

Is the money in a money-market fund, a bond fund, a stock fund, or some combination? Regardless, any dividends and capital-gains distributions are taxable in the year that you receive them, regardless of whether you receive them in cash or automatically reinvest them back into the funds (which gives...

hand wrote:marketing / ratings driven need to provide a luxury product (climbing walls, gourmet food, fancy dorms) and the associated costs.

Don't forget the athletic programs and facilities.

Wow, trudging door to door in sweaty clothes (Gulfport, Mississippi!) while being chased by dogs... not exactly what I would have envisioned a stockbroker doing.

If you're still in the "accumulating" phase (you're not retired yet), it may suffice to direct all your new contributions for a while to the funds which are "lower" than they should be according to your target asset allocation (probably bonds or other fixed-income, right now). If...

frankjuka wrote:At the worst I sold high bought high.

Looks like you bought a little bit higher. The S&P was up 1.0% today.

I think the usual word for non-Roth --> Roth is "conversion", not "rollover". A Google search on "roth conversion" will turn up lots of hits.

You should be looking at all of your investments together (inside the 401k and outside it) when figuring your asset allocation.

I am now 40 years old and do not have even 100K for retirement :? . I didn't start saving specifically for retirement until age 30, after I finished graduate school and got my first job with a retirement plan. When I was 40, I didn't have 100K (in today's dollars) either. In the nearly 20 years sin...

Seven: 403(b) with TIAA-CREF: 1. TIAA Traditional 2. CREF Stock. T. Rowe Price mutual funds: 3. Total Equity Market Index (POMIX) 4. International Equity Index (PIEQX) 5. US Bond Enhanced Index (PBDIX) T. Rowe Price brokerage: 6. Vanguard Total Stock Market ETF (VTI) 7. Vanguard Total Bond Market ET...

Chase has issued some guidance on this: http://www.theonion.com/articles/after-checking-your-bank-account-remember-to-log-o,32260/?utm_source=Twitter&utm_medium=SocialMarketing&utm_campaign=standard-post:headline:default when you’re finished with your online banking session, we recommend th...

Lady Geek has mentioned an Actiontec modem might be a wireless router. If it's as fast as your netgear router, then you gain nothing and maybe actually be slowing down your connection by connecting to the netgear. I have an Actiontec DSL modem and two Apple Airport Express wireless units. The Actio...

We visited the UP several years ago as part of a loop through the Midwest, entering from Wisconsin and exiting via the Mackinac Bridge. Our overnights went something like this: 1. Ironwood (after a day's drive from Minneapolis) (made detours to Black River Harbor and through the Porcupine Mountains)...

TIAA-CREF announced a few days ago that in August, in certain types of accounts they will close current TIAA Traditional contracts to new contributions, which will go into new contracts that have a lower guaranteed interest rate. Before you decide whether to use TIAA Traditional, you should find out...

My dad's main argument for active management for the entire portfolio is that active managers are better at avoiding downside risk and can avoid or lessen the negative impacts on compounding when the market drops. According to his theory, they are professional and the best managers and they underst...

Maybe your father would agree to letting you manage part of the UTMA, say $60K, a bit less than 1/4, on a trial basis. After a couple of years, you can compare performance and fees with the FA and decide where to go from there.

I could only get 1 channel and even that was fuzzy. To mangle a line from those credit card toting barbarians, "What's in your walls?" If there's metal mesh (like in stucco walls) or foil insulation, it can do a good job of blocking TV signals. Another possibility: those small leaf-type a...

I inherited some money just as the stock market was beginning to tank in late 2008. I was terrified, of course, so I put it all in bank CDs. I didn't put it into the market until halfway between the bottom and where we are today. If I had only done it in the summer of '09...

From the program blurb: Assume you are invested in a mutual fund, [Bogle] says, with a gross return of 7 percent, but that the mutual fund charges you an annual fee of 2 percent. Over a 50-year investing lifetime, that little 2 percent fee will erode 63 percent of what you would have had. As Bogle p...

If you don't want to give specific dollar values or ranges, you can use percentages, e.g. your current annual expenses are x% of your total cash holdings.

I haven't checked recently, but a few years ago you could also get TIVO DVRs that worked with OTA TV. They're still available. Last November I bought a TiVo Premiere for $200. You have to pay extra for the program guide, without which the box is useless as a DVR: either $15 per month or $500 up fro...

All the transmitter are between 13-25 miles away from where I am, I guess this antenna should do the trick then? Nothing's ever guaranteed with antenna TV reception, but there's a pretty good chance it will do the job, so it's definitely worth trying it out. Reception can vary a lot between differe...

My wife and I got married fairly late, mid to late 30s (25th anniversary coming up in a couple of months). We've both had very stable, similar jobs and earned similar salaries. We have similar attitudes towards spending and saving. Neither one of us is a spendthrift, but she's more frugal than I am,...

By rabbit ears antenna you mean something like this: http://www.amazon.com/RCA-ANT111-Basic-Indoor-Antenna/dp/B000HKGK8Y/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top ? Yep, that's it. The Radio Shack version has a larger circular loop which is a bit more effective at picking up the UHF channels. The rabbit ears are fo...

How much do these antennas cost for viewing OTA channels? It depends. If you're close to the transmitters, up to maybe 10 miles, a simple unamplified $10-$15 rabbit-ears-and-loop combination from Radio Shack will do. I'm 50-70 miles away from most of my transmitters, in various directions, so I use...

In addition to (or instead of) Antennaweb, check out http://tvfool.com. Its information is more detailed. With a good antenna on the roof, you should be able to get anything in TVFool's green and yellow zones. Going down into the red zone, things start to get dicey even with a top-of-the-line antenn...

You might consider maxing your 401K contributions and in parallel, convert part of the 401K to a Roth IRA each year. You'd have to pay tax on the amount converted, but the Roth will grow completely tax-free. Also, it's not subject to RMDs like the 401K is, so you can leave the money in it longer.

If anyone in the group is a car buff, you might want to stop at the National Packard Museum in Warren OH, a short detour off I-80 after you cross from PA into OH. Not nearly as big as the Ford museum in Dearborn, though.

Welcome to the Two Comma Club!

About 10-12 years ago I went to DC a few times with a group that always stayed in Rosslyn near the Key Bridge, right across from Georgetown. We used a Best Western a couple of times, and another place (whose name I've forgotten) right down the street the third time. The Rosslyn metro station was in ...

YouTube has a de-shaking option that did what I thought was a pretty impressive job with a video that I shot out the front window of a train during a bouncy ride. The worst jolts caused some brief blurry spots, but the result was much more watchable than the original. Hand-held video shot while stan...

as i "stay the course" will having an advisor on an ongoing basis help me do that? I would say that depends on how likely you are to react impulsively to real or perceived crises. If the stock market plunges 50% like it did in '08-'09, are you going to be seriously tempted to bail out nea...

Right, the funds with larger ratios of stocks took bigger hits during 2008-09. However, since March 2009 they've generally been increasing faster than VTINX. If the current bull market in stocks continues, it looks like the other funds on that chart will catch up to VTINX in about a year or so, and ...

I'm using Office 2010 and was able to find the functionality. It was cleverly hidden away under "Save as...Save file as type...PDF," which actually makes a whole lot of sense. A bit more sense than under Mac OS, where you have to choose "Print...", then go to the little "PD...

Your wife doesn't gain anything by delaying her spousal benefit, because it's based on your age-66 amount and won't go up any further.

My understanding is that it's 50% of the age-66 amount (your Principal Insurance Amount = PIA), but I don't know enough to recognize the 45.1% that you cited.

If you don't "need" your own SS benefit right now because you're still working, then you should delay collecting benefits until you're 70 or stop working, whichever comes first, to take advantage of the resulting increase. However, in order for your wife to collect her spousal benefit, you...

with all your free time, consider generating some income to supplement your withdrawals. In other words, you could semi-retire, instead of completely retire. Just tonight, ABC news had a report on a former NBA basketball star who made $1.2M per year at his peak. He works as a school crossing guard ...

(By the way, your username reminds me of a certain minor-league baseball team in northeast Ohio.) Really? What's the name? I just chose this name because I spend a lot of time scrapbooking. Ah, a different kind of scrapper. :happy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahoning_Valley_Scrappers That valley u...

grap0013 wrote:20% is perfectly fine. There are some very large incomes here.

And some of us live in areas with rather low housing costs.

why would I not use what I currently have to get into as many funds as I can now with the intent of expanding into more funds later if that is what I decide to do? For maximum diversification, you don't need a lot of different funds. The 3-Fund Portfolio that people often recommend here contains: T...

Note that that one doesn't have to go all the way to Denmark to experience Legoland on a European trip. There's another one near Günzburg, Germany, which is about halfway between Stuttgart and Munich.

Yep, they will probably make you pay for internet, too. I've been amused by reports of extra charges for internet service in high-end hotels. My wife and I generally stay in low-end places like Motel 6 or Super 8 or local family-owned places when we're on a road trip (Hampton Inn is a splurge for u...

1. About 5% 2. Yes, about four years ago. 3. About 7% We live in a rural area where housing prices are pretty low compared with major metro areas in the Northeast and on the west coast. I made a wild-assed guess about our home equity based on a couple of sales in the last year in our neighborhood, o...

A family rail pass is often not the way to go. If you're making shorter trips within a country, you can get better deals by buying family tickets for each leg from the rail company in that country. For longer multi-country train travel it can work out. If you're focusing on a particular region by s...

Now: 0%

When we bought the house, our payments were about 12-13% of our combined gross income. Just before we finished paying it off, about 5%. At that time, and since then, property tax, insurance and utilities have been about 5% also.

You'd think he'd be stuck at 42, the way Jack Benny was stuck at 39.

Downtown Abby? Was she the one who wrote that advice column?

Driving an hour on an empty country road would be more boring, but probably less stressful ... until a deer jumps out in front of you. :shock: One of my colleagues who commuted from a place on "the lake" a half hour away once come in late because he had had a run-in with Bambi on the way ...

In my state, the longest commute times are in rural areas that are relatively far from the cities and towns where the jobs are. My area, although rural, has an average time of only 19.2 minutes, probably because it's dominated to two small towns close together which have a fair number of jobs relati...

If he decides to wait until 70, it seems that this should guarantee that the rules [insofar as they affect him] will not change between now and when he turns 70. I would say that it does not [guarantee], because he can change his mind at any time before age 70 and start to collect SS at that point....

As a rule of thumb, for US stamps, 1930 is something of a dividing line. An extensive collection covering the 1920s and before, in mint or unused condition, is likely to be worth something. Used condition, not so likely, although still possible, especially if there's a lot of pre-1900 material. Afte...