Bogleheads.org

http://i51.tinypic.com/280se8h.jpg LOL... Talk about cherry-picking the dates... 1971? when gold has been artificially held at $35 for like 40 years? So yeah it popped... And then the chart ends in May 2009, very close to the near bottom when the S&P 500 was at 800-something... I wonder how tha...

Pay someone else $100k a year to handle the B.S. for you.

Otherwise, work 2 more years, save another $1.1 million, then quit forever

I look at the facts and see that 50%+ of marriages end in divorce That statistic has a lot of caveats. Highly educated people who get married in their late 20s have a much lower divorce rate than that. People with a high school education and who marry young get divorced at a very high rate. People ...

Yes, but seriously, at that price your daughters had to suffer through KU football seasons :) Ha! But one of them got to enjoy a NCAA Basketball National Championship in 2008.... The other had to suffer last year when Kansas lost in the finals. She'll be a senior next year, so she has one more chan...

I'm an IT grunt....

I'd love to cut back to working 4 days a week in a few years (at 80% pay, of course)...

How can I convince my employer to do this? I might even accept 75% pay if that would help.

If they won't go for it, what kind of IT jobs would let me do this?

I just put two kids through college... University of Kansas... about $15k a year including room and board... $60k total for each of their degrees... And that's with sorority fees... Could be done for less. There should be a simple college admission test. "Are you willing to pay $200k for your u...

It looks like over the past 35 years or so the policy has averaged about 5% return. Even 5% return is pretty good in the current environment. He's not going to get 5% going forward... He got 5% over the last 35 years because bonds returned 8% over the last 35 years (notice how those 3% fees work?)....

Investors who allocate to this strategy allocate less than 10%-15% of their portfolio to reduce vol. of their portfolio. I would suggest to those investors that they invest in CDs or bonds instead. These funds appear to trail bull markets terribly, and they don't make a lot of money even in a bear ...

market timer wrote:Seems like it would be much more efficient if rich people could find some way to agree to give each others' kids preferential treatment in hiring and in the marriage market, and save on the university administration fees.

Heh, quote of the month.

OP, I plan to retire at $2 million and a paid-off house.... Also figuring on expenses being around $80k a year... But that's in 11 years or so when I'm 55... and my wife will be 63 at that point, and she can start taking Social Security (and I'll be only a few years away from taking it myself). If I...

but I don't want my kids turning down an ivy and working three jobs through college (like me). Yet, that experience turned you into a person who has managed to save $750k JUST for his kids' colleges... You are proof that you don't need to go to an Ivy to be VERY successful. Those tough times made y...

I started downscaling at 45, first Fridays off, then taking an afternoon off, and now I'm down to a few mornings a week. What kind of job lets you just come in a few mornings a week? I'd love to take all Fridays off forever (and drop to 80% pay, of course, or even 75% pay!)... I'd do that in a hear...

Do you have a job? How much do you make? What are your expenses?

The problem is that 95% of the people who have invested with him over the years did not invest from inception. completely made up. See Ranger's comment. We can agree to disagree on my other points... I may indeed be wrong about his intentions, and I may indeed be comparing his funds to the wrong be...

You are comparing capital preservation fund with index fund, which has a different objective. That fund supposed to under-perform in raging bull market and reduce draw down during bear market. What exactly is the point of that? Just buy bonds instead.... Heck, CDs over the last 10 years would have ...

The problem is that 95% of the people who have invested with him over the years did not invest from inception. It's the same problem we see with all active management... New fund does well, leds the pack on 1-year or 3-year return lists.... the masses pile in, the fund underperforms from then on......

Hussman's flagship fund since inception: http://i44.tinypic.com/6em1on.jpg The problem is that 95% of the people who have invested with him over the years did not invest from inception. It's the same problem we see with all active management... New fund does well, leds the pack on 1-year or 3-year ...

Oh, he also announced a new fund a year ago in that newsletter above...

HSDVX

Hedging against a downturn while investing in dividend stocks... It's made 4.3% since inception in February 2012 (compared to 25% for S&P 500).

1.25% expense ratio too.

This was first posted on March 6th 2012 (I decided not to necro the original thread) Last week, the estimated return/risk profile of the S&P 500 fell to the worst 2.5% of all observations in history on our measures. This is not a runaway bull market. Rather, it is a market that again stands near...

Honobob wrote:Public records show this property sold in 2005 for $490,000. Bay Area real estate has been very good to me. There's no reason this won't be selling for $600,000+ in a couple of years.

Simple math is a reason... Home prices cannot go up faster than salaries indefinitely.

Homer, All that stuff about billions of Chinese is totally irrelevant--markets don't price growth they price risk, and it's valuations that matter--all that growth you are forecasting is already well known and built into current valuations, thus the only way likely to get higher returns is if growt...

There are a billion Indians and Chinese joining the middle-class over the next 20-30 years.... and they are all going to want to buy washing machines and Diet Coke. Again, I don't plan for 10%, but all these people saying "Oooh things are bad... We're only going to get 7% going forward" ar...

bobcat2 wrote:We see that from a historical perspective 7% would be very high. If global equity returns are going to be lower than they have been historically, we are looking at real returns below 5% going forward.

I believe the 7% was a nominal number (so 4%-5% real probably assuming inflation stays low)

It may also be because overall stock valuations are high, and the combination of P/E and dividends gives a rough estimate of future longterm returns. P/E ratios were very low in the 1980 when the long bull market started that produced those 10% returns. No, the long bull market produced 15%-18% ann...

Tarzan series: Developed my interest in reading at a young age. Me too! My Dad owned like 20 of them when he was a kid... When I found them, I read all of them straight through, and then made him go out and buy me the other 30+ in the series... After that, I was quite the reader (Re-read a couple a...

Thank you for all the help and responses. After reading all the links, and looking at my notes, I think he was talking about a single payment annuity. He did say the annuity take 1.65% and he gets paid from that. He also said there was a 8.75% surrender charge. I know there's a death benefit, but n...

The 6.8% SPIA rate for a 65 year old male is not inflation adjusted, but the 4% safe withdrawel rate usually refers to an inflation adjusted withdrawel. The 6.8% SPIA still could yield less than 4% inflation adjusted over 30 years. That is important to remember. But the real difference between an S...

I hate to be the bearer of sad tidings, but at today's super low real interest rates the 4% rule will have a very high failure rate. The studies of SWR's that have looked at past historical periods don't include extended periods where real LT interest rates are negative, as they are today. :( :( Bo...

HomerJ - To explain my "naughty words" edits: While the majority of readers are adults, we have a number of younger readers, and we have received complaints from this perspective. So, this forum is best served by keeping the language "family friendly" - stuff you can say in fron...

ricb wrote:I'm just learning about cash-back SPIAs; e.g., your spouse receives the balance of your original purchase amount less the amounts paid to you - no matter when you die.

I'm guessing they pay a ton less?

The whole reason SPIA's pay so well is the mortality credits...

I don't think the moderators should be routinely adding anything to the thread titles. If they want to change something they should at least ask permission from the OP first. Good grief, Bogleheads doesn't need to become a nanny web site. JW I agree with this... I do appreciate LadyGeek's tireless ...

Jim Dahle, The White Coat Investor , who posts on this forum as EmergDoc, obviously seems to think physicians belong in a special category of investors. Not quite sure myself how they would differ from veterinarians, lawyers, and other "professionals." Perhaps that is because most physici...

I hate to be the bearer of sad tidings, but at today's super low real interest rates the 4% rule will have a very high failure rate. The studies of SWR's that have looked at past historical periods don't include extended periods where real LT interest rates are negative, as they are today. :( :( Bo...

Mill wrote:congrats LadyGeek, but is this thread actionable? Lock please.

Heh, hate to say it, but it's true...

this thread is off-topic and locked: A reminder that non-investing general comment threads are OT

I'm just a lame American, who reads too much science fiction and not enough history... My Dad gave me "Memoirs of the Second World War" by Winston Churchill for Christmas... and I finally got around to reading it last week... What an amazing book... What General Weygand has called the Batt...

Hawaii vacations, Las Vegas vacations, Toronto vacations, Seattle vacations, .... What badassity are we talking about here? It amazes me that some people criticize others for not living the life. You indicate that MMM is not living as a monk. That is exactly the point. He lives frugally, but he sti...

Hawaii vacations, Las Vegas vacations, Toronto vacations, Seattle vacations, .... What badassity are we talking about here? It amazes me that some people criticize others for not living the life. You indicate that MMM is not living as a monk. That is exactly the point. He lives frugally, but he sti...

I think the RB40 author (Joe) IS "retired" and is about the same age as MMM. However he also points out his wife is still working and makes a solid income . Then you're not really retired... Geez... there are 20 million house-wifes and house-husbands who could have started a blog claiming...

1) The reddit article linked was flawed. The author mistook two major aspects of the blog. First, (through, in part, unclear reporting on the part of MMM) rental income was not included in the math. Second, the author misunderstood the difference between ads that run in the side of a site vs. spons...

I think the RB40 author (Joe) IS "retired" and is about the same age as MMM. However he also points out his wife is still working and makes a solid income . Then you're not really retired... Geez... there are 20 million house-wifes and house-husbands who could have started a blog claiming...

Money absolutely can buy happiness.

Jet skis cost money.

Have you ever seen anyone who looked unhappy while driving a jet ski?

I also don't believe he lives on 25k a year. You don't get 3 people to Hawaii for a multi-week vacation on a 25k a year budget... Rather difficult to bike there. Now he says he traded renovation work for the vacation... That's exactly the same as getting paid $10k for renovation work, and using that...

If he continued to invest at the bottom of the market, he'll have seen some significant appreciation over the past 4 years. He could only continue to invest at the bottom of the market if he had income... Financially independent (or retired) people don't NEED income, they may generate some income, ...

his wife continued to work part-time until last year (or thereabouts). That was why I didn't like him touting how he retired at 30 because of his awesome money and life skills... If your wife keeps working, you're not really retired... There are 50 million stay-at-home moms and dads who could all s...

Some of these responses are quite entertaining, especially from a boglehead crowd. What's the saying...'haters gonna hate'. This is one of the situations where there is no such a thing as a "boglehead crowd." You see a number of individuals who hate Mr. Money Mustache (MMM) and happen to ...

Yes, it's a scam.

100% of newsletters are scams.

Our bread-and-butter living expenses are paid for by a single rental house we own, which generates about $25,000 per year after expenses. I'm curious how he clears $2,000 a month from a single rental home... I'm assuming it has no mortgage, but to generate $2000 in rent (after expenses!) it must be...

Here's an article that recommends Petroleum Engineering. http://money.cnn.com/2013/04/25/news/economy/engineering-best-paid-jobs/index.html?iid=HP_LN Just to respond to generically to a lot of these kinds of articles that recommend engineering: Engineering gives you a decent starting salary, stabil...

For example, at age 65, an SPIA of about $220k would produce an annual payout of about $15,000, the same amount your GWB will pay out on your illusory $300k. Exactly... Your account doesn't really grow to $300k, it grows to the equivalent of $220k... You don't really get 5%, you get like 1%... It's...

resulting in what they call a Guaranteed Withdrawal Balance (GWB) of $300k. In my opinion the 300k is phony money. Your opinion is absolutely correct. That 300k value is a bogus number, used to trick people into buying the annuity. How do I calculate whether it is better to stay in each annuity or ...