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Here's a simple way to think about the should-I-wait question in the specific case of a fixed-income SPIA. Say I want to purchase $1000/mo of extra income. (These are nominal dollars, not inflation-adjusted dollars.) Say I'm a 60yo male, but might wait until 65 or 70. A quick trip to an online quote...

However, I think there is another forum topic here discussing how the annuitization schedules have changed (lower), depending upon when the money was placed into the Trad Annuity account. Given the 9 yrs + 1 day time needed to remove money, -->> you might want to double check what the guaranteed mi...

I have spent an hour or so in the past days reading up on it, and am familiar with the limitations on selling/moving any investments in the Traditional Account You should allocate more than an hour to wrap your brain around all of the quirks of Traditional. I would also recommend dedicating several...

neuro, That language you are reading on the website reflects the fact that a rate for new contributions is set every month. All existing GSRA contracts are guaranteed to pay at least 3%. (And for the past several years, that has been all that they paid.) Yes it's true that tomorrow they could stop i...

My preferred style is set it and forget it. So my current feeling is that I may as well leave it there and not roll it over into an IRA? Sounds like a good plan to me. If the old employer or T-C makes changes in the plan that you don't like, you can roll it out. The low fund expense ratio is about ...

Maybe a better way to normalize the question is to ask at what age your net worth reached 2x your gross annual wages. (Regarding $50K as an "average" wage today.)

My answer: dunno. Don't have good records going that far back, but probably it was sometime during my 20s.

(4) If I understand it right, to account for potential changes in interest rates, short TIPS are supposed to be a better choice than short bonds; hence that choice. That doesn't smell right to me. Short TIPS will behave differently from other short bonds, but that doesn't mean they will do better. ...

(1) You mention: " "....(FWIW I have about 8 funds spread over 7 accounts.)...." - I wonder - If the 7 accounts are a mixture of retirement and taxable accounts, does that make rebalancing difficult? Having many tax-advantaged and taxable accounts does mean that one's portfolio is cu...

Don't bother with this blog post, nothing Bogleheads aren't already aware of. My summary: 1. Author picked $1M because he knew it would push people's buttons. The fact that $1M at a supposedly safe withdrawal rate of 4% only produces $40K in income has been discussed ad nauseum here. 2. More whining...

nisiprius wrote:And I just received the agreement... via email.

Me too. No VBS. Changed my vote.

My $0.02: 1,3. Your portfolio is way too complicated for my taste. If you want something simple try a 3-fund portfolio, and only add additional moving parts if you can articulate a good reason for them. (FWIW I have about 8 funds spread over 7 accounts.) http://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Three-fund_por...

The Forbes article is nearly useless, and Rick has pointed out one of the reasons. Some others: Defer Social Security and IRA distributions until age 70. Live off non-IRA assets. Deferring IRA distributions before age 70 is a mistake if you are in a lower bracket than you will be after age 70 with R...

I think it is within the rules, but not a good strategy. Paying tax on qualified dividends is a relative bargain. Normal market fluctuations while waiting a few days to repurchase are likely to be much bigger than 15% of a quarterly dividend. (And if I tried this, you can be sure the market would ge...

I would avoid holding (various share classes of) the same fund in taxable and tax-advantaged. Or if you do, do not reinvest dividends in the tax-advantaged account. (In my employer's plan, that's not an option. YMMV.) Otherwise, selling at a loss in taxable is likely to create a bad wash sale, one w...

The wiki has a useful compilation of the historical distributions for a few dozen VG funds. Something like SEC yield is only going to get you so far, as it won't reveal things like qualified dividends. (And VG doesn't publish SEC yield for their Intl funds.) Start with the pages linked here: http://...

Speaking of subpar IT... I'd like them to fix the bugs in their cost basis tracking for covered shares. The bug seems to affect FIFO and SpecID for some bond mutual funds. (Maybe short term bonds only.) Documented in this post: http://www.bogleheads.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=1710870#p1710870

You could probably move money from Total Stock back to the MM fund if you really wanted to, but might have to do it by phone to get around frequent trading restrictions. No. Trading restrictions occur only after you sell. (And MM funds have no trading restrictions.) Should be easy to set up an elec...

I had 9 dollars left over in MM. Did an "All" purchase of VTIAX just to get rid of 9 bucks. As far as I know, the minimum for a mutual fund purchase is $100. (Automatic purchases can be smaller.) Surprised the interface allowed that trade--unless maybe the backend also knew about the inco...

So, the asset allocation dilemma is really to see how to maximize total distributions over five years. I don't understand this comment--why do you want to maximize these distributions? You say you don't need the money now. So it seems to me you'd rather minimize the distributions; a danger you'd li...

Sunday AM: The dividend shares are now posted to the un-realized gains but at a loss. [snip] How can something bought as of close of business one day show a loss as of close of business on the same day . If I sell the dividend shares today do I create another wash sale? The dollars here and the tax...

alexbgh wrote:In your example, if you use specific identification of shares and sell May 30 shares on June 3 and leave Feb shares, it is not going to be a wash sale, is it correct?

Correct.

any ideas what would be an acceptable "not substantially identical" ETF to purchase with the funds from the sale? This is a very popular FAQ here on BH. (Not emerging markets specifically, but questions about whether two funds are "substantially identical".) There's no definitiv...

But if you already owned the stock and then bought yesterday and sold today at a loss, is that a wash sale? Or is it only if you still hold some of the position and not a wash sale if you sold the whole position? Wash sales depend on which shares you sold, and which you kept (bought). I hope this e...

IMO, you should keep track of it yourself. In most circumstances, it would suffice to save all of your Forms 5498, as these will have a record of all of your contributions to, and rollovers into, your IRAs. (If you make any non-deductible IRA contributions, you'll need to track that as well, and rep...

Somewhat related question: Is there a web site where I can look up stats for funds that no longer exist? It would be interesting to pull up a morningstar-style growth chart for some funds I owned ~10 years ago in pre-BH days. And do ticker symbols get recycled? With ETFs, there are only 17,576 possi...

Could I sell the shares purchased on the dates indicated with question marks(?) without causing a wash sale? (-and buy SCHE or IEMG right afterwards) Yes. As long as you sell the recent lots, dated 05/24, 05/13, 05/06, then there is no wash sale. Or as a thought experiment, you could do it in slow-...

There are roughly $3,000 in long-term gains on ~$19,000 invested, and $1,050 in short-term gains on ~$14,000 invested. Simply cashing the long-term in might be enough to exclude the possibility of her making it into the 15% without some heroic deductions. If she does have some space in the 15% brac...

In the spectrum of tax-efficiency, it's in the same ballpark as US corporate bonds with similar yields. Less efficient than treasury bonds with the same yield, as those produce income that is not state-taxable, whereas all of the income from foreign bonds is (presumably) state-taxable. Perhaps there...

My December 2012 contribution was dated January 2, 2013. When was your paycheck dated? My paycheck is issued on the last day of business for each month. In December, that's usually Dec. 22 or 23. (We shut down for the holidays.) And the retirement plan deductions in that paycheck are credited to my...

why do you care what Vanguard does? I'm not the OP, but I care whenever a third party reports incorrect numbers about my income to the IRS. Granted they haven't done any reporting yet, but this event doesn't inspire confidence. I do believe that on your Form 8949 you can correct reporting mistakes ...

Nothing particularly new or helpful. I'd go farther than that; I'd say the whole article is rather misguided. BOB GINSBERG, a retired production manager for an educational publisher, is worried that he does not know any of the logins and passwords for online accounts belonging to his partner or bro...

If they are not maxing out their own 401Ks and his/hers IRAs, I would do that first, and use withdrawals from the inherited IRA to replace the lost income. This is a tax-free move that effectively transfers (some of) the inherited IRA into their names. Fun RMD facts: Mortgage balance from the OP: $1...

I believe this is valid, but maybe not widely practical. If you retire in the year you turn 55, many 401k plans allow penalty-free distributions. So let's say you plan to retire even earlier. You need to be an uber-saver to do that, so you are probably doing more than just maxing out a 401k and IRA ...

^Looks reasonable, but I prefer index funds.
If it were me, I would stick with 100% TSM in taxable.

Without knowing more about your situation, my back-of-the-envelope guesstimate is you will be cutting it close to make this work out. Are you planning to take SS at age 62? I'd be nervous like a long-tailed cat in a room full of rockin' chairs... I'll be taking SS at 66 or 70. At 59.5 I will begin ...

Pros: 1. Simpler to maintain. It's a mild pain to allocate this across 5 seperate accounts with more money flowing into my 401k 2. Would be slightly cheaper (not by much though. Basically would be able to maximize admiral share usage and could have the cheapest Total Stock Market Index in my self-d...

Just as an FYI, a fair amount of the lost postings can be found in Google's cache. I'm not suggesting that the moderators do anything about it, but those of us who want to restore a post to an existing thread may be able to fish it out of the cache. Example: http://www.bogleheads.org/forum/viewtopic...

Note : this post got trashed as a consequence of the recent BH outage and data loss. I've resurrected it by pulling it out of the Google cache. I am going thru a similar situation with my dad's RMD mess and would like to know if you have an update to share? Did the IRS ever contact or formally waiv...

To anyone... I can see that where you get the dollars to pay the taxes might matter for the conversion. I see 2 feasible options... (I'm sure there are more) Pay the taxes thru conversion from the IRA acct. at the time of conversion. Better: Do it in two steps. Say you've got $10K left in the 15% b...

Does everything sound like it went as it should? It sounds correct to me. Read the documentation on the back of your Form 5498. Box 3 is only for reporting Roth conversions from various flavors of IRA. Box 2 shows the amount of a rollover from any qualified plan--the taxable amount, if any, is not ...

They offer fidelity and TiaaCref and have only 2-3 vanguard funds. They also only have a smattering of the cheaper fidelity spartan funds. Why not ask your employer to add more Vanguard funds and/or more Spartan funds? We have TIAA-CREF as our TPA, but the menu includes a dozen or so Vanguard funds...

I used to think it was perhaps an expectant wash, as one is simply reducing cost basis, but reading posts of retirees, and people who have looked at decumulation tax wise, I have come to realize that tax rates for decumulation are really really low expectantly. By harvesting losses, you are postpon...

Folks, I have been using short term munis as a combination emergency fund and partial bond component of my AA. With SEC short term muni yields at about 0.35% and my local bank offering 1% on savings, there isn't any reason to hold munis vs cash correct? The risk reward seems inverted. Not necessari...

You're right that tax rules for IRAs are no excuse to delay rebalancing. Get off your <expletive> and get it done. The same applies to RIRA: all money is tax-free when withdrawn and doesn't matter which shares are sold. No. The rules governing withdrawals from Roth IRAs are rather messy, and depend ...

Am I missing something? I see nothing here about her anticipated income streams, expenses, and tax rates (Fed + state) in retirement. So, unless she doesn't need this portfolio to cover expenses in retirement, what makes you assume that she'll have the "problem" of needing to re-invest RM...

I believe the leftmost drop down menu of your VG account page has a "Taxes" or "Capital Gains" entry. That will take you to a page that should list all of the cap gains you have realized.

Or ask a CSR where to find it.

Thus, the true value of harvesting the capital loss is the opportunity to invest the near-term tax savings for growth From a cash flow standpoint, TLH'ing is excellent for reducing your bill come tax time. But from an investment standpoint, one must actually re-invest the savings from your tax bill...

My $0.02: 1. Don't invest in things you don't understand. 2. When you inherit a non-spouse IRA, you have to start taking required minimum distributions. (Read also about the 5-year rule, which might be an option in your case, but means withdrawing amounts at an even faster rate.) Wrapping it inside ...

I never read the contract, but I'm surprised that they are able to do this when they stated that the minimum rate for contributions would be 3%. They can do this by stopping new contributions to the account, and creating a new account with a new contract. Similar to closing a fund. Existing money i...

For the record, here are the real (inflation adjusted--as of 3/13) levels that need to be exceeded to qualify as an all-time high: Dow.....................16,124 S&P500...................2,106 NASDAQ.................6,847 Wilshire 5000.......20,005 All of these levels were set during the first ...