Bogleheads.org

All I can think is that they're trying to keep the dividend payout per share within some narrow range, which would explain the timing of a split and the same time as a dividend increase. Maybe they think that, by keeping the dividend-per-share figure in a tight range they reduce volatility and there...

Do you trust Mint or similar sites with your Vanguard information?

No. In fact, if I could get away with it, I wouldn't even trust Vanguard

As I understand it, for calendar-year taxpayers (most of us) the payment is due on April 15th, so the tax has to be paid on or before that date regardless of when the 1040 is filed. This is true even if you get an extension on the filing date. In the instructions for Form 1040 there's some discussio...

I am interested in how others stay the course when there arises a desire from within to "do something". The best way I've found is to get involved doing something else, something in the non-financial world. After soaking up time and energy on other things (life) there may not be much left...

Well, it's a minor point but in fact it's not possible to purchase yen-denominated inflation-indexed bonds. Those bonds are only available to institutions approved by the government. There is a working group that is looking into introduction of such bonds for individual purchase in the future -- the...

At the risk of confusing things even more, assuming you're a US resident, it looks like the US and Finland have a tax treaty that limits taxation on dividends to 15%, but they withheld 22.9%. You may be able to file a claim to get the excess $300 back directly from Finland. Or if you choose not to g...

My question is what is the best exit strategy? Im thinking taxes are my biggest concern, but not totally sure I am not missing something else. No, that's about it. There's nothing much else to be concerned about. Except that you should probably use a limit order when you sell. Do I wait for the nex...

I suppose I'd get referrals and then go interview them. Have a list with the kinds of questions you think you'd like them to answer, and then see if they're willing. Of course, beyond a certain point it's fair for them to charge for that time. In my experience what really counts is whether they'll w...

1. What is my play here, from a financial standpoint or just in general? I think it's always a good idea to invest in yourself. Especially when young, anything you do now to increase your potential for a satisfying, meaningful life will produce big benefits later on. And of course, financially, any...

I took the cryptography course offered by Dan Boneh (Stanford) through Coursera and was very happy with it. What I liked most was that it was the real thing, not something watered down for the web, but as people have said, that meant devoting a lot of "real thing" time to study. The only d...

Not really a position borne out historically. The defiance of even a single person can bring down a government if it's the right person and the right protest at the right time. But we're straying far afield and thanks, as always, for your clear-headed appraisal of the situation in Cyprus. Japan's ab...

Wow, that's a thorny issue and I think you really need professional legal representation on the citizenship and back-filing issue. That's not a place to make mistakes. If you want to continue holding your citizenship then the answer is probably just to file. The IRS may still have an amnesty program...

I think anyone who feels safe isn't paying attention.

In a related note, for US taxpayers in Japan, the IRS will have a staff member at the US embassy this week -- for a whole two days (3/13-14) -- to answer questions. It's by appointment, so the thing to do is to call Ms. Ronda Berry at the embassy (03-3224-5000) and see if they can schedule a time fo...

I don't think you need to attach a 1099 to your return, do you? At least for a normal brokerage return, the information on the 1099 is reported directly to the IRS to the broker, so all you need to do is make sure your numbers match up with what they've told the government. Not sure about the report...

I imagine there will be a lawsuit about that if a settlement isn't already agreed upon. There was similar talk about refunding purchases of Fannie Mae bonds and preferred stocks that were pushed on banks before FNM went into conservatorship. Unfortunately the talk in Congress was to only refund the ...

Hmmmm... never noticed that. Combined with the devaluation of the yen that's some pretty stellar performance.

(1) Sure, as far as I know (which isn't very far!) (2) I think you'd have to calculate your tax both ways and see which location gives you the best result. Moving such a fund to your taxable account would give you the FTC, of course, but at the cost of paying US tax on the dividends, so it depends o...

Also I've been meaning to post some notes on handling the tax on investments in US brokerage accounts. There are some discriminatory rules that make it advantageous to use Japanese broker, but it depends on your situation, details of your investment strategy, comfort level doing financial stuff in J...

Sorry I didn't catch this question before. I file for the foreign tax credits on both sides of the Pacific each year, and while the process is a bit convoluted and you never really get the credits that you'd expect in principle, it can be worth doing, if only for the educational value. On the Japan ...

Another factor in the mix is that VEU is 13% Japan and with the return of the LDP to power anything denominated in yen has essentially crashed, losing 20% of its (dollar) value in six months.

I use Schwab as a non-resident and have no problems, so if things don't work out at TD they're certainly an option. But that said, I think with your level of assets any broker should be happy to make an arrangement of some kind if you talk to them in person. General statements on web sites are the &...

I guess if you look around there are lots of things like that, so I suppose I'd want to compare this deal with some of the others around. Or find a fund of distressed companies so you can spread out the risk. Firms like that are a different world, largely ignored by the larger market, so any notion ...

Lacking tax-advantaged space, I would (and do) buy TIPS for a taxable account. Actually if you buy the fund then there are no special tax ramifications to speak of. The "phantom income" issue arises due to taxation on the adjusted principal, so when there is positive inflation (which is mo...

Could the increase in volume be due to insiders buying shares on buyout speculation? You have to remember that before any deal is announced there will have been months of due diligence. All of the information about the deal will have been on the table for a long time, subject only to negotiations, ...

Information about default rates is scattered around. I'd look at the S&P site for updated information, but there is a useful table embedded a little less than half-way down the text of this bill . CUMULATIVE HISTORIC DEFAULT RATES [In percent] ----------------------------------------------------...

Also, remember that if the international fund pays out $1000 in dividends over the year, and the FTC is $100, that $100 is added to the total dividend paid out for tax purposes (here, you'll get a 1099-DIV that will list $1,100 as dividend income, not the $1,000 that was paid). You'll get the $100 ...

Although there may be some special cases I don't think the FTC is something anyone should actually go out and try to accumulate. It's just that, if you want the diversity of foreign investments in your portfolio, it can help reduce the pain when the funds throw off foreign source distributions. Ever...

I think there must be a misunderstanding about the classification of SCHB dividends. It's probably based on the fact that Schwab apparently doesn't receive Vanguard's 2012 dividend information until 2013, so an adjustment has to be made. Until that's done everything appears as ordinary dividends, an...

Wow! Thanks very much for all your help! The interaction between US and Japanese tax returns is hideous, thanks in part to the hideous tax treaty and equally hideous differences in regulations, so I'd really have to take deep breaths and pray to the gods before trying to amend both, in part because ...

Thanks very much for your note. I checked the broker's (Schwab) 1099 for 2008 and there's no mention of a negative OID even in the supplemental information not reported to the IRS. They list the accrued interest paid for the TIPS there, as well as the details of the purchase itself, but there's noth...

This is a really narrow question but one that I'm struggling with as part of a grand reconciliation of several years of tax returns. Like a lot of people around here, I bought some TIPS in late 2008 when yields were high. Looking back at my 1099 for that year, though, all I see is an entry for accru...

The lack of reporting for Roth contributions is both a blessing and a curse. The blessing is obvious: one less form to fill out. The curse is that no third party has enough information to check the contributions and notify you in a timely way if you made an excess contribution. Taxes, penalties, and...

I cannot open a taxable regular account at Fidelity as a non-US resident. I didn't realize that. I do know that Schwab will open a new taxable account for a non-resident US citizen. They did that for a friend of mine a few years ago, anyway. Some paperwork had to go back and forth to verify his ide...

I never thought about the repercussions on the US side, taxing tax as a distribution. I suppose you could argue that the tax was withheld at the source and never actually deposited in the IRA in the first place, but I'm not sure, and it would be another massive headache. I imagine there will be a lo...

I was looking over my brokerage statement for January and saw an odd thing in my IRA account: a line item deducting foreign tax on a security where that had never occurred before. Talking with the broker it seems that as of January there's been a change in the way Canada interprets its treaty obliga...

If the life insurance policy is only worth $5K it may just intended to protect the family in case of an untimely death. The costs associated with burial/funeral, etc, can be outrageously high and could be a burden in the worst-case scenario, so sometimes parents will buy insurance like that for thei...

Interesting about their on-line application. I think the devil is in the details. Looking back to what they told me in 2009, when I wanted to open account, was actually this: Vanguard's U.S. mutual funds are for sale only to residents of the U.S, Guam, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. So yo...

It is hard for me to see anything but a very bad outcome for Japan. I feel the same way, unfortunately, but for some reason it's like we're all deer in the headlights. This NBER paper proposes some future scenarios: Defying Gravity: How Long Will Japanese Government Bond Prices Remain High? . I hav...

It's an interesting question. Take a look at this [urlhttp://finance.yahoo.com/q/ta?s=^N225&t=1m&l=on&z=l&q=l&p=&a=&c=^DJI]graph[/url] for the past month, for example. Compared to the Dow, the Nikkei has been pretty violent. The main things I can think of off the top of m...

It's not the US govt that they are worried about. Institutions like Vanguard are worried that they may become liable to the regulations of a country like Japan if it appears that they are soliciting business in the foreign jurisdiction even if they don't have a business address there themselves. Th...

If the point is just that high deficits don't (immediately) lead to rising rates or devaluation, then I guess it is a data point, but for anything beyond that there are many other factors that would need to be taken into account. I don't think Japan's case should in any way serve as a source of comf...

This is a common problem at a lot of US financial institutions. They all try to pretend it's due to some law, regulation, rule, or just for some vague "compliance" without ever revealing just what it is they're trying to comply with. At the same time, brokers like Fidelity and Schwab have ...

There's really no problem in this situation. Lots of people don't know if they'll be over (or under) the limit until the end of the year. You can make the full contribution to the Roth now, and if it, at the end of the year, you're over the limit, you can reverse the contribution without penalty as ...

It all depends on what pond you swim in. Preferred stock gets touted a lot by those aiming at income investors, and they do have some nice features. They're the original exchange-traded structured products. I was actually surprised recently to see that banks and pseudo-banks are still offering them,...

It sounds to me like the parents don't really understand what is going on. You'd be taking their savings and putting it at risk, along with a lot of weird tax complications for them and your girlfriend. I think it would be better to skip the IRA. If you have to do anything, take the cash, buy a bank...

There are a lot of funds that focus on preferred stock. Most seem to use the CEF structure but there are also some ETFs. The biggest are PFF and PGX. I can't help thinking this is a dangerous time to buy into them, though. Larry Swedroe's book has a good run-down on the dangers, and I think at this ...

It may be just a coincidence, but there's certainly an argument to be made that companies with powerful individual owners do not suffer the same "agency problem" with their management that other companies do. I think before you assign this to anything more than a coincidence you'd want to...

Actually the first thing I would do is pay off the student loans. There is the moral argument, first and foremost, of course, but as a lender yourself I'm sure you don't need someone telling you that. Just from a financial point of view, though, eliminating that 5.1% drag on your earnings is worth s...

Ah, I remember hearing about this a few years ago. Japan government offers floating-rate bonds, and I think several countries others do as well, so there is historical data out there, albeit in different markets. The way they work here for the 10Y floating-rate bond is that the rate paid on each cou...