Bogleheads.org

I see no problem with having them deposit it directly at the bank.

However, if you want to stick with an old school method, telling them to mail the rent also works! That's what I used to do when I rented. It's a lot better than trying to meet up.

From my perspective, don't rush and try not to stress about it. Nice job selling a house where the proceeds are 20% of your net worth. Even if it sits in cash for a few years, it is unlikely to make all that much difference. Of course, the highest percentage play (assuming you already have a good pl...

I'm with Beagler and the others who are skeptical of Merton's advice. Merton is currently employed by DFA (Wikipedia says he is their "resident scientist" - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_C._Merton). DFA is an investment firm that charges high fees to invest money for institutional in...

This is a great thread. There are certainly benefits to living on-campus (I did, my wife didn't - and we both had good experiences), but the idea that college is a time to party and "find yourself" always seemed silly to me, even when I was 18. You can "find yourself" while study...

I thought previous studies had suggested that there was no increase in happiness after ~ $72K/year. How does one resolve these apparently different results? That isn't quite an accurate summary of earlier studies. There have been studies that found some aspects of happiness don't increase while oth...

I am asking here on the forums just in case there isn't something I'm missing or that I should check. Running it through some calculators it saves about $12k in interest over the life of the loan. The fee is included in the rate. If he wanted to pay the fee up front, he could probably get 2.5 or 2....

don't think you can guess what the home will be worth in 20 years In all of my analysis, I want to be on the conservative side. I basically assume that he home price has not changed and have never put the home price increase/decrease into consideration. Fortunately, based on the numbers you have pr...

I made a similar decision back in 2001, when I bought a car. I could have sold stock to pay cash for the car, but the tax bill on the stock sale would have been more than the interest I paid on the car loan. However, I put all of my spare cash towards the car loan rather than buying more stock, and...

My brother bought a Honda Civic from Enterprise in 2004, with relatively low miles. He told me it was about $2000 below Kelley blue book. I was surprised since you rarely saw Hondas in the rental car lots back then. At the time, my view was that he should avoid used rental cars, since they might hav...

If you are set on buying a house in the next few years, I would suggest: 1. Start contributing to your 401(k) next January. 2. Don't pay off the car loans yet; just keep making the payments. The interest rates are not very high, and having a cash buffer is important. 3. Use your monthly surplus to a...

When I started dating my now-wife, we were in our late 20s. She had -$30k in net assets, I had +$700k in net assets. To top it off, her family is well-off and mine has no money. She had considerable school loans and became a public school teacher. I worked all through school, started a business, the...

Another ridiculous thread. ... - we enjoy cooking at home, unfortunately, unlike most bogleheads, our culinary skills aren't refined enough yet that we can match the efforts of the best chefs in the world at home in our kitchen I don't think anybody is saying that; but plenty of bogleheads do prefe...

Agree with the consensus on this. It's a terrible idea, particularly because you're parents don't need the help. They need to sell their current home if they want to buy a new one. For some additional perspective, I did something similar to what everyone is advising you NOT to do. My parents didn't ...

OP - my wife and I are in our 30s, and I do a simple rough cut of just taking our current projected benefits and cutting them by 50%. I really have no idea what will happen, so that seems sufficiently conservative to me. However, you and your wife are 60, so I think your assumptions in the first pos...

Many of the responses seem more appropriate for a single 22-year-old than for a married 30-year-old. To answer OP, my advice would be to stick with delayed gratification, at least for awhile. If you are feeling the itch to spend a little more, then maybe (1) don't skimp on health - eat healthy food,...

It seems unanimous here, but just to add: I would imagine giving her, say, $10k that she can spend as she wishes for furnishings/home improvements would be received very, very gratefully, and it will be better for everyone involved vs. guaranteeing the home loan.

59 pages this year, down from a high of 82 in 2010. Next year, it will likely be longer. We use turbotax and e-file the federal but print and mail the state return.

Congrats on what appears to be a really strong, responsible personal financial situation. What jumps out to me is that you've got $100k in taxable. What's on the horizon for you? Marriage and kids, at some point in your 30s? Or is that not what you want? Do you want to buy a home, or are you happy r...

for a $600,000 house with a $500,000 mortgage, I would need at least $1,000,000 in liquid assets after the purchase to buy. So a max leverage of about 31% ($1.6m assets, $500k liabilites). Am I being too conservative? Not conservative enough? (Note: I still have about 20 to 25 working years left, s...

Another option would be to allow users to select "favorite" threads. Then we could check the favorites of certain people, or possibly search by which threads received the most favorites. However, I appreciate the simplicity and speed of the current bogleheads.org interface, and I defer to ...

Just addressing your first question, not the other family stuff you mention -- do you have any trustee/management responsibilities if they don't both die ? Before you say no to your good friend, run the numbers and see how likely (or unlikely) the scenario is that both parents die within X years. I ...

I think it's a great idea. Wish we could have done that! If you are happy to wait to buy, then that works out. We put down a big chunk of cash when buying our first home (more than 40%, and we're now over 60% equity), but we definitely needed the mortgage to get the home we wanted.

Note that some people, such as Taylor (and my wife and I), prefer to largely self-insure. Why pay for insurance (which has a profit component for the provider) if you don't need it, i.e., if you already have a cash buffer that would sufficiently address a particular scenario? Your sister may or may ...

Right now, you are in a good financial position, and it gets better every year as you save more. If you buy the house, you will be creating a lot of pressures on yourself. It could work out very well financially - even if you later move and rent the place to college kids - but there will be a lot of...

Many comments here about inspectors. Our inspector was fantastic. He prepared a detailed report, filled with color photos, and sent me a PDF within 48 hours of doing the walk-through. Now, 2.5 years later, we have had no problems that he did not mention in the inspection report. But let me state tha...

Your emergency fund may not be too outsized if you can't easily go into forbearance on the private loans in the case of a layoff.... Definitely take advantage of the 0.25% rate reduction for them all, and THEN just make EXTRA payments to the ONE LOAN you are targeting for elimination. I was going t...

It seems like you've thought this out well already, but a few questions: 1. When you say, "75/25 stocks/bonds with stocks split at 65/35 us/international," what are you talking about? Is that your savings, not counting cash reserve or retirement savings? Or does that include your retiremen...

+1 to BBL. Cake is the best, especially if they've never experienced chocolate or cake before.

Enjoy the waning days before your daughter becomes super-active -- and, inevitably for a time, acquisitive!

As I noted above, retirement projections have a tendency to change over time. For grins, I suggest everyone have a separate file for "assets and projections". In this file, place your annual list of assets and retirement projections. Keep this file in a very safe place. For max humor valu...

regarding the 4 million: Ultimately, my number is sort of a gut feeling. But there is some logic behind the gut feeling... -right now, I am busy working. When I am done working, I want to be busy playing. Playing costs money. When I am older, heck even now, I want to fly first class. I want to stay...

In sum, the rating agencies are for-profit companies, selected by the very entities that they are rating. No idea about the merits of the lawsuit, but it boggles my mind why anyone would ever trust credit ratings. It is scary that so many institutions still feature credit ratings in their investment...

I had 60/40 for quite some time and due to the fact that I recently paid off my mortgage, carry no debt and have been working at the same firm for 18 years so when my time comes I should get a decent monthly SS check. I remember Mr. Bogle recommended that you should include things like pensions and...

Agree with Hardknocker, of course you need at least one independent estimate for the remediation, but I wouldn't treat it as a deal-breaker. For what it's worth, we discovered some mold in a bathroom after we bought our house. The mold was on the drywall, under some wallpaper we tore off. It wasn't ...

Since you can sell your home and rent, I do not see the point of completely excluding home equity from an AA calculation. But practically speaking, how many people are going to do that? It is very inconvenient, to say the least. I prefer the model of living in my home and having an investment portf...

Congrats on buying a home with cash from taxable! This is an old and somewhat "agree-to-disagree" debate, but for what it's worth I take the opposite view of Call_Me_Op. Since you can sell your home and rent, I do not see the point of completely excluding home equity from an AA calculation...

Looking great. Fundamental question: what do you expect your expenses to be after you retire? If you have a 70% pension, and you currently save a ton, then you don't really need much in your IRAs/401k's/457s, right? That might be true even if you conservatively assume that your pension might get cut...

vacationer - congrats on the "child on the way." I would second Taylor's confirmation of your simple 50-20-30 allocation. You and your wife seem to be in good financial shape. I would not rush to make changes, but the basic advice you received above in this thread all seems good: (1) figur...

Anything I am overlooking? Note: I'm asking about what to do with cash, not inviting another discussion about using bonds, dividend stocks, etc. as an alternative to cash, or debating how much one should hold in cash FWIW. Thanks... What's wrong with EE Bonds? Not to answer for OP, but, like Grt2bO...

You're doing pretty well. Of course, since you asked, here's some advice: (1) If you would never move to Vegas, then don't buy a house in Vegas. Rental properties are a huge pain, and the profitability is far from certain (even if you get a great deal on the place), particularly when it needs to be ...

What factors impact foreign exchange rates? Why are you asking? The short answer is: many many many things. Off the top of my head: relative inflation rates, relative current account surpluses/deficits, relative interest rates, relative productivity, and - probably most importantly - the market's p...

We had Amazon Mom, and we bought Amazon Prime when it ran out. At first, it was worth it just for the discounted diapers and wipes. Once you factored in the "Subscribe and Save" discounts, there was nowhere cheaper. Since then, the prices have gone up a bit and the discounts have gone down...

Agree with neurosphere, although the wording "prior to June 30 of the current school year" in clause (B) makes this not 100% clear. Which June 30 are we talking about? Is the "current school year" defined / clarified somewhere else in the contract? If it's not clarified elsewhere...

- The year of the delivery -- 2011 - What kind of insurance did you have - very good PPO -- 100% coverage in network; co-pay not required for pregnancy visits after the first one - How much did insurance cover -- close to $40,000 from first prenatal visit until 4 weeks post-birth - How much did you ...

I'd say no, other than the obvious: 1. Per Dickens, "Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery." 2. If you were considering a job, but the tax impacts a...

In drawing conclusions for what will happen over a 30-year investment horizon, even 100 years of data doesn't tell us very much. You may say, "Well, data since 1871 is pretty impressive, and this is the best we can do." That is true, but we should still be humble in drawing conclusions. Wh...

When sailing the captain will fix his sights on the goal and then tack to adapt to the wind to "stay the course." +1. This is the gist of what a lot of people are saying. I wouldn't "abandon ship," but I certainly change course. You are 25. Okay, I assume you've read a bunch of ...

According to the Bogle method, presuming you're invested somewhere in the mid-risk range, approximately how many years are projected to double the size of the original investment? To answer this, you would need to know the future real rate of return for all assets in which you might invest. Nobody ...

I'm astonished that no one has mentioned the single most important asset in a financial calamity, even though it has been proven to reduce portfolio volatility even in relatively normal times. Okay, I'll bite: people are welcome to go out and buy a bunch of pounds of metal if the media has got them...

This is pretty close to the list I would go with, if I had to pick 10. But you could narrow that list down pretty quickly if you wanted to - e.g., just for personal finance purposes, Malkiel is probably unnecessary if you read Bogle; and Galbraith, Siegel, and Taleb are all strictly unnecessary if y...

Regardless of what you end up doing with the unit, you should pay close attention to the potential water damage in the kitchen area. See if there actually is water damage there and how extensive the damage is. Get that fixed ASAP, since it any structural damage could also affect the garage area. An...