Bogleheads.org

I see purchasing power as purchasing power whether it is dollars, pounds, euros, or yen. To me, currency diversification makes sense. For all those in favor of currency diversification, can you answer my pension plan hypothetical posted above? I already did. Was that in another thread, or did my an...

I see purchasing power as purchasing power whether it is dollars, pounds, euros, or yen. To me, currency diversification makes sense. For all those in favor of currency diversification, can you answer my pension plan hypothetical posted above? I already did. Was that in another thread, or did my an...

Anyone who already has international and is just now lowering it after a spell of underperformance has me worried.

http://i.imgur.com/BjGB9sS.jpg I am not suggesting anyone should be tilting toward international, but the US has had a nice run and these things do turn around now and again ... Buy, hold, rebalance, and don't trick yourself into thinking you're lowering your international allocation because you wa...

I apologize for the bump, but going over some home bias threads (much harder when your country constitutes 0.4% of the world's economy) I keep running into Noobvestor's excellent advice and flawless logic. I think he deserves some kind of prize :sharebeer That being said, another angle worth mentio...

Glad to be here! I remember when I was a kid. I had a box of baseball cards that I carried around with me everywhere. I had carefully notated how much each card was worth based on the high estimate provided by the price guide. I estimated that I had about $500 in cards. I was very proud of this num...

I had my checkup with a Vanguard CFP a few months ago. I went in completely open-minded. I listened to the 30% idea and asked for the data. So we looked over the report that was attached by OP. I have done research most of my adult life and am familiar with viewing data and interpretations. So look...

The fanatical replies and accusations by some on this topic indicate an emotional attachment or bias more than a rational decision. I'll leave it up to you to decide. Personally, I just go with a % that I can sleep at night with and not make a hasty decision if International either under or over re...

Thank you all for responding - I am going to accept the wisdom of the board on this one and concede I must be over-thinking things. I did also pick up a good idea here: perhaps I could add one small layer of security by separating out my Vanguard-connected email account (I can always forward from an...

IMO this whole topic is really a perfect illustration of various cognitive biases that even us Bogleheads (even Jack Bogle) can subscribe to: recency, localism, anchoring. Much of the argument in the paper, and on this thread, seems to amount to rationalizations of why in this case subscribing to s...

Looking to reduce yearly volatility at the expense of longer term gains, whilst providing a more emotionally comfortable ride, might not meet investment objectives. I think that was the stated objective of the PP. muted returns 3% to 4 % real with less deviation Which distils down to what I suggest...

I'm trying to see if anyone here knows better than the guy I just talked to, but here's my situation: I don't like Vanguard's security (for reasons already much-discussed on this forum) and want to put up some roadblocks to taking out money (as my VG accounts are for long-term investing - I don't ne...

Bill Gates: "[Bitcoin] is a techno tour de force." Charlie Munger: "I think it's rat poison." Warren Buffett: "I think either Charlie or Bill is right."

http://video.foxbusiness.com/v/2359385547001/

Question for anyone who is saying some variant of " I don't invest in asset classes with 0% expected return": Do you invest in bonds? Do you believe they have a real expected return (my napkin math suggests that most don't)? If the best predictor of future rates is current rates, the answe...

Probably no problems, but you have to decide what you'll do if they change the composition down the line (e.g. complicate it with international bonds, etc... or frustratingly change the glide path, as they've done before I believe). You will also *potentially* need to address taxation issues if/when...

I'm in the (perhaps rare?) camp that would consider it seriously, but does not actually employ it personally. Here are a few of my reasons, FWIW: 1) I want more return out of my portfolio than I would expect 25% in stocks to provide. I would thus *reconsider* it if I were looking for stability over ...

A risky investment means you don't have money when you need it. If someone needed all the money from their investment portfolio next year, they I wouldn't recommend the Vanguard High-Yield Corporate Bond fund either. What If you don't need all the money? Then it's a different risk.i With all due re...

vital, I am not sure I exactly understand your question, but: I would choose a target retirement fund with a date ten years later than your actual date. Keith Did you mean ten years earlier? They already skew toward risk by rule-of-thumb reckoning - ten years later would be extremely equity-heavy.

HSV is correct - I wasn't talking about his wife or kids' tickets - I was talking about how he worked for 3 weeks and vacationed for 4, but counted all 7 as a blogging business expense (despite it clearly not being his intention to travel there for business at all ...). I mean I'm really confused no...

find it incredibly ironic that we nit pick the authenticity of MMM's lifestyle, nitpick the transparencies in deciding if he's worthy whereas 99% of the people here are anonymous handles giving opinions, some authoritative, to all that ask. Perhaps each of us should reveal our expenses for the year...

Here is the article: http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/11/18/mustache-on-the-move-wintering-in-hawaii/ He went down to help someone he met online do home renovations. We could debate whether his trade work will wind up on his taxes, but I won't go there. What I do find interesting is that accordin...

@Noob - do you really think that person you quoted will act the way he thinks he will in 20-25 yrs from now? Don't you think he is at the very least on the right path by starting to save aggressively towards his goal? Oh it's not about what they do in 20-25 years based on this information - it's ab...

@DoubleDraw: you're right - I'm wrong about my search experiment because I was using the same browser without a cleared cache, and at least one of the results is indeed out of place if I use FireFox with a clean history. To be fair, you're the one who told me to just type it into Google, though I sh...

You're grasping at straws here. Using Alexa to confidently assert you know anything about his web traffic is a joke . Alexa gives a general idea, but you want to get more specific? Sure, let's do that. His Google PageRank is 5 - it's a log scale system from 1 to 10, as you probably know, so 5 is ex...

It appears to me that it's the "literal" readers of his blog that are either offended by him or may get into trouble because of him, but I suspect those readers (although vocal) are pretty few and far between. Many people coming to his site do so via search engines. His number one traffic...

Time flies ... I can't believe I last bumped this two years ago! Still one of the most useful bookmarks I have under 'financial' ...

From /r/financialindependence, a SubReddit he co-controls with some other similarly-minded bloggers: This is a place for people who want to become financially independent (FI), which means not having to work for money. Financial independence is closely related to early retirement (ER)--actually not ...

Anyhow, you're still missing the forest from the trees or the mustache from the whiskers, as another poster has aptly described. Maybe in your quest to save us from the dreadful and deceitful MMM, you've missed the purpose of his blog? No, that much is plain as day: he runs it to make money. And wh...

It's a shame people are programmed to believe that working a 9-5 corporate job for 40 years is what qualifies as a productive member of society. How do you get 'people are programmed to believe that working a 9-5 corporate job for 40 years is what qualifies as a productive member of society' from w...

This thread has been quite entertaining so to the OP thank you! I do enjoy MMM so I might be a bit bias in saying, but some of these detractors claiming he isn't "really" retired are hilarious. "HE ONCE PICKED UP A PENNY OFF THE FLOOR THATS NOT RETIRED" :oops: You call managing ...

A big shout out to all of you who took the time to respond, and your collective wisdom. Noobvestor hit the nail on the head when stating that I should get all in or all out with my gold. I had reached this conclusion on my own. In addition to this forum, I have spent time on the internet and readin...

I have a lot in taxable relative to tax-advantaged, and have the dividends go to a money market. It only helps so much (a few percent in dividends may not be able to keep up) but better that than not at all.

Noob, it seems you're set on creating division between BH and MMM users. It is entertaining to watch you cherry pick certain posts from the MMM link and post them over here to paint your little narrative. Haha, what naive fools over there! The general theme of that thread is that most value BH foru...

Second, participants in his forum have themselves confirmed what you can see there, or on /f/financialindependence on Reddit: yes, people are taking his dangerous numeric suggestions and running with them. Need examples? I'll link them for anyone who does. ... He actually says you can live forever ...

2. After reading MMM, I bought a bread machine. Couldn't be happier (though by this date I am not sure I've reached the pay-off point.) Now that I have started visiting MMM's web site, I noticed that he is advocating a no/low-carbohydrate diet, which makes a bread machine quite useless. Victoria I ...

Victoria: I agree with your assertions and reasoning essentially on all fronts. What has personally raised my own blood pressure a bit in this conversation is that MMM has long been quite defensive of his positions, for better, worse and whatever it is worth. But unlike many of the gurus found in th...

Oh good, now we're getting discussed on their forum - how meta! http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/forum/welcome-to-the-forum/lots-of-discussion-at-bogleheads-about-mmm/ From that thread (a poster titled Handlebar, so clearly some level of fan, and with 188 posts) - my bold: Look at how many people have...

Meh. A 4% withdraw rate isn't terrible advice. It's a starting point. You make adjustments along the way to your specific situation. If you're smart enough and savvy enough to save and invest your way to a $800K - $1M net worth in your 30's, you can certainly figure out how a very generic, non-spec...

Anyhow, not sure why I'm still wasting my time and energy defending him. People will always attempt to poke holes in the success stories of others, particularly those that make their successes public. It goes with the territory, and I'm sure he's developed a thick skin. You may or may not be oblivi...

Wow, his cult (sorry if my term for his 'fans' isn't as clever as his term for his critics) following is strong. Sure, you can call the readers of his blog a cult, so long as you're comfortable being labeled as a "cult" of Jack Bogle. didn't call his readers a cult, I called his fans (man...

The above posters have it right: no one here is taking issue with his advice to be frugal - we take issue with his misleading people into thinking luck is the same thing as skill, and that retirement means having a few hundred thousand in the bank and skipping health insurance (by my count he had ab...

Wow, his cult (sorry if my term for his 'fans' isn't as clever as his term for his critics) following is strong. So if I ran the numbers (which I did, based on his site and interviews of his elsewhere) and concluded for myself that they don't add up, what am I supposed to conclude? I see only two po...

One day, clearly bored, I pored over various interviews and blog posts of his. My conclusion was threefold: (1) he is lying - or, if not, he is confused about his finances. The numbers just didn't add up from one place to the next. (2) To the extent he is telling the truth, he had lucky break after ...

Thanks for the elaboration! It sounds to me like you still believe in the reasons to hold gold, but aren't comfortable with the amount. Now, I'm really going fully subjective here, but a rule of thumb I follow (and see others on Bogleheads mention) is that 5% is the smallest amount of a portfolio wo...

I am too much of a simpleton to understand the gold/silver/platinum markets. If I can not understand it in a plainly written paragraph, I must move on. Not sarcastic: can you really claim to understand stocks or bonds in a plainly-written paragraph? I'm going to attempt all three asset classes just...

I confess I can't answer your tax questions, but I would like to ask you a question in return: if it is 5% of your net worth, why the urge to sell? Is it the drop-off a week or so ago? Have you decided that gold has no place in your portfolio? There is no right or wrong answer here per se, I'm just ...

I also think if a couple serious competitors could tank the value of bitcoin, if people realized there really is no reason for bitcoin to be more expensive than something like litecoin or any other cryptocurrency that is capable of enacting the same things. The implementation is open source after a...

Hey now folks - let's not get carried away into fantasy land with these comparisons. Tulips are a real thing that have real value with real resource constraints. If by 'real value' you mean 'they look pretty' then I guess we have a pretty weak idea of 'real value.' If by resource constraints you mea...

Just because I like playing devil's advocate, maybe this most recent dip was the First Selloff. Perspective is everything I guess. I'm staying clear of it either way. Oh it absolutely could level out and rise again - I have no real idea. BUT, I do know there was a 'first sell off' already (this cou...

There are a lot of good threads on the historical diversification benefits of EDV/extended-duration treasuries. To summarize some wiser Bogleheads than myself: 1) Too much of it is probably a bad idea for anyone except someone matching a long-term nominal-dollar liability 2) Some, though, can be goo...