Bogleheads.org

Any spots left?

Agreed. I've used them for mortgages, car loans, CDs, etc. But use a local credit union for my daily since I don't have a local branch of penfed.

I'm pretty impressed with this as a very basic primer to reminding young folks the importance of sensible choices.

http://www.funnyordie.com/videos/0b8581 ... bs-edition

Apparently, I'm out of the loop, because it is a promo for a show that happened in 2010.

sending you a PM now with a link.

In 2013 I will be a part year NC resident and part year PA resident. In the NC income tax instructions, it says: Line 46 - Contributions to NC College Savings Program: You may deduct up to $2,500 ($5,000 on a joint return) for contributions made during the taxable year to an account in the Parental ...

I'm no expert (even after Mike's book) -- but I believe there would be a gap there for her because I believe survivors benefits only pays for a child (<18) and a spounse caring for that child up until they are 16. (Unless it is a child with a disability.) So she'd have a SS gap until her retirement ...

Sure...I'll PM you a link. But let me play around with it a little bit more and make sure this logic all works.

I believe it is. My spreadsheet shows a yearly prediction for: Children's age, mom's age, dad's age, salary (which is 0 for 10 years or so while the kids are young), SS benefit, Yearly need -- all inflation adjusted PV of amount needed to cover need (brought back by a nominal return set in my assump...

Good thinking. I just ran the same scenario for me. I have 22 years left on my policy -- which puts me either with a new 1.5 mil 20 year or 1.5 mil 25 year. 655/yr for 20 yr. 1080/yr for 25 yrs. (Assuming preferred plus) What a difference that extra 5 years makes. Based on my cash flow calculations,...

Makes good sense. When I discount the potential cash flows of a potential insurance payout, an extra 500k definitely gives me some more breathing room. It's all about the "cost of living" and "inflation adjusted returns" that I set in my assumptions. The next 10-15 years are the ...

I'm curious to get feedback on this. My wife and I currently have 2 children with 1-2 more in the plans. We each carry 1 million term (3 years into a 25 year term) on each other. We're considering stacking another 10-15 year policy that would cover the time period where the kids are small and the su...

The idea that a 2 year old car has taken 30% depreciation has not been accurate over recent years. I actually just sold a great 2 year old car. We were moving and scaling down to 1 car. It was in beautiful shape, still under warranty, and only 25k miles. I bought new (for a great price) and paid 17,...

livesoft wrote:Hidden gems end up in the Wiki anyways, don't they?

Yes...but someone has to pick those. With voting, you crowdsource that and automatically find/sort the most valuable and interesting threads.

I'd be curious to hear their rationale. Seems like a very useful thing.

Often a post can have lots of posts/replies but not be valuable. Then there can be a hidden gem with only a few replies, but tons of value. What the forum needs really badly is the ability to up-vote. You see this on sites like Reddit.com and on forums like fatwallet.com. With that feature, it becom...

My opinion, for what its worth, is that you should buy a term policy not based on age, but on life stage. When you get married or have the first of several children, buy a 20-30 year policy that will get you to a point where the youngest (still unconceived) child will be an adult. So for me, I bough...

I've sold several on CL. You will get some spam emails asking for you to ship the car or offering your half your price. But other than that, I've gotten really good leads. I just sold our Camry about 3 weeks ago on CL. I got 3 appointments lined up on a Saturday and sold it to the first person who c...

Scottrade does them. I opened mine there.

You should definitely be familiar with the FINRA site. http://www.finra.org/Industry/Compliance/

I imagine I could except I would never make any money selling low cost index funds. I don't think financial advisers are required to be licensed, are they? Yes...they are. You have to have the appropriate licenses to sell securities, insurance, etc and be registered with FINRA. That being said...th...

MN Finance wrote:She'll train you to sleep on the sofa if you show her the title to your thread

Yeah....I just mentioned to her that I posted that to bogleheads...she sort of laughed and said "you did NOT!"
Definitely not dog house worth though. Its just a misdemeanor.

Last night my wife surprised me. I mentioned that I hated to sell a bunch of our kids' DVDs on craigslist for just $25. She said "Look at it this way, in 20 years, those DVDs will be worth nothing, but that $25 will have grown to $75." I couldn't help but laugh at that. She's using my own ...

To me, the easiest way to rebalance is with new money. As I have new money to deposit, I look at my allocation and see where the money needs to go to bring things back in line. To me, these little nudges one way or the other are much easier than making big changes at the end of the year.

Yes...the unbundling of channels will really make the pricing wacky. One of the key concepts is that some channels have to pay to be in the lineup. Others get paid to be there. So if I start a new cable channel, DanDanTV -- I'll have to pay the cable providers to bundle it. But that helps me gain an...

G-Money wrote:All (or almost all) of those are recommended/endorsed by the Mortgage Professor. http://mtgprofessor.com/

I second your recommendation of that site. Great info. Very helpful.

Wells Fargo and the likes (BoA, etc) are going to be the highest of all. You'll do much better shopping your rate at small banks, credit unions, and even mortgage brokers. Make yourself a list with the rate, the points/orig fees, and any promos like no closing costs. Then link to the rates page. Thi...

The student loans are tax deductible for you, so the after-tax rate is actually a little lower than the stated rate.
So assuming everything stays the same, pay down the car first.

But why not refinance the car for a much lower rate?

I use google voice through a Obihai device. The "aha!" moment came when I increased the priority (aka Qualities of Service) of the google voice packets. That took it from unusable to nearly perfect.

"Good" movies are totally in the eye of the beholder. Spend some time filling out your likes/dislikes on netflix. Also, go ahead and rate as many movies as you can on their site. The more you do that, the better they can recommend something for you. With over 50,000 streaming titles, there...

Don't think of it as inflation. Think of it as calorie reduction.

(But I agree....it is happening everywhere you turn. A box of cereal has about 3 bowls worth in it now.)

It totally depends on your preference and your childrens' needs. I wouldn't suggest cowboom though -- prices seem high compared to new. (And the affiliation with Best Buy is enough to turn me off.) If you want used, I would suggest craigslist. I've bought and sold a few laptops on craigslist at or a...

One way of looking at this (of many) is that with rates so low, you may get a higher selling price for your house than if/when rates are higher. SO, maybe if rates are higher when you buy that next house, you might pay less than if rates stay at these historic lows. In other words, do nothing to tr...

Near retirement wrote:Thanks Dan Dan. If there are specific resources (books, wikis) I would appreciate any leads.

Here you go:

Bogleheads wiki: http://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Main_Page

Bogleheads reading list: http://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Books:_R ... nd_Reviews

My wife and I are considering selling our house and living a few places before settling in again in a couple of years. (I work from home.) I hate to walk away from my 2.625% mortgage, so I was thinking about how I could hedge for the couple of years until we buy a new house. After thinking about it,...

The first year is the hardest -- it requires a lot of getting things setup correctly, moving accounts, consolidating, changing beneficiaries, getting allocations set correctly, etc. If you figure $150-$200 / hour that rate sounds about right (Assuming you don't have a completely simple situation.) O...

pochax wrote:i use this one from amazon and it works just fine.
http://www.amazon.com/Ultra-High-Perfor ... pd_cp_pc_0

Yep, that's the one I have too. No issues.

It absolutely makes sense IF you have the cash to pay the taxes. We did exactly that when I had a year off. If you really want to push it to the brink, you can convert a bunch of money, then when you file your taxes figure out exactly where the break point is that pushes you into the next bracket an...

You have the HP 12c camp and you have the HP 10bii camp. Personally I like the 10bii. It's the little engine that could.
Inexpensive, easy to learn, and fairly intuitive. It got me through CFP school and the CFP exam.

We were where you are 1 year ago exactly. We had a Camry and decided that a minivan would easier in so many respects -- one of which was ease of getting kids in and out. We ended up buying a Toyota Sienna and love it. Here are some benefits. Easier getting kids in and out. Keep a little potty in the...

I would use it for sure.
At first I would use it as a double check of my current software. Once the open source software became mature, I would likely convert.

The tricky part is that tax law is constantly changing and is time sensitive. Neither lends itself well to open source.

Page Plus has a 1200 minute + 250MB data + 3000 texts for $29.99. Hard to beat that deal.

Also worth noting is that Page Plus works on the verizon network and with most verizon phones. I bought a Droid X on ebay for $70 that I converted to page plus in about 5 minutes.

I agree. I had the same conversation with Vanguard last week. Congress has been threatening to cut out Coverdell ESAs for years, so I guess Vanguard just doesn't want the hassle. Scottrade told me they do them -- so I'm setting mine up there. My plan is to put in $2000 for 2012 and $2000 for 2013 fo...

Wow, that is very interesting. I always get my prescrip from my eye doctor -- no problem.
The last few times I've ordered, I've gotten the best price at lens.com (I wear Air Optix Night&Day). You enter in the prescrip online, and they call your doctor to verify.
Maybe that would work for you.

How far are you off. Now that we are in 2013, it should be easy to fix by contributing to your 401k and Roth this year and putting in bonds.

Based on my allocation, I should have hit about 14%.


But with dollar cost averaging over the year, XIRR shows an actual return of 15.23%.
Fantastic year!

Depends on what she wants to do. Does she need her own domain? Does she have some tech skill to be the admin? If she wants easy, the easiest thing is to pay for a blog at wordpress.com. If she is willing to learn and do a few techie things, there are tons of tutorials on youtube to show you how to i...

Given the waiting period before benefits kick in, she may be better off to just try to save $50/month or so to help fund a future funeral. After that 2 year period, she would already have $1200.

My wife and I are considering doing something a little unconventional. We're considering selling (or potentially renting out) our house and having several short-term (6 month-ish) living experiences around the country. I won't have any problem working remotely. Does anyone know how this would work f...

For an hourly planner, the going rate is about $150-$250/hour.
Depending on how much money you have and how much advice you need, that can come out significantly cheaper than paying a 1% "Assets Under Management" fee.

Oddly enough, ESA was not an option when I tried to open it on Vanguard's site. I called them and they said they have stopped doing them.
So I'm setting up at Scottrade instead.