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We give money to our parents living in a foreign country each year for few thousand dollars. This year, we plan to give them $50,000 to cover their medical cost and other costs. We understand that we can gift $14,000 per person, per parent, per year, so we do not pay gift tax on this. (2 of us, to 2...

I did not read the whole thread.

I just want to let you know the cost that I paid 30 years ago to get our green cards (mine and wife), and it was $7,000 dollars. It was more than 1/4 of my annual income then.

We have two family members who work for the same megacorp, though only one 401K account got moved. Not sure what criteria that triggered this.
The lesson learned here is not to throw away garbage mails without checking, or delete all emails without reading, I guess.

The letter that I received does not say that I had requested or approved such action. It simply says "Please examine this statement carefully to confirm the changes made to your account are accurate." Then a table showing CHANGE OUT .... CHANGE IN ..... The change happened for sure. The re...

I noticed few days ago, "Managed" appeared under my account name in my Vanguard 401K. Then I received a letter of "Confirmation of Exchange". They changed my allocation, and moved around some funds. I called them today and found out, they moved my self-managed 401K to "Manag...

Suming, I am not even qualified for any investment recommendations, but a simple explanation for stock split is to look at a pizza. If you cut the pizza in half, you have 2 pieces, but the total volume (value) is still the same. This is the same as stock split. The value of each share is cut in half...

Suming, You don't mention kids' education fund, or if you have equity on those 2 rental properties. Unless your properties have large equity, or DH has inheritance coming from back home, with mid 6 figure (600K?) funds, you might need few more years to build up more retirement funds if you wish to w...

A friend with a young wife who never worked asked this. He plans to withdraw SS at the age of 70. His wife can take spousal benefit when she reaches 62 with discounted amount from his 1/2, or at 67 with all of his 1/2 amount. The question is: if he passes later in life, can the wife switch to surviv...

Schools pile on staff positions to be "relevant." UC San Diego has a Vice Chancellor for equity, diversity, and inclusion, a Chancellor’s Diversity Office, an associate vice chancellor for faculty equity, an assistant vice chancellor for diversity, graduate diversity coordinators, a staff...

My wife only took 3 months of leave for both of our children. We were also fortunate to have a baby sister who lives close by. She and her whole family took care of our 2 children nearly 12-14 hours a day for almost 12 years. We would drop off our children in the mornings, and pick them up late at n...

I am in the process of re-balancing my asset allocation and I like the income as well. I am thinking of Wellington(VWELX), Wellesley(VWINX), Vanguard Total Bond ETF(BND). Below is the 5 year performance graph from Yahoo. It looks like BND has outperformed the other two, in this period. What compelli...

ETFs also have expense ratio. Do they also get calculated the same way each night? Since ETFs are openly traded with bid/ask prices, when did they get adjusted to account for the reduction of expense ratio?

Congrats to you!!! As an aside: In the country, where I was born and grew up commas were placed as in the following examples-- 1 thousand would be written as 1,000 10 thousand as 10,000 Then things change -- 100 thousand as 1,00,000 1 million as 10,00,000 10 million as 1,00,00,000 commas are easier...

If you want to convert from a non-deductible IRA to a Roth IRA, you have to take the total IRA amount (non-deductible and deductible) into consideration when you convert. If you have a $10,000 IRA ($8,000 is deductible and $2,000 is non-deductible) you have to use the percentage of each in calculat...

My daughter is in 11th grade so we are one year right behind you. Our income and savings are very close to yours. We met with a consular who told us to file the form anyway. The reason is if both parents were to get laid off, the family will suddenly face a situation without income. That would chang...

My daughter is now 16 1/2. She will turn 18 in 2012 which is the same year for her college bound. We are in California and the age for UTMA maturity to turn over to beneficiary is 18. I am preparing for such event and have some very basic questions: 1. After the name transfer and liquidate mutual fu...

I am currently 54, and wife 49 years of age. Our 2009 tax year effective tax rate for federal is: 18.02%, and state (California) effective tax rate is: 9.6%. I used TurboTax software to do my taxes each year. Our total taxable Income was: $206,610, so kind of surprised that our federal tax rate was ...

Jury duty is very interesting and educational to me. I am in LA area so both my wife and I get called every other year. About 10 years ago, I was working for a public utility company and they allowed 10 paid jury duty days so when I got called, I tried my best to behave impartial and was selected as...