Bogleheads.org

Around 2000 or 2001, I heard someone interviewed on CNBC (can't remember for sure whether it was J. Bogle or not). When asked for his recommendations, he said, in effect, "the whole U.S. stock market is good; so you should own all of it." This statement haunted me, as it was so contrary to...

If you really plan to spend a lot of time there, you could ask a bank in Canada about opening an account there. I'm not aware of any prohibition on doing that. It would save you the trouble of conducting any exchanges at all during future visits. Other than that, it's been the consensus of the peopl...

Most discusion on this point focuses on which claiming age provides what is the actuarially optimal outcome, based on current interest rates. However, for my purposes, if the calculation were even close, and I had a reasonable financial cushion, I'd still wait to get the higher monthly payment. This...

Surely one problem with the annuity approach is that it includes a profit for the insurance company? You pay them that in exchange for eliminating the risk of running out of money (and swapping it for the risk of running out of insurance company, and the promise that your money will be used up when...

It appears that the annuity approach hasn't yet been tried. So I thought I'd give it a whirl, using the closest data I could find from the Elm Annuity site. I found the following ratios of lump sum to inflation adjusted annual income (using the inflation rider) for the following starting ages Starti...

Fire Calc says at $2.5 million portfolio and $80,000 per year spend for 50 years you will have a 100% success rate. I guess a lot of people in this thread are either overly pessimistic or don't trust Fire Calc. Either that, or "those people" subscribe to the bizarre view that past results...

I read some conflicting information and I just wanted to clear things up. I know that contributing to a roth 401k does not reduce federal taxes because the AGI is not lowered. Does contributing to a Roth 401k reduce the AGI for NJ State Income tax purposes? Thanks in Advance! No. I'm not aware of R...

How about we take the OP at his word and believe that he knows how much income he needs, since he is the one spending it? 80k is certainly reasonable for a family, even if they didn't have paid off house. The issue isn't whether $80K is enough to live on or not. I think that everyone here accepts t...

Honesty, I think it's a close call, too close for me to really be able to answer yes or no with a lot of confidence. For sake of simplicity, and to be conservative, in my own retirement calculations, I've assumed that my assets will simply match but not surpass inflation during retirement. There are...

That's some great information. I had blithely assumed that administrative expenses meant expense ratios. Thanks so much! Expense ratios would never be considered administrative expenses. For one thing, the mutual funds, and the 401K plan are usually run by separate companies, so there is no way for...

. . . what are the hidden fees that you didn't disclose when I first asked about hidden fees. +1 A related and more comprehensive question could simply be: what is the total of asset-based (i.e. AUM) fees assessed on participant assets per year? The sad part is that some sales people may not know t...

If you really have no options beyond those listed, I'd go with plan A.

If your employer is willing to consider further options, take a look at Employee Fiduciary's web site.

As the above poster said, you will likely get better responses on the various Canadian centered fora. However, I couldn't help but chime in. A brief internet search revealed numerous firms in Canada dedicated to helping Canadians living abroad which appear fully able to manage investments while thei...

I rented a condo from a couple that lived in China. Before they left for China, they verified with their bank that it would be ok for me to drop by the bank and pay my rent each month. I did that regularly for years. In my case, I deposited a check into their account. However, I see no reason why ca...

Did they ever get back to you? Yes they got back to me. There were no further fees. However, we were paying about 1% ERs and 1% in mortality fees (the unofficial jargon for which is a "wrap fee"). Going by the usual definition of the terms, our employer was also paying "all of the ad...

I want to ask good questions at the informational meeting coming up and I wanted some advice. I'm assuming that the expense ratios will be easy to learn. The questions I plan to ask are: - what are the separate account charges for each of the funds? - do any have 12b-1 fees? - how many funds underl...

As others have stated, you might want to consult someone at an SS office, or possibly an SSDI lawyer. I've seen many stories about people qualifying for SSDI - a program which has greatly increased in size in the last couple of decades - and I don't know that all of them were completely incapable of...

And it appears worse because he no longer has his nice steady job income to rely on. And he is fully functioning, there are no diagnosable signs of dementia etc. I would be grateful to hear any other useful thoughts that people may have... It does not seem fair that the law says that children can't...

From what I've read, for most of market history, most stocks have been controlled through active management. In this situation, since actively managed portfolios, cumulatively, ARE the market, they could not outperform it. If this changed, and most stocks were owned through index funds, and by total...

The above all makes sense. However, there is one disadvantage of Solo 401Ks I became aware of. Solo 401K plans are not eligible for the ERISA protection that other 401Ks benefit from. They are protected in case of bankruptcy. But, outside of bankruptcy, state law governs accessibility by creditors t...

Are you a contractor in the sense that your compensation will be reported on a 1099-MISC form? If so, you may the option of opening a Solo 401K account which would make your employer's 401K provider selection a moot point. This is worth checking out before you send any money to your employer's 401K ...

My wife's 401K does not charge the employees any fee's other than the standard ER's from the funds either. After a lot of looking I finally found a line in the materials that explicitly stated that administrative fee's were born by the employer. I may have to reverse myself here. I now recall that ...

Our employer uses Employee Fiduciary which is usually well geared for small employers. Whether there are other providers better suited for employers with only two employees, I don't know. If you search the forum, you should find the names of some other low-fee providers for small firms. I think the ...

But are you sure that their kickback on the ER ( which is the 12b-1 fee portion of the ER as I understand it) isn't enough? Because they don't much of anything in terms of management. I'm not sure that it's not enough. But that's the wrong question. The question is what can they get away with, and ...

We have no other administration fees or costs Are you sure about this? If true, your plan would be the first I'm aware of that charges nothing on top of the fund Expense Ratios. Our firm's plan is with a low-fee provider, widely considered on this forum to be the best option for small employers, an...

In the end, as Mr. Bogle has said over and over, GDP, dividends and Corporate profits will go up over time and that is the only aspect of the stock market that we trust. If indexing is the strategy in 20 years, would contributions and distributions with rebalancing by millions of indexers be enough...

Seems like the solution is incredibly simple. Just change the law so that everyone is entitled to shelter say $25,000 of income in whatever combination of vehicles they chose (401(k), IRA, ROTH etc.) . . . Then 401(k) advisors would actually have to COMPETE to keep people in their plans rather than...

I have no dispute with Mr. Milevsky's feelings toward SPIAs. Wade Pfau also favored using them to add solid safety flooring to a portfolio. However, I wonder if anyone else was struck by the degree of optimism regarding the expected real performance of 60/40 and 70/30 equity/income portfolios. If me...

Allan Roth's review I do need to point out, Frontline, that you neglected to include a very critical segment in your documentary -- the vital role that active managers play. Seriously, who do you think keeps markets efficient and allows us indexers to profit? Without the expensive active managers, ...

My 401k plan charges 1.6% on top of the ER of each fund. So to invest in an S&P 500 index fund in my plan costs me 2.2%. I'm considering whether to bring the high expense of our 401k up with management. We're a small consulting shop, currently numbering around 30 people - maybe they couldn't fi...

P.S. I have a quibble with the sound bite that says "You put up 100% of the capital, take 100% of the risk, and get 30% of the profit". The missing 70% was never there - it was taken in costs and likely consumed as income. But even granting that the fund managers took every dollar of fees...

The short answer is, yes, many people pay well above 0.4% in asset-under-management fees per year in their 401K accounts. If you call your provider and ask, you may find that there are fees other than the administrative fees. In the Bloomberg news investigation of this topic in 2009, they found a to...

The problem is that the entire process is opaque. The current plan was not selected through any sort of public process that generated minutes. We don't know what sort of alternatives were available. We don't know to what extent they tried to negotiate on fees. We don't even know if the whole proces...

If you have a poor 401k plan, quit, rollover to an IRA, and get a job with great 401k plan. Of course, have the new job all lined up ahead of time. One of the motivations for leaving my last employer was to do just this. Sometimes that's possible, and other times not. Some large employers have jobs...

A few years ago, some sort of retirement panel, which included Paul Volcker as I recall, recommended removing the very disparity you're asking about. I then saw David Wray - the 401K lobbyist - say that that idea was a non-starter. It is that because the 401K would lose its importance if people coul...

Am I the only one having a hard time feeling sorry for some of the people interviewed for this? For me, it's not a matter of not feeling sorry for them, it's a matter of regretting that the show mixed up separate matters that detracted from the fee issue. I saw at least three issues in the segment:...

Just learned something the other day. Social Security claims that based on life expectancy, no matter when you start taking SS$, everyone one of us, on average, will collect roughly the same number of dollars when they pass on. Do you buy this? If, by this you mean that, on average, one gets the sa...

It's good that some of the posters took a look at the web site, but it shouldn't be necessary to answer the question. Low-fee investing should be simple, transparent, and include mininal intermediation in between the investor and his/her stocks, bonds, and possibly SPIAs. When you ask about an advis...

The MS advisor has waived the yearly maintenance fee the account, as my mother was a long-time friend and client. I will have no costs/fees unless I utilize their services. As reluctant as I am to doubt the word of large-firm financial advisor, I notice that the language of the fee waiver is limite...

Does anyone agree with me that that is being a little reckless or is this expected by the guys who run the 401Ks for companies. It's more than a little reckless. And, yes, it's expected, but not just from people who run 401K plans, but by anyone who stands to benefit personally by moving you into i...

If it is a Group RRSP she may not have that option. Not sure how that works, but I think employers contribute to the Group RRSP in matching to the individual contribution? As I suspected, the employer cannot deprive an employee of the right to participate in an individual RRSP. One advantage of a g...

Having family in Canada, I have some familiarity with the investment system there. I'm not familiar with the company-based plans in general, and obviously not with the plan offered at your daughter's employer. Canada as a system called the Registered Retirement Savings Plan (RRSP) as one other poste...

My first preference would have been DOD & DOS schools, etc. - however, as I mentioned in the title, this is a second career, so if I need lots of retraining, it almost wouldn't make sense. I am open to refreshment training, but not starting over from scratch, at this point in my life. Also, the...

If you are looking for a place to teach English in Latin America, and if you can pull it off, my choice, hands down, would be Havana. Is it legal for Americans to teach in Cuba? I'm aware that there are exceptions to the travel ban for some purposes, but didn't know that teaching English was among ...

I've looked into teaching English abroad and came away with the conclusion that Asia was a better market for teachers than any place in Latin America. The reason seemed obvious to me, only after I read it at the linked paper below. It seems that Spanish already serves as the lingua franca for Spanis...

I hope, but am not sure, that the below answers at least part your question. I wanted to stop paying a fortune to Sprint on a Smartphone contract. I bought a pre-paid Verizon phone from Best Buy for about $40, went to a Verizon store, and had my Sprint phone number ported to the pre-paid phone. Ever...

As for indexes - "Are you referring to the NAV of a fund beating an index, or the total account value, with dividend reinvestment, beating the indexes." - Total account performance I didn't review your funds in detail, but did want to respond to the statement quoted above. You indicate th...

Simple question. I exceeded market returns relative to each index by a percent or two last year. I don't want to babysit the account. In brief, I think the fee is too high. Your statement about beating the indexes leaves a lot of variables open. Another poster asked which indexes you beat, and whet...

I don't have any specific company recommendations, but do have some warnings of things to be careful about. First, I'd extensively check out any moving company you intend to use. There are some bad characters in that business for some reason, including some who've jacked up prices after the move was...

I'll try to remember to watch it. I'm really glad to see that John Bogle is involved this time. I've love to see his capacity for bringing out change expand from the mutual fund business to the 401K industry. (Is there a Nobel prize for personal finance?) Reports like this make me hopeful that more ...