Bogleheads.org

The cost of insurance will increase with the insured's age. Unless the policy specifically has a no lapse guarantee you may eventually have to start paying more (possibly much more) than 200 a month to keep it in force.

I have used Netflix for a couple of years, streaming and DVD both, and will continue it. I can find the majority (but far from all) of the TV shows I want to watch on Netflix streaming, but only a small fraction of the movies I want are there. I suppose it depends on what stuff you want to watch. Of...

It's funny to see how automatically new, as well as some of the more experienced posters, simply assume that they will easily stay the course for 40+ years. I'd like to see some kind of study showing how often people really make changes to their portfolio. I'm definitely in favor of nisiprius' sugg...

I agree completely with discussing a real situation rather than abstract principles. That's why I didn't mention general rules like 'tilting is "not recommended for new investors"' but focused on the unique situation. Here's what I think about the real situation: 1) I of course agree that ...

That is incorrect, buying only small cap value alone is not "tilting", I didn't suggest buying only small value. I merely suggested that would be the only stock fund inside the 401K, and explicitly mentioned balancing it with other funds outside the plan so as not to have small value alon...

If I were in this plan I would just stick with the small value index and the inflation protected bond fund. There has been lots of debate on here whether tilting to small value is a good idea, but that is usually in the context of small value having slightly higher expenses. Here the small value fun...

Bonds certainly look like a bad deal today, but be careful what you do about it. The conditions that created today's outrageously low bond yields may persist for a long time. You don't want to end up doing the financial equivalent of trying to douse a fire with gasoline. As has been noted already, d...

Article does not say anything about "current yield". I guess they would not have that number until they'd actually start buying bonds. But without having that number, we don't know what is the potential "reward" is in "risk / reward" equation. For a SWAG I would guess ...

Are you allowed to make your own selections among the funds listedinstead of using the pre mixed lineup? If so you could get the costs much lower by using only the small and mid indexes. Your overall portfolio could then be balanced with other categories of investment in the non 401k accounts.

Is it possible to go to reduced paid up status in this situation? If so, is there any tax to be paid?

I don't know but perhpas someone here who knows about insurance could answer.

"Volatility depresses compound annual growth compared to what? " Compared to simple average return. Like I said, this all explained in Asset Allocation, 4th Ed. by Roger Gibson, Chapter 7. "The dampening of portfolio volatility in turn has a beneficial impact on the compound return o...

1. Bonds reduce volatility in the portfolio. That's important for risk, but also for another VERY KEY reason. Volatility depresses compound annual growth. It has been demonstrated that a portfolio with two asset classes can generate greater long term growth than the growth of either one of its cons...

I'm wondering whether the Permanent Portfolio would be more appropriate than an 80/20 stock/bond allocation. Incredibly, it seems to have done just as well as even a 100% stock portfolio over the past 30 years or so, despite the fact that it only holds 25% stocks... and yet it has done so with sign...

On April 29, 1983 (approximately 30 years ago), the S&P 500 hit a new closing high of 164.43. Buying an S&P 500 index fund then would have been a great choice. If you had bought the S&P 500 then (using the Vanguard 500 index fund) you would have multiplied your investment by a factor of ...

(The ideological sideshow is this: is there any reason why you need to consider anything other than the redemption value of I bonds? Is there some other concept of value that applies? The answer is: yes if and only if you know of some other way to get money in exchange for them and if you actually ...

If I were in this plan I would probably use the regular index (presumably S&P 500?) and also the mid cap index. I wouldn't use the bond fund in the 401K at all since there is plenty of room to buy bonds outside the 401K at much lower cost.

Whether a fund is typically quoted in USD or EUR doesn't make much difference (except possibly currency exchange and trading costs, which I would hope are minimal in this case). If the US stock prices (in USD) stay the same while the USD declines in value against EUR, the EUR value of the EUR denomi...

Folks; The additional expenses for the external manager is less than $1575 total fees for 5 years (0.07% x $450K x 5). There is no way I'd try to bulldoze my mother in law's opinions about the best place to put money for this little bit. And I'm 60 and have 30 years of investment experience. In the...

Not a full analysis, but some general observations: 1) It seems like a good idea to pay down the mortgage aggressively. The 4.625% in interest you can avoid paying is higher than the returns on safe investments these days. 2) You indicated wanting 60% in stocks. However, your current portfolio seems...

I've seen various people say there is a bond bubble but also lots of skepticism on this board. So I'd like to get some idea what the current view are, and perhaps more interestingly, when (if ever) the skeptics would change their minds. So please vote on this poll as to whether you believe we are in...

The regular IRA limit is separate from a 401K. However the SIMPLE IRA counts toward the 17500 elective contribution limit for 401K.

But Vanguard takes more risk to get that extra return! VIPSX has an average maturity of 9.4 years versus only 9.01 years for SCHP.

Does the guarantee value stop growing after 3 more years?

Do you still have to hold longer than that before you can start the guaranteed withdrawal?

There are local currency emerging market funds available now, but at least for US retail investors they are a recent innovation. A brief search finds that Vaneck EMLC and Wisdomtree ELD seem to be among the oldest and both opened in 2010. For USD bonds you could get Powershares PCY and iShares EMB b...

Certainly the mean number of variants generated (let's call the total space of variants V) would be V / 2 for the average specific case. Factoring a 512 bit number is sufficient to break 512 bit RSA. You don't need to search a space of 2^512 because you are looking for one factor, and once you've f...

But to give it a shot anyway: the only currently-known way of attacking public-key cryptography involves guessing every possible variant until one works. This is not quite correct. For instance, 512-bit RSA keys can be readily broken on today's computers. This isn't done by trying all 2^256 or so p...

Assuming he has only worked for one employer in the year, the employer should notice that he hit the limit and block contributions beyond the limit. But you never know -- they might screw up and put in more. The 457 contribution limit is separate from the limits for other types of accounts. However,...

If you want to see what really long term bonds can do, look at the EDV (extended duration treasury) ETF.

1. Agreed, but an overall investment strategy (one's portfolio of portfolios) should resemble a market portfolio, no? The super rich, excepted... The idea of a market portfolio being optimal for every investor requires it to be optimal for the super rich and optimal for the non super rich. If both ...

The phrase "Frontier markets" is a great piece of euphemistic marketing. (Makes me think of Disneyland, Davy Crockett, and the winning of the West, how about you?) If the neutral, objective term for "Emerging markets" is "less economically developed countries," what wo...

The point I keep trying to make is, shouldn't all index investors hold something actually resembling a market portfolio (in combination with short-term Treasuries in whatever ratio matches their individual risk preferences)? It's not unreasonable to disagree, but then you are pretty much necessaril...

That's just stocks and bonds, but it gives you a good idea. Isn't everyone vastly underholding bonds if they are nearly double the global market capitalization of stocks?? Rules of thumb like "your age in bonds" seem ludicrous to me as a result. Since the market capitalization is the tota...

If you want to invest in these at market weight the percentage should be very small indeed. From the data World Bank data at http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/CM.MKT.LCAP.CD/countries/1W?display=default these countries seem to add up to much less than 2% of world market cap -- and you would have t...

0% qualified dividends for FM 2012 http://us.ishares.com/content/en_us/repository/resource/2012_qdi_summary.pdf http://us.ishares.com/content/en_us/repository/resource/tax/2012_distribution_summary_information.pdf It looks like the total dividend amount was zero -- so it's not too much of a problem...

If in a taxable account series I savings bonds might be better (though unfortunately you can only buy 10000 a year, plus tax refund).

It's interesting that I see so many bond doom threads now while the stock market is at an all time high. In fact, I think I saw a 100% equity thread here recently. Curious... Bonds are also rather close to an all time high. That said, what worries me is not that interest rates might increase, but r...

Risk = probability of failure. 100% chance is riskier than 10% chance. "Failure" is not being able to achieve ALL the objectives of a retirement plan. You can choose to arbitrarily categorize them in terms of importance ("my cruise takes precedence over John's 529 plan"), but cl...

The stock market hit all time repeatedly highs in 1985 ... if you had bought after any of them you would have had over a decade of bull market ahead. Of course, maybe things won't turn out as well if you buy now -- but that would be the case regardless of all time highs. If I were in a high cost VAL...

No detailed plan here, but some things worth noting: Having a large portion of the portfolio in a handful of individual stocks gives you a lot of extra risk. If you haven't done so already, there should be a way to count the worthless stock as a loss on your taxes. I would not recommend rolling over...

The 5.75% load is money you have already lost. You might as well have taken out all the dollar bills in your wallet, shredded them, and then burned them until the ashes were unrecognizable. On the bright side you can save 1% a year or so in additional fees if you move out of them now. We can't tell ...

I know that Series I US Bonds will not go down in nominal value in the event of deflation. However, I want to be sure I correctly understand how they behave if both deflation and inflation occur during the holding period. For instance, suppose that (after accounting for the lag until new inflation v...

A further warning: the core iShares ETFs do have very low expense ratios, but unfortunately seem to have large bid ask spreads which could negate the cost advantage unless you hold a very long time. If I were in this plan I would probably just use the low cost international index from the default op...

can you provide the source that says junk (= speculative grade) bonds have the same risk and returns as 25% in small value and 75% in regular bonds? Here's an example saying they are similar to bond/stock combinations: http://www.bogleheads.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=18121 Though the stocks aren't c...

I know the merits high yields bonds have been argued a lot. I have read that high yield bonds are similar to something like 25% in stocks and 75% in regular bonds. If so it may point to a valuable use for high yield bonds. Let's start with the following hypothetical portfolio. Let's assume that our ...

If you're not looking to overweight small caps or emerging markets, I'd consider livesoft's suggestions. You could just use Fidelity Spartan Global ex-US (FSGDX), with a .10 ER as your sole international holding (replacing RERGX). It looks like ACWX is no longer available, but IXUS (ER of .16) is. ...

I too had hoped you were pulling an April Fools joke on us. The bottom line as presented is if I buy a 6 yr annuity and give them 100,000 dollars the worst result would be getting back 100,000 in 6 years.If the index goes up in some of those years I will make money.I will not lose money.It is diffic...

Without getting into the gory technical details, there are ways to share the workload such that one can essentially look at work previously done to minimize the work being done now. The end result is that each password is NOT tested in isolation. The current group is simultaneously tested and the w...

Money market fund regulations have already been tightened since the financial crisis. For instance, the average maturity must now be limited to 60 days versus 90 days before and the illiquid securities limit has been reduced from 10% to 5%. See http://www.sec.gov/news/press/2010/2010-14.htm for deta...

I'm glad that they're doing this. Though with computers becoming incredibly powerful, you can brute-force a lot of passwords per second. If you're cracking password hashes offline, 350 billion combinations per second . Now, this of course only applies if you've got the data stored locally. Looking ...

The current list straight from MSCI, along with a list of past changes, is available here:

http://www.msci.com/products/indices/market_classification.html