Bogleheads.org

Thanks all for the replies. I'm don't quite get the bond comparisons. If I don't invest in my mortgage, I'll put the money in my portfolio which is only 22% bonds. I hope this outperforms 2.4% after tax but who knows. Is the bond recommendation a way to play it safe. Would I not include that money i...

Rammer wrote:
I'd use your taxable account to maximize your tax-advantaged space...

I shouldn't have mentioned the tax advantage space since it was a little misleading.
I currently maximize my tax advantage space with my work income.

In the past I've been investing in my taxable account instead of prepaying my mortgage. With the current market and bond rates, I'm wondering if I should deplete my taxable account to pay down my mortgage. My current mortgage is $230,000 @ 3.5% (2.4% after tax), 29 years left My taxable account is ~...

I assume that the small $8000 balance indicates that the loans will be paid off in a few years anyway. If the loans have 40 months left, then spending $8000 to pay them off is equivalent to investing $200 in each of 40 CDs earning 2.4% after-tax with maturities from 1 to 40 months; a single 20-mont...

I have a $8k left on my student loans with an after-tax rate of 2.4%. I've been perfectly happy investing in taxable space instead of prepaying the loan. However, with todays stock market hitting an all time high and fixed income yields so low I'm now considering paying it off.

What would you do?

Lighting takes up a lot of energy. Have you switched to energy efficient bulbs?

http://michaelbluejay.com/electricity/lighting.html

sunnyday, At your age, with your goals of ER (and assuming very high savings rate), I would consider 100% stock portfolio. You can start adding bonds later, based on predetermined criteria, and/or you can work longer if necessary. If you like having bonds for lower volatility and rebalancing opport...

Thanks for the feedback Valuethinker. I think I'll stick with TBM for now and probably stay that way for a while (maybe forever). I have 29 years left on my mortgage so that is a bit of a hedge with inflation. I also have some money in i-bonds but it's part of my emergency and car fund so I don't in...

Thanks for the reply. I'll probably just keep things simple and stay with the Total Bond Market but am thinking about tilting more towards corporate because of Jack Bogle's comments from this post - http://www.bogleheads.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=115039 Does anyone know the difference betwe...

I've been investing since 2009 but never paid much attention to the fixed income portion of my portfolio. I like to keep things simple and would consider the Total Bond Market but am wondering if I should tilt to corporate bonds. I'm in my early 30's and hope to be financially independent in my 40's...

Even safer and better than the recommendation from the comic strip above is to just use Keepass for all things financial or requiring security, and max out all the password generation complexity for the given website. Yes, you're then tied to Keepass to logon to the website, but that's likely good ...

Here's a good article that I found about it - http://lifehacker.com/5966214/how-often ... -passwords

My work requires employees to change their passwords every six months. Is this good practice or overkill -- why or why not? Thanks to password management software, I use very strong passwords and they are all very different. However, I've had many of my passwords for over a year so I'm wondering if ...

I'm planning to get my mother a digital point and shoot camera for her birthday. She mostly just takes snap shots of people and will likely leave it in automatic mode so the camera doesn't need any bells and whistles. However, I would it like it to be easy to use and take great pictures of people. I...

I currently use Mint.com (just for my checking account and credit card) and a spreadsheet that I manually enter for all of my investments. I'd rather not have any passwords on a third party server so I'm thinking about switching to something like Quicken. I have a bunch of questions: 1. Do you use Q...

Say a single parent passes away and leaves everything for her 1 year old daughter. Everything includes $500,000 in cash and a house with $250,000 left on the mortgage. Can the daughter and legal guardian (and the family of the legal guardian) live in the house and make mortgage payments with the $50...

Thanks for the replies. Some great feedback. I'd like to learn RoR but I don't really have a hands on project that I can apply it to at work. Instead, I think I'll work on developing an ASP.NET Web API as someone suggested. This will give me experience with C#, models and controllers. Once I have de...

I'm a web developer and have been employed with the same company for the last 6 years. My main job responsibility is to maintain a very large website that was built with ASP.NET (vb.net + Web forms + stored procedures). I'm not actively looking for new work but I want to make sure I stay relevant wi...

I'm planning to reallocate some money from my Vanguard and Fidelity mutual funds. These funds have received dividends within the last 30 days. Will there be any fees associated with this if I sell the dividend portion of the fund?

My lawn has taken quite a beating over the years and is now quite patchy and dying. I live in North Carolina and have hard red clay for soil and lot of direct sunlight in the summer. I'm not looking to spend a lot of time on it but am going to see if I can bring it back and I have a few questions: 1...

My parents anniversary is coming up. Any one have some good gift ideas?

I would agree with your choice. On this thread is was pointed out that, even though the name of FTBFX sounds similar to the Vanguard TBM, ... Fidelity's fund is actively managed and includes high-yield/junk bonds. Good catch on FTBFX. I noticed that I aslo have Spartan® U.S. Bond Index Fund - Insti...

My 403b has two low cost bond funds to choose from: FIBIX (Spartan® Intermediate Treasury Bond Index Fund) .1% ER FTBFX (Fidelity Total Bond Fund) .45% ER Which one would chose? I don't really want to pay .45% on a bond fund so I'm leaning towards the Treasury bond fund but I'm not sure if my bond f...

I noticed that my Fidelity account has low ERs but it also has a management fee which is around .2% per index fund. The management fee is included in the expense ratio. What funds are you looking at? If you want a 3-fund portfolio as recommended in the wiki , then you might want FSTMX (total market...

I noticed that my Fidelity account has low ERs but it also has a management fee which is around .2% per index fund. They're also a 1% 90 day short term trading fee. What are all of the fees that Bogleheads should look for when choosing an index fund? Also, for the short term trading fee, is that onl...

Thanks retiredjg and livesoft for the great information. That's good to know

sunnyday, please clear this up a bit. Were you planning to hold half in the Spartan Fund and half in the Vanguard fund - both in the 401k? Or did you mean hold the Vanguard Fund in an account located at Vanguard and the Spartan Fund in an account located at Fidelity? Sorry for the confusion. I modi...

Great reply, thanks. I do need to use Fidelity as a custodian. A few of the international funds that I have to choose from in my 401k are: FSIIX .17% gross, .12% net Global EX US .28% gross, .18% net FPMAX .35% gross, .2% net Vanguard Total International Stock Index Fund Signal Shares (VTSGX) .18% g...

I'm planning to have about half of my international equity in FSIIX (Fidelity Spartan International Index) and the other half in VTIAX (Vanguard Total Intl Stock Index). Would you consider those two indexes well enough diversified, or would you recommend adding some emerging markets? I usually like ...

I underestimated my estimated payments and I owe a little over $1,000 on my taxes this year. Would it be better if I submit a late estimated payment or just pay the full balance when I submit my tax return? Or does it not matter?

What are all of the items that you will include for your 2012 taxes? Mine are: 1099's (4 different companies) W2 (both mine and my wife's) Interest Income from Credit Union Dividend Income from Vanguard Capital Loss from Vanguard Donations Student Loan Interest Mortgage Interest (x2- I refinanced in...

You may want to use a SEP IRA instead. It's simple, a lot less paper work and I believe you'll be able to contribute just about the same amount.

I'm a little fuzzy on the logistics of how FSA's work (specifically how money is added, deducted and when and what they can be used for). Say a husband and wife have a child on April 1, 2013. They both open up a flexible savings account on the same day and set it to $2,500. The wife's medical bill f...

I signed up for Netflix streaming but have been pretty disappointed with the movie selection and am likely going to cancel. What are your recommendations to stream? I'm interested in any genre except tv shows

I think it's fine to max it out early assuming you don't get a company match and are not planning to change jobs.

I don't see any US equities there. I could have been more clear with the question. What I meant to ask is, does the Bond fund cover the entire bond market, or does the Barclays Capital U.S. Aggregate Bond Index tilt in one direction (like short term bonds)? Does the international fund cover the ent...

A few index funds were just added to my 401k. Do the following funds cover the entire market or do they tilt too much in one direction? SSgA Total Bond Market Index Fund The SSgA U.S. Bond Index Fund (the "Fund") seeks an investment return that approximates as closely as practicable, befor...

Say you have $10,000 in a fidelity international fund and $10,000 in a fidelity bond fund. You transfered $1,000 from the international fund to the bond fund on 1/2/2013. 1 week later you want to transfer $5,000 from the bond fund to the international fund. Will this incur a short term trading fee?

Make sure that you are not doing this just because of recent performance ( i.e . Int'l ~ 2% better last year and over the last decade). In other words would you do the same if recent performance had been the opposite? I would do the same is the opposite was true. Did intl outperform US by 2% in the...

Wow, .95 since 2002 is even closer than I thought it would be. Thanks for the sender information.

I'm wondering how closely a US total stock mutual fund is to an all world ex US mutual fund. Does anyone know what the largest difference in annual or even quarterly performance has been in the last, say 10 years? I did a google search but didnt find what i was looking for - Are there any charts or ...

Thanks for the reply nyboglehead. I'm curious how others feel about lump summing vs dcaing an allocation change. If I'm set on the new allocation, I'm not sure if I understand the advantage of dcaing

I'm thinking about shifting 10% (of the portfolio) from her 401k to the international fund, 7% to the S&P 500 fund, 8% to the small / mid cap and exchanging all of his 457b to the Large cap index fund. That would give me the AA I'm looking for and would lower my expense ratios a bit. My main que...

I was just checking on things and my portfolio got a little out of line. I'm looking to transition from 33% international to 50%. Looking for advice on the best way to make the adjustments. Questions: 1. How should I bump up my international allocation to 50%? Should I do it all at once (shifting so...

From the S&P Website: http://www.standardandpoors.com/servlet/BlobServer?blobheadername3=MDT-Type&blobcol=urldata&blobtable=MungoBlobs&blobheadervalue2=inline%3B+filename%3Dfs-sp-500-ltr.pdf&blobheadername2=Content-Disposition&blobheadervalue1=application%2Fpdf&blobkey=i...

I have two decent US index funds for my 403b. One tracks the S&P 500 and the other tracks the Russell 2500. What would you recommend for an AA between the two? I'd like to shoot for at least a 70-20-10 large-mid-small breakdown but I'm also thinking about tilting a bit.

Thanks for the replies. I'm still undecided but if I do bump up my international, I'll probably spread the transition out over a couple of months. The Vanguard total world index is close to 50-50 US / Intl correct? So if you don't want a home country bias doesn't a 50-50 AA make sense? Here's an old...

I set my international allocation at 33% when I became a Boglehead but I'm now thinking about setting it to 50%. The reason being is that I feel having 67% US, all my bonds in US and my job, pension in the US is too much of home country bias. Has anyone done the same? Should I do it in one fell swoo...

1444.44

Thanks for the replies. The dishwasher is almost 7 years old and lower end. I talked to my wife and we decided to buy a new one (will probably get a Bosch) instead of paying a bunch to try to get it repaired.