Bogleheads

From what I could gather from reading the article, Ben Stein is telling us to:
1. Not rely on forecasters,
2. Keep a hefty supply of low risk, liquid funds on hand for lean times,
3. Keep a diversi ...

The company that owns freescore that Ben Stein shills for was recently cited in a Congressional report as one of the three sleaziest internet marketing companies in the country.

http://commerce.sen ...

Justice prevails.
Not unless the brokers do jail time. If I rob a bank, get caught and pay back the money, do I walk free?

Since brokers rarely get caught and the worst that can happen is paying ...

Let me take a different approach to all of this. Take the notion of house and tax out of the equation. The following is true:

1. Owning something offers a higher expected return than renting some ...

I should have been more clear as livesoft pointed out. The annual exclusion of $13,000 requires no tax and no reporting.

The lifetime exclusion of $1 million requires no tax but does require an in ...

All of those are gifts so they are all subject to the gift tax laws, but there are some options to consider. First, your spouse can gift another $13,000 annually. Second, both you and your spouse ca ...

The only thing B shares have less of are voting rights, but who cares anyway.It can matter. Wang Laboratories had Class B and Class C shares, Class B having 1/10th the voting rights of Class C. The tw ...

The part which is hard for me to wrap my brain around is how Buffett could make a comment like:

'current shareholders will not suffer any diminution in per-share intrinic value, no matter how many ...

Bubble memory! Back in the 1970s that technology was constantly being touted as the Next Big Thing.
At Bell Labs, magnetic bubble memory led to charge bubble memory which became the charge-coupled de ...

BRK.B is not necessarily tied to any intrinsic value in the assets of the company, while BRK.A *is* tied to the underlying value of the assets of the company.
That is nonsense. The bylaws of the c ...

I believe Mr. Buffet may have his own reasons for disparaging the B shares, if what you wrote is true. Certainly, if all of my net worth was locked away in one security, I would like to make that ...

Buying BRK.B is not A good deal. Compare the 15 yr return of BRK.A vs BRK.B. The difference is significant. Buffett himself says BRK.B is not worth buying (in "The Snowball" the authorize ...

Here are a couple of older newsletters from Bill Gross at Pimco. He obviously felt that CPI understates real inflation and he makes a pretty good argument.

http://www.pimco.com/LeftNav/Featured+Ma ...

The CPI calculations are done by career economists at the BLS, not by political appointees. All of the figures they use in their calculations, long tables of data and all of the formulas they use are ...

And good luck with that when medicare reimbursements are scheduled to be cut by 21% in 2010.
Medicare reimbursement rates are based by law on the 1997 "sustainability growth rate" formula. ...

Net effect is another tax on the 'rich'
Actually you have it exactly backwards. Regular muni bonds have been a subsidy to the rich. Because the tax deduction of regular munis benefit the rich you h ...

I do not believe Buffet when he says the BNSF is a bet on the US Economy. Indeed, the BNSF network is West - East and specifically designed to move goods made in Asia into the United States.

So, th ...

Maybe I am off base, but I seriously have to wonder if that expense of adding a "Cancel" box to a "View Pending Order" page might actually cost less than fielding all those many ...

Google's spiders are constantly crawling this site. They retrieve around 3 pages per second and make up over 10% of our total traffic. All the rest of the search engines put together are less than 2% ...

I know there are different versions around, and I have to say I find ones like this to be quite lacking. It has 8 "classes" yet 6 of them are U.S. stocks and a 7th is EAFE stocks? I look a ...

Where Fama really goes off the rails is in his defense of financial innovation.
But suppose we buy into the more common negative current view of finance. There is still a big open question. Beginning ...

Google up the "periodic table of investment returns. You'll find the Callan table. You can remember the google terms because it looks somewhat like the periodic table of elements from chemistr ...

I loaned my son more than $13000 this year. I did a wire transfer from my account direct to his. The bank person said they would have to report it to the IRS for gift tax purposes. So, are you sayi ...

[url=http://tinyurl.com/yfocqy5]200 metric tons of gold is a cube about 7.2 feet on a side.

If your income is below the Roth conversion limits, a SEP allows the choice of either tax deferred or tax free investing. You can convert a SEP to a Roth at any time.

Bogle, who filed a brief supporting the Oakmark investors, says mutual fund shareholders are being overcharged with fees that seem low when expressed as percentages yet add up to a multibillion-dollar ...

The UK has imposed a stamp duty of 0.5% on stock transactions for years. Since the UK is 16% of the Total International Fund and Brazil is only 3.6% of the fund, the UK tax actually costs the fund mo ...

So how can the IRS say you have to charge interest?
They're not saying you have to charge interest, only that there's a tax consequence associated with the money transfer if you don't.
So how do you ...

One thing I really know not to do is get a spare battery to have sitting around for the eventual needs down the road....it will be dying in the box!
That is probably the most important point of the d ...

No reporting unless the transfer involves cash currency. It's called a Currency Transaction Report.

Opening up two accounts to break a transaction into smaller pieces to avoid scrutiny could be in ...

Insurance companies use your FICO score as one factor for insurance rates, but I don't know if paying off a mortgage increases or decreases your score. Having no debt can actually lower your score si ...

The dealer is probably getting a bonus from Toyota Financial for steering customers into a loan. They are hoping to make up the difference in interest on the back end. Of course if you pay it off at ...

The internal battery charger has a complex algorithm that keeps track of power in and out of the battery, its voltage, resistance, temperature and state of charge. If you remove the battery, the algo ...

I guess that what I am wondering about is this.....if the AC charge can shorten battery life so greatly, why is there not a switch (either hardwired or software activated), that will disable the charg ...

I don't quite follow the logic of:

We teach geography. Some students can't find Iraq on a map.

We teach mathematics. Some students can't do division.

We teach sex ed. Some students get pre ...

I guess that what I am wondering about is this.....if the AC charge can shorten battery life so greatly, why is there not a switch (either hardwired or software activated), that will disable the charg ...

I enjoy listening to NPR programming just about everyday; I just don't like being told that they are a commercial-free "public" station when they clearly are not.
Commercial TV has about 19 ...

If 401k providers do not have to compete for your money they will use every trick in the book to separate you from your money.
I think you have the case backwards. The complaint is that Harris Assoc ...

I think since brazil is charging me a load for investing in brazil via emerging, the US should charge brazilians the same load for investing in the US.
Perhaps you should start first by complaining a ...

A 3.5 percent annual GDP growth rate is better than nothing but it's not much comfort to the unemployed.

[url=http://www.kansascityfed.org/Publicat/ECONREV/PDF/4q07Knotek.pdf]Okun's Law describes ...

The flu vaccine each year is a guess as to which strains will be predominant come Winter. Some years they guess well, and some years they don't.

Why don't they just put all the strains in there? ...

I'd love to know what those numbers are, right now, in my town.
The CDC gives regional data which probably the best you are going to get.

http://www.cdc.gov/flu/weekly/index.htm#whomap

CBS had an article the other day showing that estimates of H1N1 cases were wildly off. They looked at lab results for cases where people were diagnosed with H1N1, and in most states only 1-2% of thos ...

What I read does not contradict what you say, but it made it sound like the Fed actually would create the money for the bank. That is, if you opened a bank with $10 reserves and found someone willing ...

I have an insurance plan from my employer. The plan charges a premium, and part of the benefit is an HSA contribution. For policyholders ineligible for an HSA, the plan will fund an HRA. The HRA be ...

believe it or not, many people actually manage a happy retirement without $1-2M and a 4% SWR. maybe they do their own pool maintenance.
Half of all seniors would be in poverty without social securit ...

I read a while back about how money is "created" in the US (and probably many other countries). Basically, it said that if $10 is deposited into a bank, the bank can turn around and lend, li ...

I read a while back about how money is "created" in the US (and probably many other countries). Basically, it said that if $10 is deposited into a bank, the bank can turn around and lend, li ...

Warren Buffett said:
I realized technical analysis didn't work when I turned the charts upside down and didn't get a different answer.
He also said:
If past history was all there was to the game, ...

Check whether the HDHP offers a Health Reimbursement Agreement (HRA) for policyholders who are ineligible for an HSA. This is not an account; rather, the HDHP will fund the HRA itself, pay bills from ...