Bogleheads.org

To complicate matters, in a wash sale the amount of the loss (which you can't take on your taxes) is added to the cost basis of the lot of the security you bought that triggered the wash sale. Example:

Lot 1: 100 shares XYZ

Shares from Lot 1 are sold at a loss and Lot 2 of XYZ is purchased less than 30 days later.

The amount of the loss on Lot 1 is added to the cost basis of Lot 2.

If you want to keep things simple, just wait the 30 days.

Lucky Pierre, as a TD Ameritrade client I have free Gainskeeper which does all the wash-sale accounting for you. You can download a report either with or without wash-sale adjustments.

I asked a TD Ameritrade rep if Gainskeeper will still be available when we get Schwab accounts. He didn't know.

billfromct wrote: ↑Tue Feb 07, 2023 2:09 pm According to Portfolio Visualizer, below are the average annual returns of JEPI (which started June 2020), Vanguard Dividend Growth Fund & Vanguard S&P 500 Index from June 2020 through January 2023:

-JEPI: 12.85%
-Vanguard Dividend Growth: 14.18%
-Vanguard S&P 500 Index: 13.28%

Maybe the Vanguard Dividend Growth Fund ain’t so bad after all.

bill

JEPI probably does a lot worse on an after-tax basis.

It bears repeating: covered-call funds and the like are lousy growth vehicles.

I would pay for ESPN via an uncompressed 4K picture over OTA than via the Internet or cable, where the stream is compressed. 4K uncompressed will never happen over the air. First, OTA stations are never going to get more than 6 MHz of bandwidth where a 4K uncompressed picture won't fit. Second, OTA channels are packed so tightly now with digital subchannels which broadcast endless commercials for reverse mortgages and Medicare Advantage plans. H.266 is the next step in video compression and I don't know if there are stations/networks broadcasting in H.266 and if there are consumer receivers which can handle H.266. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Versatile_Video_Coding OTA HD is still MPEG-2. Unlike Google and Firefox, broadcasters can't snea...

I got some gluten-free biscuit mix and made some biscuits with it. They turned out to be surprisingly good!

I added a small quantity of Crisco to the dough. The biscuits had a nice texture and mouth feel, not at all crumbly. I think the flavor would have been improved by adding a very small quantity of salt. They didn't brown like wheat flour would, but that might have been baker error (took them out of the oven too soon).

I am not gluten intolerant and don't have celiac, but am trying gluten-free to see if it improves some symptoms I am having.

I love biscuits and like these gluten-free biscuits better than the Pillsbury biscuits that come in a cardboard tube that pops open.

What would you get back after withdrawing 10% per year from BND?

Withdraw dividends as they are paid or withdraw principal?

the local NBC affiliate switched on DRM (encryption) on its ATSC 3.0 signal last month. And then consumer ATSC 3.0 tuners could no longer decode the HD signal (SD signal still fine) Is the SD picture 16:9 or 4:3? Is it an SD version of the main channel or one of the subchannels like Buzzr? As long as I'm getting a stable, watchable picture in the correct aspect ratio I'm happy. I don't need to feel like I'm at the baseball stadium and I sure as shootin' don't need an 8-foot-tall Tucker Carlson. Many of the shows on the digital subchannels were produced in 4:3 and that's how I want to view them, no have them forced to 16:9. I want to see exactly what the director saw. I actually worked on a few of the shows that air today on Buzzr, 40 years...

Your money is out of your hands the same way it's out of your hands in the other investments you stated where you hand over your money and get a return (maybe).

My point was that with a MYGA or a CD your money is locked away for several years; early withdrawal involves a substantial penalty — do I have that right?

With BND or TIP all you have to do is sell your shares, no penalty other than taxes.

I once specifically asked on this board what the preferred kind of annuity is. The answer was overwhelmingly SPIA, not MYGA. A SPIA offers lifetime income if that's what you're after. Both offer a locked-in, guaranteed rate, right?

The difference is the MYGA is a guaranteed return (CD like) in the range of 5% currently with zero interest rate risk and do not have yields that fluctuate.

Why do so many bogleheads recommend SPIA's, not MYGA's?

As of today, 2/6/2023:

BND Yield: 2.51%

https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/BND?p=B ... c=fin-srch

TIP Yield: 6.96%

https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/TIP?p=T ... c=fin-srch

CAGR 4/20/2007 to 2/6/2023, dividends reinvested:

BND: 2.9%

TIP: 3.4%

Dividends not reinvested:

BND: -0.2%

TIP: 0.4%

If it were my decision I would go with TIP.

With shares of either BND or TIP, the shares are in your hands.

With an annuity, the money is out of your hands.

It appears that in 2021, revenue for SS coming from payroll taxes, interest from trust fund, and from taxation of benefits covered outflows. This means that there was no depletion of the trust fund in 2021.

That's good to hear I suppose, but all I ever hear about ss is "insolvent after 2034" and "20% benefit cuts". Can you blame people for being worried?

That was the situation in 2021. Then in 2022 inflation reared its ugly head in a big way.

When I can no longer watch CNN or Lawrence O'Donnell on MSNBC will I consider getting an ATSC 3 TV set, and not before.

Right now, plan on SS dropping to 78% of current benefits in 2034 or so. That's the official current projection by the official SSA statement

Nothing is etched in stone at this point and 2034 is 11 years off, during which time anything can happen. There are many schemes for "fixing" ss floating around Washington which we are not allowed to discuss on this board.

I have always felt that the very existence of ss long term is not 100% certain and so have planned accordingly.

The picture may be gorgeous but the content will still be mediocre.

I don't need an 8-foot tall Tucker Carlson in my TV room.

I have two non-political questions about social security (OASDI). According to this page:

https://www.ssa.gov/news/press/factshee ... 20percent.

In 2021, $980.06 billion (90.1 percent) of total Old-Age and Survivors Insurance and Disability Insurance income came from payroll taxes. The remainder was provided by interest earnings $70.1 billion (6.4 percent) and revenue from taxation of OASDI benefits $37.6 billion (3.4 percent).

My questions are: 1) where does the money come from to pay this $70.1 bln interest, and 2) what is the interest rate at which this money is paid?

Thank you.

Five years old is too young. That's kindergarten age. We didn't start reading until first grade (age 6) and it was on the "see Dick run" level.

We started learning arithmetic in second grade (age 7, 1962 for me). There was a number line with zero at the center and positive and negative numbers going in either direction. I don't think we even got to multiplication in 3rd or 4th grade when we had to memorize our "times tables".

mortfree wrote: ↑Thu Feb 02, 2023 8:34 pm 25.82 is showing as the After Hours price

Where are you getting the after-hours price?

As I write this, the market has been closed for over five hours, so things have presumably settled down. I'm getting different prices for the same security from different on-line sources. Google Finance and Yahoo! Finance give me a quote of 26.91 for TQQQ. My brokerage, TD Ameritrade, quotes 25.82 as the "Last" price. This includes ThinkOrSwim. To add to the confusion, the fund company, ProShares, gives a price of 26.98. I can understand a few pennies' difference in the prices, but this is $1.09. My dilemma is not so much why the difference in prices, but which one do I trust? Which is most likely to be correct? I checked and found some differences in the closing price of QQQ, but the prices of QLD agree. Can anyone shed some ligh...

Replace the S&P 500 selection committee with ChatGPT?

Made in the shade

As of today I was able to update TaxAct under Wine, at least it says it's updated. I had to download an update .exe file for my version from the TaxAct web site. The update program ran OK, but when I try to run the main TaxAct program it crashes.

Can't win 'em all.

I like the easy way TaxAct accepts data from the user. There is a program, Online Taxes, but its data entry is pretty fiddly compared to TaxAct.

www.olt.com

You can take care of a lot of that with EFTPS. You can schedule up to 4 payments in advance and they go off like clockwork without your having to do anything.

https://www.eftps.gov/eftps/

I am also tinkering with ReactOS which is a Windows clone. Crude, but interesting. How is ReactOS doing these days? I was following it a few years ago. They had to pause development for a long time because some copyrighted code supposedly snuck in. The last time I tried it, it wasn't very functional and a lot of stuff was broken. Development seems to move at a glacial pace. I may yet give it another look. A Windows work-alike without all the telemetry, spyware and advertising would be wonderful, and one which doesn't require the purchase of new hardware as Windows 11 does. Linux has web browsers and an office suite which run natively and make Linux functional for everyday use. Tax preparation software (Tax Act) sort-of runs with Wine but i...

What's wrong with watching TV? There's plenty of drama in Washington, D.C. on both sides of the aisle, better than any scripted soap opera, and several networks that cover it 24 hours per day.

Also, there's Bogleheads and watching the market. The latter violates Bogle's "no peeking" rule.

While I wasn't looking things went back to normal. Now I'm seeing a green "mountain" for securities that are up. Somebody must have noticed and they fixed it. And I'm having a good day

On the subject of Yahoo! Finance, it used to be that to get real-time quotes it was a big deal and you had to sign agreements with your brokerage. Now I have Yahoo! Finance, Google Sheets and ThinkOrSwim all giving me what appear to be near-real-time quotes. What changed?

It looks like the graps are based on the opening price, as opposed to the last closing price. If the current stock price is higher than than opening price, the graph is green, and if the current price is lower than the opening price, the graph is red. I agree that this is confusing. Confusing indeed. Customarily the financial press reports "up" or "down" relative to the prior day's close. I think now it is reversed from the way it used to be, i.e. relative to the prior day's close. The odd thing is, above the graph it prints the price in black and the day's gain/loss in dollars and cents followed by the day's gain/loss as a percentage. The textual display of gain in dollars/cents and percentage is the way I think it sho...

Heads up! As of Wednesday, 1/25/2023 I'm noticing some weirdness in Yahoo! Finance. When you enter a ticker symbol you get a summary of the underlying security with a little graph which shows the day's price action. When the price of the underlying is up the graph is supposed to be green; when the price is down the graph is supposed to be red. As of yesterday it's been backwards: "up" is red and "down" is green. This could confuse people. https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/%5ESPX?p=^SPX&.tsrc=fin-srch I also came across a security with a gain of exactly $0.00, but the percentage display on Yahoo! Finance showed it was up by a small percentage. Actionable part: it looks like the programmers at Yahoo! Finance have been fo...

Thank you all for the valuable advice. I am preparing a for a discussion at our next board meeting, which will touch on: Discussion on Vanguard's LifeStrategy Conservative Growth, which might be ideal So if you pitch this particular fund (nothing wrong with it per se) you should be aware of the kinds of losses that are possible in bad times with a 40/60 allocation. the losses for a 40/60 portfolio last year would have been around -19% the losses for a 40/60 portfolio during the Great Recession were -19% source: https://www.bogleheads.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=7073838#p7073838 Just know the risks, that's all. If the board is ok with declines of 1/5th of the portfolio ($200,000 loss out of $1 million), ok. They need to be ok seeing the $1 mi...

Not my worst fear, but high on the list is that my social-security benefits will be drastically reduced.

This is starting to sound less like a synagogue and more like General Motors.

Maybe Warren Buffett could buy some shares?

I fixed the problem with TaxAct importing Gainskeeper files downloaded from TD Ameritrade.

I had to perform some surgery on the downloaded xls file. I deleted the rightmost two columns labeled "Box" and "Gain/Loss". This fixed it. The .xls file is then saved as a .csv file. Only the page in the .xls file that contains the actual transactions should be saved. There are a couple of other pages that don't get saved.

I struggled for hours trying to get TradeLog to import my data and ultimately had no success and gave up. It kept throwing error messages.

They may want to simply keep it all in a Treasury money market fund or other similar investment with no risk to principal. Even a three fund portfolio with 20% equities could result in a 10% drop and some will say "what happened to that $150,000!?!?" ^^^This.^^^ If a three-fund portfolio dropped 10% ($150,000), would you or the advisor be legally liable for allegedly mismanaging the funds? They could come after you for taking imprudent risks with the funds. Even if they didn't prevail at trial they could still make trouble for you. We live in a litigious society now so don't dismiss that eventuality. Stop and think what an advisor is going to do for you besides suck up his/her fee, i.e. what is he/she going to do to earn it? It's...

I run a little make-believe mutual fund. Stocks were picked and priced as of the market close on 12/30/2022. It consists of 38 stocks (not ETF's) and will not be traded/rebalanced until the end of 2023.

So far it is even with VTI:

Make-Believe Fund: +4.0%

VTI: +4.0%

SPX: +3.5%

BRK.B: +0.3%

Move over, Warren.

If I was sitting on a $3.5M asset, I wouldn’t bother working either. Property tax is probably <$10k on that place if bought decades ago.

The house is paid for. With $3.5 M in home equity my brother could get a reverse mortgage if he had to. I know nothing about the pros and cons of reverse mortgages except that Tom Selleck tells me I should have one with all the false sincerity he can muster

I suppose you already know that the IRS says to adjust the trade dates of the remaining shares affected by a wash sale. Is Gainskeeper trying to do that? Even if it is adjusting the dates, it shouldn't be reporting a cost basis of negative $2, which is what's causing the error in TaxAct. I had this problem a year ago and reported it to a TD Ameritrade rep but apparently nothing was done about it. Last year I was able to manually work around the problem and successfully e-file the return. As is I could never e-file this year's return with those errors. TradeLog is buggy. I had trouble initializing the folder for TradeLog data but was able to intervene and fix it. Now I can't populate the baseline positions list because the Baseline Position...

Thanks! I will definitely look into Tradelog.

I asked a TD Ameritrade rep whether Gainskeeper would be available after the merger with Schwab is complete. He didn't know, but if Gainskeeper is not up to the job of sorting out wash sales then they can keep it.

Speaking of work ethic ... My brother supported my SIL while she got her M.A. degree in anthropology. I don't know how you turn a Master's in anthro into a paycheck but whatever. Upon graduation SIL got an entry-level job as a "church lady" at her local church. A job like that sure as heck doesn't require an M.A. degree and sure as heck doesn't pay an M.A. salary. She did that for 10 years and decided she was finished with work and "retired" at age 55, ineligible for Medicare and ineligible for soc sec retirement benefits. They have no kids to raise. My brother was laid off about a year into the pandemic at age 64 and now must support the both of them with no employment and no employer-provided medical insurance. They ar...

I recently downloaded a 2022 capital-gain report from TD Ameritrade. The capital-gain report is generated by Gainskeeper. One has the option of a report adjusted for wash sales or not adjusted for wash sales. I imported the report (as a csv file) into TaxAct, which reported a number of errors. I drilled down and found that TaxAct was showing a negative cost basis for some of the lots. One error involved a lot which had a cost basis of negative $2, clearly an error. Cost basis is typically reported as a positive amount. I examined the report generated by Gainskeeper and compared it to my brokerage records. I found that many of the trade dates were messed up.I then downloaded the Gainskeeper report NOT adjusted for wash sales and imported it ...

My advice to OP is, whatever level of material support you give your kids, be involved. Be proactive in seeing that they have what they need to get through college, even if you don't pay for it. Do some logistical planning with them. Where will they live? How will they eat? How will they get to school? How much time will they have to study? How much time to work if they work? Can they afford textbooks? If they have a car, how will they park and insure it and put gas in the tank? This is all uncharted territory for an 18 year old. They need guidance as much as financial support. At that age their hormones are active, so don't think they won't be "fooling around", if you get my meaning. Neither of my parents was college educated and...

So either spending or re-investing make the most sense for the portfolio visualizer tool

It's an analytical tool. How the test results are used is up to the investor.

I’m not sure what problem your solution solves.

You have to jump through hoops to get that no-withdraw figure and it suffers from the yearly reporting problem I described.

They're pointlessly making it more complicated than it actually is or needs to be.

Ya think?

Why would you want this?

Why would you want to ignore it?

OP, do you find this illuminating?

Exactly so. How one is invested in a portfolio and how much one is withdrawing from a portfolio affects the end value over time. In the first instance the portfolio is 100% SCHD and the withdrawals are the dividends as they are issued. In the second case the portfolio is SCHD and CASH and the asset allocation shifts as money is reallocated toward CASH by investing the dividends there. In the third case the portfolio is 100% SCHD and there are no withdrawals of cash because the dividends are reinvested and there are no assets in CASH. Any one of these three could be an intentional choice. The same choices can be implemented by just selling portions of SCHD and taking out the cash, selling portions of SCHD and accumulating the cash, or just ...

I understand dividends are irrelevant to total return. I was trying to understand your thinking. see if you could answer questions without contradictions. The issues with PV. You either reinvest them or not. What’s the 3rd option? See the dividend total? That’s already there. Your answers are obtuse. Your dividend options are: 1. Reinvest the dividends in more shares of the underlying. 2. Withdraw the dividends from the account. 3. Hold the dividends as a cash balance in the account. Is that clear enough? Portfolio Visualizer supports #1 and #2. It does not support #3. I have contacted the developer about supporting #3 and he seems open to it. In the real world, brokerages put cash in a money-market account where it draws a small amount of...

Fund: SCHD

Final value, dividends withdrawn: $28,854

Final value: dividends not withdrawn: $29,833

Final value, dividends reinvested: $40,315

mustangp52 wrote: ↑Sat Jan 21, 2023 3:49 pm
Chris319,
I’m really curious.

Can you explain how dividend distributions work?

The answer is at your fingertips:

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/dividend.asp

https://www.google.com/search?q=investo ... e&ie=UTF-8

What do you think PV is showing when dividends reinvested is set to yes vs no? I really don’t understand the issues, as wrote.

The developer says PV is withdrawing dividends when Reinvest is set to "no". Direct quote from an email from the developer:

currently dividends are either reinvested (default) or taken out as cash flow.

So, now, is your contention that dividend paying stocks have a systemic advantage such that they provide a higher return than the market as a whole. Do you think that advantage would be not be arbitraged away by the market?

To give you an understandable yes/no answer, the answer is definitely no.

People can have a difference of opinion about that. The answer to that is not as clear cut as whether or not dividend compounding Turbo charges anything.

OP asked about compounding as opposed to simply buying and holding a dividend-paying stock and holding or spending the divs.

Portfolio Visualizer already has a ticker for cash called CASHX that earns interest based on existing savings account rates or something.

That's great. Maybe the idea of a cash balance collecting interest is not infeasible.

Apathizer wrote: ↑Sat Jan 21, 2023 12:44 pm That's not what I'm asking, so I politely ask you to address the question I posed. So let me ask it a different way. There are two different funds with about same asset allocation. In each fund you have $5K. You hold 110 shares of fund 1, and 100 shares of fund 2. Do you think fund 1 is better than 2? If you do, please explain why.

I already answered that:

The first question to ask is whether the two positions are in the same company/ETF? If so then obviously they're equivalent.

If you need a more explicitly worded answer, inasmuch as the two portfolios are equal in value, neither is "better" than the other, IOW they're equal.

Let me try to ask you a simple questions. Do you think having 110 shares worth $5K is better than having 100 shares worth $5K? If you think the former is better, please explain why.

The first question to ask is whether the two positions are in the same company/ETF? If so then obviously they're equivalent.

Given a choice between 110 shares of CSCO and 100 shares of GOOGL, both with a current market value of $5000, I would rather have the GOOGL.

So you want an app that tracks a dividend paying investment and a cash holding and allows options for the dividends on the investment and the interest on the cash to be individually reinvested where they were issued from, invested in the other asset, or withdrawn from the account. That is not an unreasonable configuration to want to see. I don't think there is an existing app that does that.

If you're talking about Portfolio Visualizer, I told Tuomo (PV developer) that I would be content if no interest were paid on the cash balance. Doing so would greatly increase the complexity of the program and I feel is too much to ask. He would need a database of historical interest rates on money-market accounts.