Bogleheads.org

I am in a similar situation: US citizen living in EU country. I opened a Interactive Brokers account, which was set up with Interactive Brokers UK. I have not yet funded this account because I am concerned about whether I would be buying a PFIC, a concern also raised by the poster below. Can I just suggest you review what you hold in this account, to make sure nothing in it falls foul of the US's spiteful PFIC tax rules? Holding a UCITS ETF would probably be easily done in this account, but it creates a raft of nasty US tax problems. Because of US tax laws, US citizens living in the EU and UK face an especially difficult investing landscape. I spoke to IB customer service, who said I can perform an in-kind transfer of my US domiciled Vangu...

I think the big one you're missing is a UK SIPP (self-invested personal pension). That's a great suggestion! I have not considered it because I assumed that it is not allowed for me (since both Vanguard Investor and Fidelity International state that they do not open SIPPs for US persons). Do you have a provider you can recommend? Perhaps Interactive Brokers? Interactive Brokers only does SIPPs via a separate administrator - I haven't really investigated, I assume there would be fees on top: https://www.interactivebrokers.co.uk/en/index.php?f=39434 Hargreaves Lansdown will happily do a SIPP for US persons (and they'll also do ISA, LISA, and brokerage account). A.J. Bell will also do SIPPs (and only SIPPs, for US persons). For both of them, ...

Agree with TedSwippet, and to add to the fun, the mutual fund versions are not HMRC reporting (or at least I've never found one that is), while many of big ETFs are HMRC reporting. That means the capital gains from the sale of a non-reporting mutual fund are a) taxed at income rates (higher than capital gains rates) and b) not part of the annual capital gains allowance. Not pleasant.

Remittance basis may change all that, I'm not expert enough on it to have any intelligent comment.

If you don't exclude under the FEIE but rather take a tax credit against foreign taxes, then you'd be eligible for an IRA contribution. I know in the UK that can make sense for larger incomes, but those with a lower income say FEIE saves them money. The penalties for over contribution are pretty steep - what 6% of the excess amount per year until removed and 10% penalty on the gains or something along those lines. So I'd be careful to be sure you have US earned income before making a contribution. There's one more hurdle that atheB9aishei falls afoul of: the US penalises people who choose the Married Filing Separately filing status. Since atheB9aishei is married, they only have the choice of Married Filing Jointly (MFJ) or Married Filing S...

For some background investing as a US citizen living in the UK: https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Investing_from_the_UK_for_US_citizens_and_US_permanent_residents - recommend reading this first so all the terms and acronyms below make some sense! I think the big one you're missing is a UK SIPP (self-invested personal pension). Assuming you can satisfy yourself with respect to the whole "foreign grantor trust" question, and thus forms 3520/3520A and potentially PFIC considerations, a SIPP would be an ideal vehicle for long-term tax-advantaged investing (sorry for throwing all the acronyms and obscure terms out there - SIPPs have a bit of grey around them where there's no clear consensus. Talk to your accountant, assuming they're dual...

No savings account will be a PFIC - you're just looking for a bank account paying interest, there's no "corporation" that you own. I suspect your bigger challenge will be finding a UK bank willing to open an account for somebody who a) is a US taxpayer and b) not resident in the UK. I expect some of the bigger, more international-friendly banks will do so, but probably not with great rates. MoneySavingExpert is my go-to place to find the best rates: https://www.moneysavingexpert.com/savings/savings-accounts-best-interest/ That said, most of the top payers are small, often app-only banks, unlikely to be interested in the complexity of international customers. I know for sure Zopa won't open accounts for US citizens, and presumably ...

as a US person, I have the PFIC complexity of holding low cost funds. US citizens investing in the UK definitely face a unique constellation of challenges - worth reading the wiki article focused on those of us in that situation: https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Investing_from_the_UK_for_US_citizens_and_US_permanent_residents Corporate bonds is not a solution I've come across before the the PFIC challenges (individual stocks certainly is). I don't see any major hurdle to it, but am curious why the corporate bond approach? You're still going to owe US tax on the interest (at US income tax rates) and capital gains, if any, but putting them in an ISA does avoid the UK complexity. Definitely keep an eye on fees, HL is not a low fee option in mo...

djheini wrote: ↑Wed Mar 08, 2023 3:10 pm So I've been buying the HMRC-reporting US Vanguard ETFs in my Fidelity account, which I'm hoping is not going to come back and bite me somehow when it comes time to do my UK taxes later this year.

It shouldn't - the only weird nuance is the excess reportable income scheme. Monevator does a much better job explaining it than I can: https://monevator.com/excess-reportable-income/

The good news is that the Vanguard ETFs have tiny excess reportable income, if any at all. Vanguard's reporting is here: https://advisors.vanguard.com/iwe/pdf/t ... IDQAUK.pdf

All just another hoop to jump through for people with cross-border finances, although this one is more of a paperwork annoyance than any real practical barrier.

1. This seems risky since it might break the terms of service. In additional, I wonder what would happen with state tax. I suppose one could use a mail forwarding service from a state with no income tax like Florida or Texas. It may well break the terms of service, which is why it's not a great option. State tax is also a good question, and very dependent on the state. Even some states with income tax are quite easy to break away from (Massachusetts had zero problems with me filing a final return and saying I'd left the country, despite it's overblown reputation as Taxachusetts), while others are very sticky. 2 - 3. I wonder which option would be less hassle. Frankly, I have not use futures at all. I have not tried either of these options,...

It is absolutely a catch-22!

If we're talking taxable accounts, you've got a few options, none of them great:

1. Use a US brokerage account, with a US address (assuming you've got one you can use and are ok with not being fully transparent with your brokerage)

2. Use a UK brokerage account as an elective professional client.

3. Use options and exercise to get the underlying (or futures, to replicate performance of the ETF)

4. Use individual stocks

Note that there was a recent consultation on repealing the KID/KIID requirements in the UK, so we're eagerly awaiting the outcome: https://www.gov.uk/government/consultat ... disclosure

TedSwippet wrote: ↑Tue Mar 07, 2023 11:57 am But enough of my soapbox, I know we both think the US system is outrageous.

We do. The difference between us is that I'm free of it. If you haven't already seen it, this Tax Notes International article on FATCA, published in January, offers a quite entertaining and refreshingly direct take on the whole nonsense.
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Thanks, that is a good take on it. I don't tend to consider the perspective of non-US banks and tax authorities, but totally makes sense that they'd be frustrated with FATCA too. I expect the only reason they put up with it is because it's the US - if any other country tried to impose all that work on them, I'd expect a big "no thanks!".

It is less about the waste of time though, than it is about the outrageous penalties the IRS applies if you don't waste this time, compounded by their hiding the requirement to waste it so well that you may never find it. Not everybody has the IRS home page as their browser's new tab setting. The second part of this recommendation, not requiring either of these forms for home country accounts, would at least be a huge weight off for many. As for FATCA itself, TIGTA reports that the IRS does next to nothing with FATCA data, and over a decade generated a total of only $14 million of extra income; compare to the $8.7 billion extra income "estimate" used to justify passing FATCA. Set against IRS implementation costs of $547 million, ...

Legislative Recommendation #8 Harmonize Reporting Requirements for Taxpayers Subject to Both the Report of Foreign Bank and Financial Accounts and the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act by Eliminating Duplication and Excluding Accounts Maintained by U.S. Persons in the Countries Where They Are Bona Fide Residents Best not to get too excited at the prospect. The Taxpayer Advocate Service suggests this regularly; in fact, almost every year since FATCA passed in 2010. The IRS simply ignores it every time. Nibbling around the edges even if they did do it. While I welcome anything that avoids pointlessly wasting my time filling in forms, double reporting on FBAR and 8938 is very low on the list of pain points for US citizens abroad - just one o...

squirrelcorn wrote: ↑Mon Mar 06, 2023 1:52 pm This is exactly the case for me But it sounds like I should just bite the bullet and do the 8938 including this account, since it appears to be not worth the risk of not completing the form and proving definitively it isn't needed will not be possible.

The "good" news is that if you've done an FBAR, you've got almost all the information you need for the 8938 - just wasting time transcribing information the US government already has into a different form. I just keep a running Excel sheet with all the information for both of them, so it's a few minutes once a year looking up top account balances, then just transcription.

I'll join the consensus that I just report it (IBKR UK in my case, but same idea). If I have to go to the trouble of filling out an 8938, I'm just going to report everything that might be required - the incremental 60 seconds to type in another account is a small price to pay to not spend 60 minutes trying to puzzle out what the IRS really requires, or to run the risk that I missed something and will be subject to ridiculous penalties.

I'm also a UK investor, and I share a lot of your sentiments. The US feels overvalued - but it has felt that way for a long time, and underweighting the US would have cost you a LOT of growth over the last decade or so. My other problem is that if you underweight the US, you have to overweight something else - which something else is worth overweighting right now? Europe, with Ukraine/energy prices/long term demographic issues? UK, with all that plus Brexit? Japan, with even bigger and nearer-term demographic issues? EM, with lots of governance issues, and the threat that the Chinese government could do something unpleasant? Pacific seems ok, but it's a lot of small markets. Don't forget Canada, but it has a lot in common with Europe. So I'...

We welcome suggestions to make it easier to read (or you can edit the wiki yourself) - I certainly wish the overall situation was simpler! I have yet to find a US ETF that publishes a KID/KIID - my understanding is that the KID/KIID requirements conflict with SEC requirements, so that a US ETF publishing a KID/KIID would be in break of SEC rules, but I haven't delved into the details. Certainly, if you find a US ETF with a KID/KIID, let us all know! The very simple version of the options is as follow - this is a gross simplification and glosses over many nuances! 1. UK pension/SIPP = good, fine to have index funds 2. US IRA (probably Roth) = good, fine to have index funds. If your broker knows you're in the UK, they may limit your options -...

Thanks, I have not thought of the ETF option. This is because I have been investing for a long time before ETF were widely available. The schwab rep did not suggested ETF said there was no investment vehicle available. I called Schwab back, and they said that due to regulation they cannot sell US based ETF in the UK. I called Interactive Broker and they said that US ETF are allow, but you must use KID reporting ETF. The boglehead article seems to side with interactive broker. What do you think? They're both right - if a US based ETF published a KID/KIID, UK investors would be able to buy it. However, no US ETFs actually do publish a KID/KIID, therefore UK investors cannot buy any US ETFs due to UK regulations (technically, no brokerage is ...

So it feels like the IRS kind of wants to exclude UK pensions, but based on what they've actually written, they haven't. Perhaps. However, I'm not as charitable as you. My sense is that the IRS made minimal (likely zero) effort to understand how any other country's pension schemes worked, but simply went ahead and published guidelines using guesswork and gut feeling, based on the myopic and parochial assumption that every other country's pension rules operate broadly like the US's. Rev. Proc. 2020-17 achieves little beyond the opportunity for the IRS to pat themselves on the back for having done something . I think we probably agree - the IRS doesn't really want to be bothered about foreign pensions, but they care so little they couldn't b...

Valuethinker wrote: ↑Wed Mar 01, 2023 3:17 am Is there a way to preserve these 2 very helpful posts?

You have done a lot of good work here - and the questions are asked over and over again. PFIC comes as a nasty surprise to many Americans, I gather.

Just added a section on the whole 3520/3520A section to the wiki, and a few more paragraphs to the section on UK pensions. Let me know (or add content yourself) if you think there's anything more we should capture.

https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Investi ... _residents

i am curious to see which part fail. My interpretation, others will vary: It's two key parts (with some lesser questions around others): "(3) Only contributions with respect to income earned from the performance of personal services are permitted." You can contribute to a UK pension even without income, just may not get the tax advantages. "(4) Contributions to the trust are limited by a percentage of earned income of the participant, are subject to an annual limit of $50,000 or less to the trust, or are subject to a lifetime limit of $1,000,000 or less to the trust." Pension contribution limits have nothing to do with percentages of earned income (flat £40,000 limit for most people, going lower , not higher, with high ...

Is there a way to preserve these 2 very helpful posts? You have done a lot of good work here - and the questions are asked over and over again. PFIC comes as a nasty surprise to many Americans, I gather. I'll go through the Wiki page (https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Investing_from_the_UK_for_US_citizens_and_US_permanent_residents) and see if I can flesh out any pieces with some of this. I get a little skittish about going too far into the grey areas, beyond calling out they exist - it's a tough needle to thread to explain the reality of the grey areas without coming across as advising a path that some people would see as noncompliance (and others as perfectly reasonable!). Definitely want the wiki page to be a pretty comprehensive resource...

So what I am getting is (reference: https://www.thetaxadviser.com/issues/2020/may/foreign-pension-plans-us-uk-tax-treaty.html and https://www.newsmax.com/finance/stephenjdunn/sipps-isas-tax/2020/01/31/id/952232/) 1. A penion plan that is funded more than 50% by the employer is a employer trust. Those that have more than 50% employee contribution are consider grantors trust. 2. Grantors trust are subjected to PFIC, which has unfavorable tax and reporting treatments. Grantor turst are required to have Form 3520 and 3520-A submitted. 3. A SIPP is employee contributed, but is not considered a grantor trust until the owner reaches age 55. At 55, the owner is eligible to withdraw money from a SIPP and the owner must start filing Form 3520 and 35...

When reading the article, it mention that the tax treaty grants some exception to PFIC. Funds invested in pension or SIPP are not subject to the PFIC rule even if it's domicle outside of the US. Can someone invest in index funds through these vehicles? I feel like that with a limit of 40K per year, that would be enough to cover retirement savings? By the way, it's not clear from google, but are UK pension different than US pension where you can select the funds in your pension? Generally, pension in the US are controlled pretty much completely from the employer side. Like the US, the UK has two types of retirement savings accounts, defined contribution and defined benefit. In the US, when you hear "pension" you automatically assu...

One question I have is related to PFIC. I have notice something call UCITS that are often use to invest in US asset from EU. Would UCITS be considered PFIC. I read through the different articles but is still not clear on everything there are a lot of complicated acronyms and I am also not familar with UK investment in general. Update After reading through the article again, it appears UCITS would be be considered to be PFIC. Yes, it's a fair statement that anything that is UCITS will be a PFIC. UCITS = EU/UK fund - no US funds are UCITS, all EU/UK funds are PFICs, therefore all UCITS are PFICs. Can make it simpler and ignore the UCITS acronym and just look for where the fund is domiciled. Most UCITS funds are domiciled in Ireland or Luxemb...

Another vote to check the Wiki - answers all the basic questions, I hope (disclosure, I wrote a lot of it): https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Investing_from_the_UK_for_US_citizens_and_US_permanent_residents Then come back with more detailed questions. The short answer is that there are paths forward, but none of them are 100% straightforward (UK workplace pension is 99% straightforward, the rest are varying degrees of complicated). But it can be done - some of the more complicated routes are best for an "enthusiast" about investing/personal finance/taxes, but there are ways that normal people can manage, to some extent. One note: there is an ongoing UK government consultation on repealing the requirement for a KID/KIID. In practice,...

Assuming your other two funds are US equities and maybe world bonds? If so, yes, this would about cover it. You'd be missing Canada and the rest of developed Pacific (Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, etc.), but those won't make a massive difference.

No issue having more than 3 funds to be able to get to a total market weight. Due to various complications, across my retirement accounts I have 13 different funds that add up to a total world equity fund (plenty of overlap between most of them). I don't recommend going that complicated unless you really have to - 1, 2 or 3 is simpler - but the performance will be the same.

Presumably there are many Bogleheads with a portfolio that exceeds €500,000, but I doubt that most are active enough to have made 40 trades of over €200,000 in the previous year. I guess that if you wanted to be reclassified as a professional investor to circumvent MIFiD II restrictions, you could try trading back and forth between similar or even substantially identical securities, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Interactive Brokers’ compliance department flagged such an obvious stratagem. (Then again, maybe you could argue that your employing such a maneuver should count as evidence of your “expertise, experience and knowledge.”) Agree with your overall post - one minor point is that the €200,000 is in total value of the trades, not each ...

Question 1: When people refer to 'the market', what does that actually mean? Rather than "average" return of the total market, I'd call it the "aggregate" return of the total market, but that's probably being pedantic :) The point I make with that word is that "average" can mean a lot of things, and your "average" or "typical" active investor is pretty poor, well under the market. There are a handful of people who do very well - it's tough to do worse than a 100% loss (although possible with leverage), but very possible to do better than a 100% gain. But aside from terminology, "the market" is simply all the investments in whatever market you're considering. We're mostly talking e...

Key question I couldn't answer from your post: are you moving abroad to 1 country (i.e. becoming a permanent resident in one country - sure, maybe with travel other places, but a clear resident of country X), or are you planning the "nomad" route, never staying long enough in one place to be a resident? With the Country X option, a huge number of questions are dependent on Country X. FEIE vs FTC, investment options that work with PFIC constraints, their treatment of an S-corp, double tax and estate tax treaties, etc. Different countries will make different parts of this very easy, or quite challenging. But the "good" part is that you can learn how the US and Country X interact, and, aside from rule changes over time, you...

In response to Q1 - if the returns post fees are equal, then no, mathematically it doesn't matter if the fund is active or passive. HOWEVER, none of us have a crystal ball to know what the returns will be, which is one of the key elements of the Bogleheads approach. Your active fund has 0.71% OCF, your Lifestrategy is 0.22% (let's ignore transaction costs and platform/account fees for the moment, for clarity). That means your active fund manager needs to outperform the market by 0.49%, just to break even. If we accept that typical equity market returns are around 5% p.a., that means he need to be around 10% better than the market, just so that you don't lose money compared to passive. The ability to beat the market that much, consistently, ...

TedSwippet's already posted the Wiki for ideas - definitely worth a read. I did this for a time with my UK ISA (due to silly US tax rules, I can't practically have any funds in an ISA, but the UK tax benefits are excellent - similar motivation as you). With 20 stocks, roughly industry-matching like you, I was able to match the FTSE 100 quite well. In my wife's ISA, I used 20 other stocks - mostly smaller than in mine, because I'd already "used up" most of the biggest. Hers had much more deviation from the index, which makes sense. When I did the maths, I realised my 20 stocks represented 40% of the market cap of the index, hers only 8%. Depending how taxes work in your country, reporting the dividends and, eventually, capital gain...

I have heard back from IBKR and they said its possible to keep the ISA. I now see that InvestEngine is also a possible alternative (they additionally have zero monthly minimum fees, where as IBKR has ). Does anyone have any experience with it? I have no experience with InvestEngine, but I see that Monevator has a referral link to them. The Monevator team seems pretty upstanding, so I wouldn't expect them to have a referral with anybody dodgy. At some point I would have to cash the ISA and recreate the portfolio, probably on a brokerage platform like IBKR, as keeping the ISA could get me into tax complications when I move to Germany( but that will be after 2 years). As far as the immediate two years I spend in Netherlands are considered, ta...

Thanks for the quick reply. Sorry I’ve confused things- I haven’t maxed out my workplace pension to 40k, I’ve maxed out the amount I can contribute through my employer (5% from me 3% from them). You likely can contribute more, you just wouldn't get any more from them. Worth asking to confirm, but every setup I'm aware of your contributions aren't capped, but they just don't want to pay any more. I have a SIPP that I also contribute to, but if I can contribute to a Lifetime ISA instead and then boost it by 20% when I’m 60, it sounds like the best option. The UKPersonalFinance reddit wiki has a good description of LISA vs SIPP: https://ukpersonal.finance/isa-vs-lisa-vs-pension/#The_25_LISA_bonus_is_equivalent_to_20_pension_tax_relief Key que...

Money is fungible - so yes, if you are able to contribute more £££ to your SIPP, it doesn't matter whether that money came from a LISA, an ISA, earnings, dividends, capital gains, interest, wherever. But you say you're already maxing out your Workplace Pension - SIPP and pension share the same £40k annual allowance (with the usual caveats around the taper for high income, MPAA, carryover from previous years, etc.). So if you're already contributing £40k to your workplace pension, there's no more allowance available to contribute to your SIPP, whether from LISA or otherwise. Maxing out your workplace pension as a lower rate tax payer is impressive, well done! And you can only contribute to a LISA up to age 50 (and you have to have opened it ...

Oh, are there any transparent zero fee brokers? I read somewhere (I think monevator) to be wary zero fee platforms. They make their money somewhere, for sure. Given the short time frame, and that you may literally be only ever making three trades with them (buy before 05Apr, buy after 06Apr, sell all), the difference in brokers is not going to make a massive difference. I don't have a specific zero fee broker recommendation, since none of them want to play with me (a US citizen resident in the UK), but I'd just link back to Monevators broker table and pick one - not going to move the needle as long as they're generally competent and not extortionate: https://monevator.com/compare-uk-cheapest-online-brokers/ IBKR might be the way to go for ...

tradez wrote: ↑Tue Jan 24, 2023 8:47 am

tubaleiter wrote: ↑Tue Jan 24, 2023 12:39 am
If you just take the "true" Bogleheads advice and do 100% VWRP for 40 years, there isn't a lot to talk about!

I assume the tendency to go for VWRP instead of SSAC is because a) this forum loves Vanguard, and b) up until not long ago, TER was 0.6% from iShares vs 0.22% for Vanguard. Now, iShares ETF is just 0.20% with virtually identical allocation and performance.

Yes, I think that's it I think the Vanguard funds also get used as a shorthand for their category - VWRP = global equity tracker. But any similar index fund (including the other flavours of VWRP for accumulation vs distribution and currency) is a reasonable substitute.

Nonetheless, I wanted to be prepared if i) doesn't happen. I haven't worked out the calculations yet, but I suppose that in the event I have to sell all my funds parked in the ISA (max expected investment ~ £20 - 30k) when I leave the UK, and purchase similar funds when I move to the Netherlands, I wouldn't incur substantial costs. Do you have any suggestions how I should proceed if I were required to go this route? First thought: ISA allowance is "only" £20k a year, so if you want to go over that, make sure you get the ISA opened and funded before the next tax year starts on 06Apr. No issue putting in £20k before 06Apr and then another £20k just after 06Apr. If you aren't able to hold on to the ISA, you simply sell into cash and...

Very well said but I'd like to add, that even the S&P 500 is an 'active' index. There is a committee that chooses which companies go in and out based on various criteria. It is also 'tilted' to large cap growth. So unless one holds, as you said 100% World, or 50% World 50% Aggregate bonds (whatever is the current stock/bond split of the global market portfolio) then there is a bit of 'active' going on. Agree - nothing is truly "passive". Every index is designed by somebody, with their criteria for inclusion. Some are more active than others - that includes the S&P, for sure. ESG is another strong example, where everybody's definition of ESG is different, so you get very different indices. But even the most passive of the ...

If you adjust the split too much you end up becoming an active investor surely... Yes - but the kind of people who spend their free time on Bogleheads forums often have a desire to fiddle/tweak/tilt. If you just take the "true" Bogleheads advice and do 100% VWRP for 40 years, there isn't a lot to talk about! So you do have lots of discussions amongst Bogleheads about some kind of partial divergence from a pure market cap approach. Excluding stuff they don't like (there's an ongoing thread about not wanting to invest in China, for example), adding more of stuff they do like (small cap value, home country bias), "play money" invested in individual stocks up to X% limit, and so on. Where's the line that makes these investo...

Thank you tubaleiter for your reply. I was under the impression that withdrawing funds from the ISA would immediately incur taxes as it loses the tax-free wrapper provided by the ISA. But thanks for clarifying this, this was a very useful piece of information. If you do not mind, could you please redirect me where I can find more information on this? Also, I have heard that one can retain the ISA even after moving abroad, without having tax implications in the UK. Is that true? Context: Now that ISA seems to be a good option, I see a further opportunity. I might be eligible for an exemption as a partial non-resident when I move to the Netherlands, meaning that I wouldn't have to report foreign investments while in the Netherlands. If I get...

Why not take advantage of an ISA while you're still in the UK? You can cash out at any time with no tax implications. You're unlikely to have enough capital gains or dividends to actually owe anything to the UK, but it avoids needing to deal with them at all on your final UK taxes. Just buy in ISA now (in accumulating funds, for simplicity), and then sell shortly before moving to the Netherlands.

I can't speak to the Dutch or German systems, but seems like you can make your life marginally simpler by using an ISA, even if only for 6 months. You could do the ISA with IBKR and hopefully not have to change brokers, even if you're moving accounts around with IBKR. I use IBKR and I think they work well for these multi-national situations.

I sold off essentially all my accessible equities to buy my first house almost 10 years ago, and have recently done so again for a significant upsize. There's enough in my inaccessible retirement accounts that I'm not worried about being able to retire comfortably when the time comes, although the time will come later than it might have done otherwise. But it comes down to a more philosophical point - what is the reason for having money if not to spend it at some point (or gift it)? Life is for living, and you can't take it with you. So if the expensive house now is the best use you can put that money to, compared to leaving it to compound and spend later, then absolutely it's right to sell the equities and spend it. I did the same as you, ...

You could tilt towards India by adding a (rather expensive :( ) iShares MSCI India ETF. Why not use the smaller but much cheaper and more diversified Franklin Templeton ETF, in the appropriate flavour? https://www.franklintempleton.co.uk/our-funds/etf/price-and-performance/products/27853/SINGLCLASS/franklin-ftse-india-ucits-etf/IE00BHZRQZ17 or https://www.franklintempleton.com/investments/options/exchange-traded-funds/products/26348/SINGLCLASS/franklin-ftse-india-etf/FLIN I don't have any desire for an India tilt, but do use their Canada fund to close an otherwise idiosyncratic gap in my holdings (my core non-US developed fund follows the MSCI EAFE index which excludes Canada for no good reason) and get back to market weight. For tradez, a...

As far as the index fund, or 2-3 funds depending on your allocation, I would typically think of one equity fund (all-world) and one bond fund, in whatever proportion your desired allocation is. If your desired allocation is 100% equities, 0% bonds, then you only need the all-world equity fund. Some people want to add complexity, so they'll do a developed and an emerging equity fund, or all-world but also add in a small-cap value tilt, or anything else you can imagine. But you don't need to do any of that - a single equity fund and, eventually, a single bond fund will do just fine. Some people get pushed into complexity for other reasons (poor choices available in pension, trying to avoid exceeding lifetime allowance, and other reasons like ...

Agree with everything TedSwippet said - will add my own thoughts, and some monevator links since he has the Bogleheads wiki ones covered, and those are the two best sources I know of: Hi all, UK-based investor here, mid-40 with a portfolio in the low 6-figures and no clear idea on asset allocation - I am currently 100% shares. This is the first thing to decide on - do you want to stay 100% shares? Do you want to go 80/20? What's your plan for the future? Age in bonds would put you more like 55/45, is that too defensive for you? Do you plan to hold your asset allocation steady and then ramp up bonds close to retirement, or a slower glidepath? I know that's a lot of questions, but it's the kind of thing you need to decide once, write down in ...

I've used Wise to move hundreds of thousands, with no issue (to buy a UK house in 2019, before I knew about IBKR). But for millions, I echo TedSwippet and ValueThinker, that's the kind of money where things get more complicated, and a small difference in fees can really add up. I like TedSwippet's idea of moving in specie to IBKR and converting/spending gradually. Just be very careful about the relationship between your investments and your US and UK tax liabilities - don't get caught with PFICs if you still have US tax residency! (and similarly avoid non-reporting funds while a UK tax resident). Wise is not a bank, but holds your money in banks (https://wise.com/help/articles/2949821/is-it-safe-to-keep-money-in-my-wise-account). More convo...

Given your reply later in the post about not being a US citizen and planning to abandon your green card, this information applies only to that situation - radically different if you were stil required to file US taxes. First question is what kind of Vanguard account. I'm going to assume just a normal taxable brokerage; if it's an IRA, then you've got early withdrawal penalties to consider as well. I'm not aware of any facility to transfer from US to UK in specie. That would be nice, since you've already moved to the UK and will need to pay capital gains tax on any gains above the UK annual allowance. Moving to the UK doesn't reset the basis, so that's based on whatever the price you originally paid was. Given recent market performance, mayb...

Some thoughts, no clear conclusion :) I think there are really three different things that bond diversification can achieve: 1. Diversify default risk. This matters for emerging market bonds, corporate bonds, etc., especially the lower down the credit ratings you go. Generally not a consideration for highly developed countries, I wouldn't expect Australia to be significantly more likely to default than the US, UK, EU, Switzerland, Japan, etc. 2. Diversify currency risk. Obviously only if you go with unhedged (lower cost, but you're adding in currency risk by doing it). Spreading across multiple currencies diversifies the risk, but if the Australian dollar falls against global currencies, its still going to hurt. Sticking to Australian bonds...

Few more - and yes, getting depressingly long! The main list is also depressingly US-centric, tons of US-only acronyms on there... CGT: Capital Gains Tax FTSE: Financial Times Stock Exchange, an index provider. If no other qualifier is given, FTSE typically refers to the FTSE 100, the 100 biggest stocks on the London Stock Exchange, but FTSE provides many other indices, often used for index funds. ISA: Individual Savings Account (you've got S&S ISA, but not ISA itself - probably worth flagging the name is a misnomer since it comes in flavours other than just savings) JISA: Junior Individual Savings Account KID: Key Information Document, a summary of information on an investment, legally required for retail investor protection (very simi...