Bogleheads.org

The good news is that the Advisor has you in good investments. Criticisms are that you are in a lot of funds and you are paying 1.1% Assets Under Management. That is a good news - thank you. Do you think I should just move all the funds to non managed account and just keep them as they are, or sell and purchase new? What I tell people to do is to come up with a plan before leaving their Advisor. Let's get started. Why did you go to the Advisor in the first place? In other words, what was it you needed help with at the time? What do you need help with now? Why do you want to leave? This is the first step. Which brokerage has your money? That is the second step. Do you want to manage your investments yourself or do you want someone else to d...

When I arranged for my first trip to Europe, my tour was arranged so that I would arrive in London about noon and the tour would leave the next day. I actually wanted to see London while I was there and half a day after a long flight just wasn't enough. So I called the tour company and asked if I could come a day early and buy a one day tour of London. I got the very same hotel for an extra night at the same discounted price! It was a great idea and one of the smartest things travel wise that I ever did. In a similar fashion, why not arrange to come to Amsterdam a day early if you want to see Amsterdam? On another trip, I had a layover of a few hours at Schiphol Airport and didn't want to waste the time laying around. I put my bags in a loc...

The biggest issue that one has to weigh when considering whether to enter into an Advisory relationship or to stay in an Advisory relationship is the ongoing fees. I work in tax preparation and as I look at client 1099 statements from their brokerage, I am amazed at the fees that people pay. It really adds up, particularly when the portfolio balances get larger and larger. I actually am pro-Advisor and still believe that most people would benefit from an Advisory relationship. However, the ongoing fees can be pretty high and over time it is a big drag on returns. The question is whether the benefits received are worth the costs paid. You are paying $20,000 to $22,000 a year and that is a lot. I think you said you were paying 1.1% a year in...

The good news is that the Advisor has you in good investments. Criticisms are that you are in a lot of funds and you are paying 1.1% Assets Under Management. The Advisor picked good, low cost investments. Vanguard, Dimensional Fund Advisors, iShares (Black Rock), State Street, Wisdom Tree, and Avantis are all excellent providers. I am not going to run all of this through portfolio X-Ray at Morningstar, so I can't speak to portfolio construction. I can see that you didn't get ripped off. I do think he used too many funds. It looks a lot like a Paul Merriman portfolio. So taken as a whole, it was probably tilted towards Small Cap and towards Value. So it is a classic factors portfolio. Without doing the X-Ray, can't say with 100% certainty, ...

The biggest issue that one has to weigh when considering whether to enter into an Advisory relationship or to stay in an Advisory relationship is the ongoing fees. I work in tax preparation and as I look at client 1099 statements from their brokerage, I am amazed at the fees that people pay. It really adds up, particularly when the portfolio balances get larger and larger. I actually am pro-Advisor and still believe that most people would benefit from an Advisory relationship. However, the ongoing fees can be pretty high and over time it is a big drag on returns. The question is whether the benefits received are worth the costs paid. You are paying $20,000 to $22,000 a year and that is a lot. I think you said you were paying 1.1% a year in ...

The good news is that the Advisor has you in good investments. Criticisms are that you are in a lot of funds and you are paying 1.1% Assets Under Management. The Advisor picked good, low cost investments. Vanguard, Dimensional Fund Advisors, iShares (Black Rock), State Street, Wisdom Tree, and Avantis are all excellent providers. I am not going to run all of this through portfolio X-Ray at Morningstar, so I can't speak to portfolio construction. I can see that you didn't get ripped off. I do think he used too many funds. It looks a lot like a Paul Merriman portfolio. So taken as a whole, it was probably tilted towards Small Cap and towards Value. So it is a classic factors portfolio. Without doing the X-Ray, can't say with 100% certainty, b...

Please add fund names to the ticker symbols. I am familiar with a lot of the ticker symbols but not all of them.

It is good to hear success stories from people who found that the principles taught us by John Bogle really do work.

My plan is to have my retirement at three different providers. A big reason being is that funds at a particular provider might be temporarily unavailable due to a natural disaster or a hacking incident.

Larry Swedroe has a recent article at Wealth Management.com titled "Retail Investors and 'Noise' Trading". In a series of papers, Brad Barber and Terrance Odean demonstrated that retail investors are susceptible to behavioral biases such as overconfidence, often chase attention-grabbing stocks and severely underperform the market due to active trading. Robinhood traders swarm into stocks with pending earnings announcements and lose interest in them immediately after the announcements. Robinhood investors, on average, lost money after the earning announcements, with negative average returns immediately after the announcements; and the negative returns persisted even after two weeks—casting serious doubts on the premise that Robinho...

retiredjg wrote: ↑Sat Mar 18, 2023 3:21 pm Rogue advisors. Interesting. Looking forward to what you find out.

Or it could be that Vanguard Advisors are bending under customer pressure, particularly those customers who are reading John Bogle's books! Bogle, as we all know, was not enthusiastic about International investing and recommended a maximum allocation of 20% to International Stocks within an equity portfolio. I don't agree with Bogle on this one but this might be a reason.

SVB (Silicon Valley Bank) demonstrates we don't need more bank regulation, just regulators actually doing their job and not focusing on things like climate risk. Here's simple chart showing failure of regulators. Where was FDIC, where was Cal bank regulators? Allowing this mismatch to occur? For those concerned about debt to GNP ratio level recommend reading this summary of the literature. Something investors should be paying more attention to as even while the ratio is now above 100% and we have full employment (should be running surplus) we have deficit of >5% of GDP and growing. And SS and Medicare in serious funding deficits that are not being addressed. Larry is referring to an article titled "Debt and Growth: A Decade of Studies...

Larry Swedroe has a recent article dated February 17, 2023 on Alpha Architect titled "It's Always Darkest Before Dawn." He is referring to the dark four year period from November 2016 - October 2020 when Value Stocks underperformed Growth Stocks by 16.81% a year (20.35% vs. 3.54%). He noted that since the "dark winter", things have turned around for Value. Some takeaways: From November 2020 through December 2022, value stocks outperformed growth stocks in the U.S. by 27.43 percentage points per annum (30.71% vs. 3.28%). Outside the U.S., they outperformed by 13.94 percentage points per annum (11.29% vs. ­‑2.65%). Despite their dramatic outperformance over the period, value stocks around the globe are still trading at abo...

bikechuck wrote: ↑Sat Mar 18, 2023 3:03 pm I wish that people would be more welcoming to less sophisticated users like me and not speak in tongues. What does CAPM stand for?

Capital Asset Pricing Model.

watchnerd wrote: ↑Sat Mar 18, 2023 8:44 am

nedsaid wrote: ↑Sat Mar 18, 2023 8:29 am So do you just hold a World portfolio of financial assets according to market weights?

Yes, my risk portfolio is global market weight.

For anyone interested in a similar approach, there is good data here, across multiple tabs:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... g_/pubhtml#

That is actually not a bad idea.

When I get into threads where someone asks for portfolio allocations, I recommend for a stock portfolio a range of 20% to 50% in International Stocks. 20% is what John Bogle recommended for a maximum, 30% seemed to be the "sweet spot", 40% is what Vanguard holds in their LifeStrategy portfolios, and Paul Merriman recommended 50%. My International Stock Allocation recently was about 28% of my Stocks. I find it amusing that people feel they can indulge in active management decisions when it comes to domestic / intl allocations, but yet also believe active managers don't beat the market and thus advocate for indexes. So do you just hold a World portfolio of financial assets according to market weights? If you deviate from that in an...

retiredjg wrote: ↑Fri Mar 17, 2023 8:47 am

Allan Roth wrote: The 1099 tax form on my little $5,000 direct indexing experiment is 86 pages!

Wow

Direct indexing is obviously not a good choice for someone who values simplicity.

I don't know, it just seems to me that you can do tax loss harvesting with a whole lot less turnover. I think the algorithms harvest a lot of small capital losses. I am sure there is a logic to this but I am not impressed with a tax statement with pages and pages and page of transactions. There is a point where it just seems like churning.

It certainly makes sense to hold globally diversified bonds as well as stocks, and any other worthwhile investments. If you want to include a small allocation to REITs which I'm not strongly inclined one way or the other, it makes sense to globally diversify those as well. As far as things like gold and the dubious electronic Monopoly money which shall not be named, I don't think any of those type of investments are worthwhile for individual investors so don't think they're relevant to the discussion. Sure, but even if we just talk about equities and bonds, I believe the bond markets are actually larger than the equity markets. So, by the logic of excluding something or not, unless you're holding 45/55 or something like that, you're necess...

Is international really a thing post 90s globalization? Can’t I buy Apple and say I’m globally diversified? Without denying the phenomenon, I think people underestimate how globalized things have been for... centuries. One of the big take-aways from Kindleberger's Manias, Panics, and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises is the extent of international spread going back centuries. There's a little throwaway in Dicken's "A Christmas Carol" in which Dickens analogizes something worthless to "a mere United States’ security," and Trollope's 1875 novel, "The Way We Live Now," involves British investors being gulled by a phony venture to build a Salt-Lake-City-to-Vera-Cruz railway. International investing didn't beg...

I just watched the show and there is a definite left-wing bias in the presentation from beginning to end. There were some entertaining interviews, but overall it seems like a blame shifting attempt by PBS, and otherwise not very informative or interesting. Everything you watch or read from media sources comes from a point of view, as long as the source is honest about their point of view and makes an effort at objectivity, I am okay with it. I will consume media if I think they are honest but sadly most of it is pushing narratives, very one sided, and will leave out material facts that don't support the narrative pushed. There is a bit of cynicism here, I suspect a lot of what pushes media and social media is throwing red meat at whatever ...

Typically, Advisory fees are paid monthly or quarterly. They can be payed in advance or in arrears.

In one of the Gold threads, I came across the J.P. Morgan quote that "Gold is money, everything else is credit." That is really at the center of this discussion. If Gold indeed is money, no wonder why it has had zero real return over millennia. I suppose money just is, it defines itself. But since, I don't know, 1933 or 1944 or 1971, Gold hasn't been money so we are left with credit. So it just might be that most of the history of Gold is irrelevant to this discussion. Perhaps since 1933 or 1944 or 1971, Gold has different characteristics now than it did before. Gold is reduced to being a hedge against fiat currencies, and a volatile hedge at that, and in a currency crisis might not be the ultimate safe haven we hope it will be. F...

Yeah! Right on ChatGPT! Well, it seems like an unwritten rule that every good PowerPoint presentation needs a good cartoon. So if it is good for a human presenter, it ought to be good for artificial intelligence. Not sure AI could do good comedy, too many subtleties in life and in language that a soulless computer could not grasp. Would AI understand innuendo? Of course not, at least not yet. I vividly remember the dot com bust 23 years ago, and those tech companies failed because the e-commerce inphrasture was not developed YET. Today e-commerce has almost taken over retail. So much has changed in the last 20 years, just think of what the world will be like in 2043. Right now, the index fund replaces 99% of human management with just two ...

I'm retired but have not needed my IRA funds yet. After the whole Silicon Valley Bank ordeal, it made me evaluate my own portfolio and I realized about 90% of my assets are uninsured in mutual funds (half are bond funds). Since CD's are going at 5% these days, I was thinking of laddering CDs into my retirement fund for these reasons 1) they are FDIC insured 2) I can cash out the mutual funds with no capital gains and 3) They are actually paying better than some of my bond funds! Kate Believe it or not, this is precisely how I started with my IRA. I had my IRA funds in a Certificate of Deposit at a bank and when I moved rolled the proceeds to another bank. My IRA money was invested this way for 5-6 years until a friend of mine went into the...

Looks like the Feds have moved and the news is good. https://www.cnbc.com/2023/03/12/regulators-unveil-plan-to-stem-damage-from-svb-collapse.html Regulators approved plans Sunday to backstop both depositors and financial institutions associated with Silicon Valley Bank. Officials will unwind both SVB and Signature Bank, ensuring that depositors will have full access to their funds on Monday. The Federal Reserve stepped in with a separate facility that will provide loans up to one year for institutions affected by the bank failures. Today we are taking decisive actions to protect the U.S. economy by strengthening public confidence in our banking system,” leading regulators said in a joint statement. https://www.cnbc.com/2023/03/12/stock-mark...

I'm retired but have not needed my IRA funds yet. After the whole Silicon Valley Bank ordeal, it made me evaluate my own portfolio and I realized about 90% of my assets are uninsured in mutual funds (half are bond funds). Since CD's are going at 5% these days, I was thinking of laddering CDs into my retirement fund for these reasons 1) they are FDIC insured 2) I can cash out the mutual funds with no capital gains and 3) They are actually paying better than some of my bond funds! Since the general rule of thumb is to put higher risk/return funds in IRA's, it seems a little crazy to put CD's in an IRA - but to me, it makes sense. Is my logic mistaken? Kate Believe it or not, this is precisely how I started with my IRA. I had my IRA funds in ...

One reason that P/E ratios have been moving up. More value is being created that what the accountants can measure. Or, using discounted cash flow valuation (DCF) models, cheap money allowed for growth stocks (proportionally more earnings in the future than present) to have valuation expansion. Which is / will be unwound with more expensive money. Yes, monetary policy has a big effect upon valuation of financial instruments, hence the old Wall Street saying to not fight the tape or fight the Fed. Easy monetary policy lifted a whole lot of boats, it is interesting to see what happens when monetary policy is tightened. One effect is the recent Silicon Valley Bank failure, I did last night read through that entire thread. So as Warren Buffett ...

Except that when you get to extremes of sentiment, markets aren't efficient. Euphoria and panic are not efficient. Markets are not rational 100% of the time. Those unexpected moments are exactly the kind of things that drive a huge chunk of market movement and don't show up in backtesting as each mega event has unique dynamics. For example Covid, and the ensuing response, doesn't appear in backtesting data. Similarly, backtesting doesn't give insight into why the present equity risk premium, if 10 year stock forecasts based on valuations are to be believed, seems much lower than historically. I have used Portfolio Visualizer for back tests, and I will use actual funds as proxy for asset classes so that I can get an example of real world re...

Except that when you get to extremes of sentiment, markets aren't efficient. Euphoria and panic are not efficient. Markets are not rational 100% of the time. Those unexpected moments are exactly the kind of things that drive a huge chunk of market movement and don't show up in backtesting as each mega event has unique dynamics. For example Covid, and the ensuing response, doesn't appear in backtesting data. Similarly, backtesting doesn't give insight into why the present equity risk premium, if 10 year stock forecasts based on valuations are to be believed, seems much lower than historically. I have used Portfolio Visualizer for back tests, and I will use actual funds as proxy for asset classes so that I can get an example of real world re...

Oh my gosh, is there going to be a run on Schwab where people are closing their brokerage accounts there just because of this thread on Bogleheads?

This brings me to yet another point. McQ has used data over a 95 year or so time period, at least as far back as 1926, to reach his conclusions. I am with the good professor here as this is a good data set. So over a 95 year time horizon, two asset classes was probably all you needed. One just had to ride out the volatility. The thing is, I am 63 years old. My time horizon is not 95 years, probably more like 30 years. So I am looking at diversifiers that will buffer portfolio volatility over shorter time horizons. Hence the desire to expand beyond two asset classes. It goes back to the question, how much is too much and how little is too little? A follow up question is where is the point reached where too many asset classes actually decrea...

This brings me to yet another point. McQ has used data over a 95 year or so time period, at least as far back as 1926, to reach his conclusions. I am with the good professor here as this is a good data set. So over a 95 year time horizon, two asset classes was probably all you needed. One just had to ride out the volatility. The thing is, I am 63 years old. My time horizon is not 95 years, probably more like 30 years. So I am looking at diversifiers that will buffer portfolio volatility over shorter time horizons. Hence the desire to expand beyond two asset classes. It goes back to the question, how much is too much and how little is too little? A follow up question is where is the point reached where too many asset classes actually decreas...

The Nedsaid "Kitchen Sink" philosophy towards diversification came from three sources. First, I was continually learning and I couldn't help but notice that different asset classes and investing styles acted differently from each other. Second, I was willing to accept whatever incremental diversification benefits that I could get by adding additional asset classes no matter how small. Third, I was hoping that in a crisis that one of the diversifiers would work well. I did this with the knowledge that there are diminishing diversification benefits as you add more asset classes. The question is how much is too much and how little is too little. What I was implying in my post above is that two asset classes seems like too little to m...

So the good Professor has us down to a two fund portfolio, a U.S. Total Stock Market Index and Intermediate Term US Treasuries. He has pretty much said to diversify into International Stocks if you want to, it might help, but he didn't sound to me all that enthusiastic. So if you want a bit more diversification, I suppose you could combine US Intermediate Term Treasuries with a Global Stock Index fund. He also didn't show much enthusiasm for factors, pretty much said not to get your hopes up too much. Well, what about TIPS? Not much enthusiasm there either. I suppose they are okay but longer term don't seem to do much. So what do you do when neither of your two asset classes are doing very well? Stocks were down and Bonds were down too and ...

Was listening to Kristy and Bryce from the popular FIRE podcast Millenial Revolution and they made a few statements about their strategy that i'm having trouble understanding. Here is the clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sxRt2fAzRi0&t=736s First they claim that if you live off the dividends then you can eliminate the sequence risk. How is this possible? Then they claim that if you just spend the dividends then you're not selling anything - however my understanding of dividends is that it comes off the NAV so getting dividends and spending it is functionally equivalent to NOT getting dividends and then selling shares in that amount. Their suggestion is to invest more in International to increase dividend yield because the US market...

"100 words about Bogleheads" from ChatGPT: Bogleheads is a term that is used to refer to a community of investors who follow the principles of investment guru John Bogle, the founder of Vanguard Group and the creator of the first index fund. The Bogleheads philosophy emphasizes low-cost investing, diversification, and a long-term perspective. Members of the Bogleheads community often discuss and share investment strategies and ideas on forums and in person at local meetups. The Bogleheads approach is based on the belief that most investors are better off in low-cost index funds rather than actively managed funds, and that it is more important to focus on saving and investing consistently over time rather than trying to time the m...

I wonder about taking action based on this thread. (Or is that not recommended?) I have a 50/50 portfolio of Total Bond and Total US Stock. Very low expense (.05/.02) with a YTD (3/3/23) return of 3.5%. I added some rows to my tracking spreadsheet with IT funds to compare to the Total Bond portion of my allocation. I don't think that I have access to ETFs in my 401k, so the closest match I could find to the recommended (?) VGIT was the Vanguard Intermediate Treasury Fund (VFIUX; er 0.10). When I did a compare using Google Finance, VFIUX seemed to closely track VGIT, at least YTD. The returns YTD (3/3/23) were -0.51 and -0.46. The YTD returns are obviously lower when compared to Total Bond (0.47). Is that the expectation this year, current ...

"100 words about Bogleheads" from ChatGPT: Bogleheads is a term that is used to refer to a community of investors who follow the principles of investment guru John Bogle, the founder of Vanguard Group and the creator of the first index fund. The Bogleheads philosophy emphasizes low-cost investing, diversification, and a long-term perspective. Members of the Bogleheads community often discuss and share investment strategies and ideas on forums and in person at local meetups. The Bogleheads approach is based on the belief that most investors are better off in low-cost index funds rather than actively managed funds, and that it is more important to focus on saving and investing consistently over time rather than trying to time the m...

...For some goofy reason, Gold does seem to help stabilize a portfolio without hurting returns too much. I think of the Harry Browne Permanent Portfolio. Not sure what the secret sauce is... I think the secret sauce is backtesting and hindsight. We have the real-world track record of the Permanent Portfolio Mutual Fund, personally advised by Harry Browne in the early years, with real money and real expenses and no ability to rewrite history by substituting results from a different portfolio. Source https://imgur.com/42EdjkJ.png The actual result of the gold-free Wellesley Income Fund seem to me to have been better in every way than those of the Permanent Portfolio Fund. Higher return, lower volatility (StDev), and about the same maximum dr...

Negative correlation in a crash is an aspiration. Non-correlating assets don't always non-correlate in a crash. Those super-duper diversifiers that are supposed to rescue us in a crisis don't always work as intended. Magnitudes also matter. If stocks dive 50% but gold declines 10% the two correlated, but the diversification reduced the loss compared to being solely in the worst asset alone. For some goofy reason, Gold does seem to help stabilize a portfolio without hurting returns too much. I think of the Harry Browne Permanent Portfolio. Not sure what the secret sauce is, I suspect part of the answer is disciplined rebalancing, keeping whatever allocation you have to Gold constant. McQ was going to address this, I am looking forward to hi...

Negative correlation in a crash is an aspiration. Non-correlating assets don't always non-correlate in a crash. Those super-duper diversifiers that are supposed to rescue us in a crisis don't always work as intended. A big reason is that you never know what other market participants might do, particularly in a crisis. There are good diversifiers that work much of the time during a crisis but they don't work in all scenarios. So do the best you can to be well diversified but also prepare to be disappointed when things don't work out as hoped. Long Term Treasuries are the perfect diversifiers to Stocks in most bear market scenarios but not all, 1973-1974 and 2022 being notable exceptions. To hedge against unexpected inflation, commodities are...

Hi everyone, To date, I've paid $290k into BIV (my cost) and market value is $245k , so "loss" of about $45k. :annoyed Of course I do realize it's not a real loss until I sell, and I do get ~$560 a month in dividends from it. I chose BIV initially when I formed my portfolio to balance against stocks. (alloc. is ~60/40 stocks/bonds right now). Having said that, I have two questions: - I don't really understand why there is a loss,i.e. why it has gone down so much. I thought bonds are pretty stable as in they don't fluctuate much. Perhaps if I understand why it has fallen so much I can decide if I keep doing what I am doing or look at something else. - I have DRIP turned on on BIV. Should I at least turn off DRIP and start placing ...

Nice review on the 3 fund portfolio. Don't know why he took a swipe at Larry Swedroe. "Infamous" seems to have been a somewhat inadvertent word choice. Elsewhere on the site where he includes a Larry Swedroe portfolio: "The Larry Swedroe Portfolio – or simply the Larry Portfolio – was created by the legendary evidence-based investing author and advisor Larry Swedroe." Elsewhere: "Larry Swedroe is the director of research for Buckingham and the BAM Alliance. Swedroe is a prolific writer and contributor in the investing world. You’ll see him making forum posts on the Bogleheads Forum as well as writing syndicated articles around the web for sites like ETF.com, Yahoo Finance, and Forbes. If you’ve read my take on divi...

The purchase, held for many years, is an example that runs counter to much discussion that minimizes consideration of dividends. Companies that are stable, regularly increase dividends and that are held for long periods of time can produce excellent returns. A simple example that individual circumstances are important in financial decision making and that though there are few counters to the Boglehead process, nuance suggests there are other aspects for consideration within that process at times. Tim I know this is a mild heresy on this forum, I agree with you, I do believe that income from a portfolio is important, yield is important, both dividend yield on stocks and interest yield from bonds. And yet, ironically, the holding company Ber...

You absolutely not hire a Financial Advisor for the purposes of beating the market. Most active managers fail to outperform their benchmarks, a big reason being the expense ratio of the fund. Another reason is that markets are pretty efficient, there is a lot of human brainpower and a lot of computing power looking for market anomalies that can be exploited. The odds of a Financial Advisor doing better than the markets after costs are pretty slim. A good reasons for hiring an Advisor is setting up, maintaining, and monitoring your portfolio. I wouldn't hire an Advisor just for portfolio management, I would want financial and retirement planning along with that. Perhaps you want advice on a big financial decision you need to make. A big issu...

My best guess is that John Bogle's personal investments about tracked the market. The bulk of his personal wealth was in index funds though he had monies in his beloved Wellington Fund and a big investment in his son's quant fund. He also owned 100 shares of T. Rowe Price so that he could track how a competitor was doing. Bogle practiced what he preached. As far as I know, Mr. Bogle was never a portfolio manager.

Vanguard Personal Advisor Services is one of my default suggestions for those desiring Advisory Services. From what I have read in the VPAS threads, they will put you in a good and simpler portfolio and perform basic retirement and financial planning, which is what most people really need. For a person of very high net worth and a more complex financial situation, you might want a more comprehensive service. For example, I am almost 100% certain that Vanguard won't do your taxes for you. Very wealthy people might desire white glove service, which I am not sure Vanguard is able to provide. There is an Advisory firm that actually runs the business end for high earning entertainers. This is as comprehensive as I can imagine, don't think Vangua...

One thing you could do is to do Roth conversions up to the limit of your existing tax bracket. It makes no sense to me to put yourself into the next tax bracket up with a Roth conversion. You could model this with tax software, run scenarios and see how your taxes are affected. ACA subsidies is the complicating factor. We're in the 12% bracket. Let's say our expected income is $50K (family of 3)...converting $60K of Roth funds (taking income up to $110K, which is close to the top of the bracket after standard deduction), results in $8000 less in subsidies for the year. Worth it? Since so many things interact with each other in the tax code, it is best to model big financial decisions with tax software so that you can be prepared. You might...

.... Nedsaid: During the post game show, McQ, puts a good wrap on the game. McQ: In sum: -If you are truly serious about maximizing wealth gain, don’t own any bonds. -If you are truly serious about minimizing risk, don’t own anything but T-bills. If you are looking for a happy medium—if you are willing to sacrifice a hefty amount of return in exchange for an even more substantial reduction in risk—you will find that sweet spot in blends of intermediate Treasuries and stocks where the stock allocation is 50% or less. Well done, nedsaid! At least, I certainly enjoyed it :D Thank you. I wanted, like a good student, to show interest in the course. So I cared enough to write a paper, so to speak, as a response to your thread. It took about thre...

1.6 million net worth with job that pays at least 136k by the time you will take the cruise. If you invested nothing further, you would still at a minimum have a pension that 108k a year plus another 24k a year for social security, plus easily another 40k just from your portfolio. You’ll have more money in retirement than you do now and you’re wondering if you can afford it? I’m not trying to be rude but isn’t the answer obvious? And if it isn’t, I’m sorry. You could pay for the cruise just from interest in your accounts. You could pay for cruise with the thousands you get in gifts. Btw, I have been on a Disney cruise. Only cruise I’ve ever been on so can’t compare. It was fun for being a cruise. I’m kind of a picky eater so each dinner wa...