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RVD

thx for the advice! looks like going with a pro this time around is probably the right way to do it. i am aware that i can get some relief on the US taxes side from the taxes that i've paid in Korea but if you add in all of the various perks like tuition reimbursement, housing, company car, etc. the...

RVD

i moved abroad this year in may 2019 and started a new job with a foreign company on may 1, 2019. i have been doing a lot of research and have always done my own taxes with turbotax but due to complexity, i'm thinking that maybe i should get a cpa this time? fwiw, i am from the US (washington state ...

RVD

I just put in a sell order for a little bit of it. The stock that vested a few weeks ago is down a little bit so I'm selling that along with some shares that went up a little bit. Since it's been at this for the entire year, stock earlier in the year have already seen some gains and I'd prefer to pa...

RVD

yeah i invested in the total stock market and the total bond market (roughly 50/50) with my company stock earnings. i fully get that all individual stocks are risky. i started my career in the 90s so i lived through the dot com bust. i was lucky enough back then to have the foresight to take 50% of ...

RVD

funny that you mention BTC, i did invest in bitcoin. sold half of my stake last year though. and no didn't have much but you didn't need much to make a good return. it's a public company. when i ask myself if i would have turned around and bought our company stock with the proceeds the answer is yes...

RVD

The company that I work for allows you to opt in once a year to automatically sell all of your stock (RSU) as it vests. I have been working here for 4+ years and have always opted in to doing that so every month when my stock vests, it just automatically sells it and I get a bank wire every month wi...

RVD

ok i'll probably check on a tax professional. i did not establish residency in CA meaning that i never got a CA drivers license (i still just kept my WA one) and i never registered a car in CA (kept it in WA - actually never brought it over to CA). i can find records of dates when i was in CA vs out...

RVD

I live in WA state (no state income tax) but for work, I transferred from our WA office to our CA office in Dec 2016 (I was put on a new team that was CA based). Payroll started to withhold CA state income taxes starting mid December 2016 (a few hundred bucks total). For my 2016 tax returns I filed ...

RVD

When we moved up here 4 years ago I was in a similar situation but at the time I took the advice of everyone (which was "rent first and then buy later"). I rented a house, then sold the primary residence, then bought a house and paid penalties to get out of my rental. I'd prefer not to do ...

RVD

Hi Everyone, Here is my situation. I have roughly $1m in savings and investments of which around $400k of that is in IRA/401k/529/etc. and the other $600k is in taxable investments, bank checking/savings, etc. I used to live in Southern California and at the time bought a second property (townhouse ...

RVD

I have read through their website and it looks like they don't subscribe to basic MPT. This is fine but I question any algorithm that they have built that is simply tested by back dating across history. I don't know if bull markets over time show similar patterns but I'm guessing that they do not. I...

RVD

So, you still want to go to VG and close the backdoor Roth option for her!!. well, next year my income won't be in as high of a bracket so i will probably convert her rollover IRA to a roth and then do a backdoor roth. So what is it that you gain by not withdrawing the net salary after payroll taxe...

RVD

Yeah reading into it, even though it is an S corp, because our only 2 employees are myself and my spouse, we should be eligible for a vanguard individual 401k. I started filling out Vanguard paperwork and it looks like this will be ok. We'll see once I send this in and am accepted / declined. As for...

RVD

I like to keep my investments at vanguard so i'll look into an individual 401k.

As for me, I'm also an officer in the company (my wife and I). Will I be able to contribute anything or probably not since I already max out my $53k/year with my employer?

RVD

Sorry, one more key piece of info that I left out. Wife has a previously employer 401k rolled over into an IRA. It is pre-tax. It has around $50k in it but I am in a high tax bracket and don't want to roll this account over to a roth. So I guess this rules out a backdoor roth. Solo 401k I guess is w...

RVD

Hi, I tried to do some searches but it got really confusing so I thought I'd ask here. Here is our situation: 1) Wife and I are married file jointly. I make good income so we are over the max for a roth IRA. 2) Wife is self employed via an S corp. She bills clients and those clients write checks to ...

RVD

Thanks! 1) Yes, I included cash in my AA. I will take your advice and remove it. However, I think $180k is still more than the typical 6 month (or even 9 months) guideline. Mortgage + property taxes for my main home run around $50k/year and mortgage + property taxes for our investment condo run arou...

RVD

Quick Update: I posted here in October 2014 and finally got my finances in order over the next few months. I didn't contribute enough to my 401k over the years and saved mostly to taxable so that was my biggest change. I was also heavy into individual stocks so I moved a lot of my taxable over to Va...

RVD

lol, not enough info here though. do you have other savings (cash, taxable investments, etc.)? at 36 years old and depending on your level of risk that you are comfortable with, etc. i would do something like 80/20 equities/bonds or 70% total stock market/20% bonds/10% reit. if you want to go with i...

RVD

i have purchased gold bars and coins from apmex and they are fine. i don't buy much but just dabble a little bit.

i mostly buy american eagle coins because i like the US based coins but maybe i'll look at more 24k stuff as well.

i also buy some silver coins as well. all through apmex.

RVD

I think that there is a difference between using past performance to determine future results and core fundamentals. For example, the equities / bond split thing may seem like it's based on past performance but it's also core fundamentals. Bonds have a lower variance over time than the stock market ...

RVD

I'm with you on this. I don't see a need for you to sell your home and move up to a more expensive home simply to leverage up on real estate. When selling your home, there are also the various fees, taxes, etc. that add up resulting in a loss. There's also no guarantee that real estate will go up, e...

RVD

aw, sucks that vanguard doesn't do solo 401k rollovers.

i guess i could look into fidelity. it's only around $45k so i would just park it into a low ER index fund on fidelity.

RVD

sure, i don't mind the hijack. looks like i'll do the backdoor roth for myself. for my wife, she doesn't have a 401k plan at work. it is actually our own s-corp that we own for her graphic design work. all money earned goes to the corp and she just collects a minimal paycheck from it. i'll consider ...

RVD

1) You're free to hijack this thread since I did get my original question asked. 2) I took another look at the details and realized that my wife has a rollover IRA. we file our taxes married filed jointly. i don't want to convert her rollover IRA to a roth this year because i'm in a high tax bracket...

RVD

ok thanks. sounds like i'm good to go. i already converted the after-tax to roth (although i converted to roth 401k instead of roth ira). i ended up doing roth 401k because the ERs for the funds that i have access to via vanguard at work are lower than the ERs that i would get on my own. this is the...

RVD

Hi Everyone, I have already maxed out my company 401k + after-tax 401k for the year. I am wondering what else I should invest in other than taxable investments. I am thinking of putting in $11k for my wife and I into our respective roth IRAs. We don't have any other IRAs (no traditional, etc.). Well...

RVD

i guess i can just skip it this year and not do any ira contribution for my wife. next year when my tax bracket is a little lower (but still too high to contribute directly to a roth), i can consider doing this: 1) contribute $5500 to a new nondeductible after-tax IRA. i would then have this new acc...

RVD

our income is too high to contribute directly to a roth. we file married filed jointly and i make too much.

RVD

I read through the wiki but this is pretty confusing and I don't want to mess this up so I figured I'd ask here before I start initiating anything. My wife is no longer working full time (as of 2 years ago). She had a pre-tax 401k at work and we have since rolled it over to an IRA. It is sitting in ...

RVD

just do it. it sounds like you can easily adjust your lifestyle to fit your new budget. people spend money because it's there and if you haven't had it for a long time because you spent a lot of years in school, residency, etc. they feel entitled to spend some of it. i don't see anything wrong with ...

RVD

congrats! 7 figures at 38 years old is a great feat!

Now share the knowledge to us older newbies...

RVD

A Visa Black card is nothing...just like any other visa card. If you are ever offered the Amex Centurion (black card), it is a completely different realm of prestige and people pay $7,500 for initiation and $2,500 per year for the privilege. Most spend well over $250k year on the card and have a net...

RVD

I have one friend who spent 20 years in the US military to get his military pension (retired pay) and then is now in about year 15 of his defense career at northrup and is expecting his second pension from northrup when he retires in another 10+ years. He was not happy to read this thread but he als...

RVD

Thanks for the info. Yeah, i am fully aware (as our my friends) that pension plans can and will likely change in the future (as well as reduced costs for health care). BTW, if it matters, my friends and family work for Boeing and government labs (Lawrence Livermore Labs, Los Alamos National Lab, etc...

RVD

I am familiar with PBGC and know about the limits.

Thx.

RVD

I would also revise the AA to less equity but that's just me. A 50% loss in the the stock market (37.5% loss in my portfolio) would really cause me to re-think retirement if my expenses were $100k/year after tax. I have similar expenses as you (although I think I live a less frugal lifestyle) and ac...

RVD

I was having a discussion today over dinner with some friends and one of the guys gets a pension from a large company (private sector). It is a well known and established company with a long history, etc. However, one of the other guys in the group was saying that he has heard of some companies gett...

RVD

I bought some USO in December. It's down a lot so I may load up some more. It's in my gambling account though that I used to buy individual stocks.

RVD

A few quick things: 1) I would get out of the target retirement funds and invest according to your desired asset allocation in a tax advantageous way (i.e., put all of your bonds in your retirement and none in taxable, etc.). 2) Yes you probably should just cancel the whole life assuming that your w...

RVD

i actually find it hard to believe that any advisor last year lost 4%. there's just no way that he could have invested that poorly. in any case, i used to think that 1% or 2% was low and insignificant and worth not having to deal with this stuff...but i have taken it over and i actually enjoy managi...

RVD

when i moved my ira from etrade to vanguard, due to dividends, etc. that came late, i had a balance of $.53 in my etrade ira. i asked what my options were to close the account and it was either to get a check cut for $25 or tell them to just disregard it (let them keep it). i let them keep it.

RVD

I think it's easy for folks in here to say that financial advisors exploit, etc. But I had one for many years and at the time that I started with him, he did provide a valuable service to me. He was able to work with me to come up with a plan for long term savings, etc. He also got me to wrap my hea...

RVD

lol, great letter. i broke up with my advisor last year. i didn't write him an email like that but i did slowly move some accounts out from him to etrade saying that i was going to manage things. i did it slowly though... 1) closed an account and took all the money when i bought a new house. he did ...

RVD

I wrote before about my spousal dynamics in that I handle all of the finances, budgeting, and retirement planning. My wife simply doesn't really have a head for it although recently she has shown a little bit of interest and I have tried to teach and include her. However, the problem is that she mak...

RVD

ok thanks! i'll try that. i don't care about the funds but just don't want it to bite me in the arse later on.

RVD

quick update. The rollover IRA that i had on etrade ($87k) was successfully transferred over to my company pre-tax 401k about a week ago. After the check was cut and sent, etc. I guess there was a dividend or something like that because although the balance on my rollover IRA was $0, the balance in ...

RVD

I vote for #1. The target funds are nice but you seem like you know what you're doing so you can add the extended market and bonds at your own ratios on Vanguard to get your 90/10 equities/bonds rather than being a little too s&p 500 heavy. At your rate of savings, you'll be at 6 figures and bey...

RVD

I would move all of it over to Vanguard and try to stop dealing with the advisor. The more you have to talk to the advisor, the more uncomfortable they are going to make it as they keep trying to convince you not to manage this on your own so talk to Vanguard first and see if they can handle all of ...

RVD

OP and I are probably similar in age. I also started investing back then (actually started my first job in 1996 but didn't really have any money to invest until 1999 and it has more or less been flat). My only saving grace is that I have made decent money over the years and have been able to save bu...

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