Bogleheads.org

afan

There are already plenty of opportunities to debate proxy proposals. Even before the huge rise of mutual funds few investors voted their proxies at all. There are lots of people today who own lots of stock directly and could vote their shares. They could but they don't. If you really want to vote yo...

afan

Not to disparage the delivery people. Some do a great job, others less so. But I don't believe that the quality of work depends on a personal relationship. How about this? I don't have a personal relationship with the people who deliver gasoline to gas stations I use. It is highly important to me th...

afan

The most important steps would be seeing an attorney and protecting the physical assets of the house and contents. Attorney should design the legal protection plan. This would include blocking relatives from somehow getting FIL's name on a will. It might include putting the assets in a trust with ei...

afan

"With public markets becoming so efficient it has become difficult to produce returns in excess of market gains, so institutional investors are looking to private markets to generate alpha, he said." https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-10-24/blackrock-sees-institutional-clients-moving-to-p...

afan

Except for the quibble about 1.99 vs 2%, the Fidelity VISA Is the same as Citi double cash. It gives a straight 2% on all purchases that will automatically post to a Fidelity fund. You can have it go to a money market fund. Maybe to the Fidelity CMA. Simplest 2% deal I know about. At your level of s...

afan

I hope to have our networth continue to increase during retirement. It should under some pretty conservative estimates of real returns on our investments. The after tax value of SS and RMDs will be considerably more than we have any intention of or interest in spending. So we will be reinvesting the...

afan

On some financial forum, it may have been whitecoatinvestor, someone reported their experience with an automated TLH service. It produced an 89 page 1099, listing the many security sales for the year. It not only made preparing the tax return a nightmare, it accomplished almost nothing. Apparently m...

afan

Although we got lucky, if we had it to do over again we would not have used UTMAs. Forcing the money into the hands of a very young adult is a serious problem. Even if your kids turn out to be mature and responsible, using the money only for rational purposes, you give up asset protection. The money...

afan

You could be right about Vanguard not giving you a feeling of personal relationship. I don't need a personal relationship with an employee of my mutual fund company any more than I need a personal relationship with my mail deliverer. That said, the Vanguard article does list this personal relationsh...

afan

As for correlations VTI vs BND -0.02, effectively zero BND vs PCRIX 0.14, low but not zero VTI vs PCRIX 0.54, not much of a diversifier It did not make sense and it did not work. CCF managers and investment advisors made a lot of money on the commodities play. Has anyone seen any estimates of how m...

afan

As for correlations VTI vs BND -0.02, effectively zero BND vs PCRIX 0.14, low but not zero VTI vs PCRIX 0.54, not much of a diversifier It did not make sense and it did not work. CCF managers and investment advisors made a lot of money on the commodities play. Has anyone seen any estimates of how mu...

afan

But you were not supposed to look at the performance of the asset in isolation. One was supposed to add it to a portfolio of stocks and bonds, exploiting the low correlation with both to improve risk adjusted return. According to portfolio visualizer, if you added a 10% allocation to PCRIX, one of t...

afan

I am not sure the academic papers made this sound too good to be true. That was more on the marketing side of investment advisors. There was excellent evidence that the returns about match inflation. So it had to be dressed up to look like something investors should want. After the hard reality came...

afan

Silly article. It assumes that everyone is a lazy jerk, doing the minimum amount of work they can get away with and still manage to live on this earth. From such an attitude, it is easy to see the puzzlement that someone could have their material needs met and continue to work. If all work is so hor...

afan

There are two issues, keep them separate 1. Is it appropriate to hold such high allocations in cash? Most people would say no. It is possible that there may be certain situations for certain clients when this is reasonable. Holding money for a down payment, for example. As a default allocation for e...

afan

I did not see anything about Ivy League hedge funds. Only about endowments and their investments. Since all the Ivies are nonprofits, I don't know what an "Ivy League hedge fund" would be. The usual response to comparisons between a 60/40 portfolio and endowments is that nonprofits value the diversi...

afan

No one runs an index fund manually. To create your own index fund you would need to automate all the trading. To reproduce what index funds do you would also need to use options and futures to stay fully invested while some of your money is temporarily in cash. Running an index fund is not as simple...

afan

Nate79 wrote: ↑
Mon Oct 14, 2019 10:18 am
Schwab offsets cash with higher yielding, higher risk bonds to result in a no cost robo service...

Good point about thinking skills.
Except that one could use the same strategy with a higher paying money market fund. It is clearly NOT no cost.

afan

Both PAS and the Schwab product are designed to gather assets with the attendant fees. Vanguard, being Vanguard, is upfront about the cost. Schwab hides some of the cost in the cash allocation. This encourages people to simply look at the stated fee and conclude Schwab is cheaper. It makes it appear...

afan

In a separate question: How is providing and marketing PAS beneficial to Vanguard's owners (the funds, and through them the fund shareholders)? Less turnover in fund holdings. PAS will not move in and out of Vanguard funds to chase performance or in response to what some investing guru says will ha...

afan

The risk of investing based on a cult of personality. Whether the person gives advice on the radio should have no effect on the decision to invest with him. There are lots of opportunities to invest with large heavily regulated mutual funds with no assumptions needed about the honesty of a particula...

afan

I probably would not do it but using it to pay down the mortgage is not a bad idea. OP says there will be no problem paying off the loan, so no risk. The loan rate is substantially less than the mortgage rate, so there would be a profit. It would be worth several hundred dollars, less if the mortgag...

afan

Vanguard probably makes little money on stock trading as it us. Not a major activity for most of its investors, commissions on stocks already go to $2 on moderate sized accounts and zero for somewhat larger accounts. There is just not that much revenue at stake. Even marketing to those who plan to t...

afan

Buying an old house and renovating can be a good deal if there is some combination of Deteriorated house in a high priced neighborhood. You can get it at a discount because of condition, renovate and get your money back as the value catches up with the neighborhood. You really love the old house loo...

afan

I suspect PAS is both a way to bring in some money- charging a lot more than Vanguard collects from expense ratios- and a way to keep assets at Vanguard. PAS will always put the money in Vanguard products and will not trade in and out. So this gives Vanguard a large stable base of assets. If I were ...

afan

If you buy only highly liquid ETFs the spread will be one cent. Little opportunity for price improvement.

afan

My wife and I are planning to move to another state w/in the next couple of years. If we get a will done by an attorney in our state will we have to start from scratch with another attorney in the new state? You might tell the attorney who does your documents now that you are planning to move. Depe...

afan

These are typical services of a corporate trustee. Except for the part about taking over when you become incapacitated. Does the company have your durable power of attorney? Most corporate trustees will not do that. Even if they have a DPOA, how will they know when you are no longer capable of manag...

afan

And that is why you need an attorney as well as software. Someone who knows what they are doing can write the will manually. Someone who does not know what they are doing can use software to prepare a document without realizing that it does not do what they want.

afan

We have a younger generation heir who has our DPOA and is successor trustee. Knows that they can bring in Vanguard or some other entity as co trustee if managing our simple financial lives becomes a hassle. Mt primary plan for assuring mental acuity is my job performance. As long as I am doing well ...

afan

Having someone manage your investments will do little to solve the problem of cognitive decline. Leaving assets in a handful of index funds dies not require much mental acuity. Resisting sales pitches mat take more. But an advisor cannot keep you from buying that over priced annuity or penny stock. ...

afan

Before doing anything about protection from malpractice exposure, get some information about the coverage her employer provides. Many health care professionals get their coverage from their employers, it may be perfectly reliable.

afan

There are variable universal life policies that guarantee no negative years. But they charge so much for this downside protection that they do not come close to matching the index. Plus, they will cap payment at some figure that cuts off the really good years with high market returns. Since the comp...

afan

Worth the effort to call and check. Banks have been known to make mistakes in their records.

afan

It may be worthwhile to get overall financial advice. Roth would be a good source for that. Ferri, as far as I know, only advises on investing, not on the other decisions that one would make having recently come into money. If the OP does not want to DIY the investing, then Vanguard PAS could be goo...

afan

But "call us" is not much of an explanation of what they are offering to do. It seems to be something different from flagship, PAS or trustee services. It is not legal or funancial estate plannung. There are 4 people listed as the team. Two are CFP's. The other two have no financial or estate planni...

afan

Is it true that PAS does not charge its AUM fee for cash held in the account? Money market fund- no fee, short term bond fund- AUM fee? Seems odd. I was struck that the average age for all the investors was early - mid 60's. So the Vanguard 60/40 might be driven mainly by age There was also little v...

afan

aqan, As you can see from these replies, traditions vary widely. It depends on the couple, the families and to some extent the region. Since the invitation is from a close friend, just ask. Mention that you have never been to an American wedding. You have already taken care of the gift. Ask about ho...

afan

This is not worth so much angst. You got a good answer in the other thread. Fiduciary is nor a magic wand that assures that all the advice will be perfect. It does not mean the advisor has to find you the least expensive options, even if they come from a competitor. Vanguard typically will have good...

afan

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afan

To get back to the point. Some parts of the financial services industry function in a fiduciary capacity and some do not. In general, the SEC-regulated part is fiduciary and the FINRA-regulated part is not. There is a "solely incidental" exception that acknowledges that brokers have selling securiti...

afan

I did not think brokers act as fiduciaries. Neither Fidelity nor anyone else. It is possible that some parts of Fidelity, a very large organization, has employees whose jobs conform to a fiduciary standard. Perhaps when they are the advisor for employer retirement funds, for example. Brokers are not...

afan

The idea might work for a very narrow subset of the population. They need enough money to put it away for many years with a high probability of never getting anything back. But also little enough money to have a reasonable concern about running out. They then need to estimate their personal life exp...

afan

We stayed in our starter house for 18 years. Only moved when careers took us to another city. We loved that house. It had plenty of land, being in the exurbs, but a painfully long commute. The money we saved by having a small mortgage and low taxes was all invested and we are way better off for it. ...

afan

In spite of their claims to highly personalized investment plans, the companies are not set up do do things completely differently for each trust. To do that would require far more employees and much higher expenses. They might do unique investing for a large trust that required it. For a typical bo...

afan

Vanguard would have no say over who traded VTI or how frequently. If you want to day trade in this fund the etf would be the way to do it. Trading in the etf does not impose any costs on the fund or its shareholders. Any costs would be borne by the parties to the trade. They have both. Some investor...

afan

The industry players are motivated to earn money. There is nearly no money to be made in cap weighted indexing. So the active management part of the industry has to come up with something else. One needs a story and high enough fees to pay the salespeople to do the hard work of selling them. The hig...

afan

Under a traditional trust company relationship it seems that the profit comes from managing the assets. If Schwab puts money into its own broad market index fund rather than VTI the expense ratio is so low that there is not much profit to be made. I can understand why they might prefer to keep it in...

afan

The following is NOT about any particular individual. It is NOT an attack on anyone. It is an observation about the nature of the investment advisory industry. Start with the financial advice that is often preached on bogleheads: Do it yourself. Don't pay anyone anything to do this simple work for y...

afan

The amount you need can be estimated better than jus X times income. You need to look at your overall financial picture. How much you own in total. What are your current expenseS? Are you saving for kids' education? Planning to move to a more expensive house? Compare your future expenses to your ass...

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