>> ignited the formation of this country based on an individuals right to bitch about taxes (Boston Bay Tea Party).
Not quite a sophisticated reading of the history or the events or the reasons.
This is sort of a start, and droll as well:
www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/05/03/tea-and-sympathy-2
'Today’s reactionary history of early America, reductive, unitary, and, finally, dangerously anti-pluralist, ... compresses a quarter century of political contest into “the founding,” as if the ideas contained in Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense,” severing the bonds of empire, were no different from those in the Constitution, establishing a strong central government. '
etc.

I had two Raymond James accounts. Closed one and they left $0.35 in the account with their miscalculation and sent me statements in the mail monthly for over a year costing $0.79 in postage only. I finally informed them of the situation. Next, I decided to close the other account with the all the waste I witnessed personally. They could not get the amount correct and had to issue three different checks. This went on for some time. Finally they attached a penalty to the last check which I tried to contest much to my dismay. Their comment was ...it is a new fee to close the account.

MainStay Funds (New York Life)
http://www.nylinvestments.com/polos/MSSR06-101450680.pdf

FYI: Where to find shelter amid a market that has returned to dramatic dives and ascents.
Regards,
Ted
http://www.kiplinger.com/printstory.php?pid=12894

Eat copious quantiles of macaroni & cheese and your grocery bill shrinks - but your waist line expands. :)
It absolutely costs more to eat healthy.

The flip side of that is that health insurance may cost less for those (healthy) people who can most afford to pay for insurance.
Found this related item about North Shore - LIJ Care Connect - a new individual insurer, affiliated with North Shore LIJ (a hospital complex serving primarily Long Island, NY):
"North Shore-LIJ Care Connect ... [is requesting] for next year a decrease of 1.3 percent. ... North Shore-LIJ also had a large proportion of members take up Platinum memberships—the most expensive—which could indicate that their customer base was generally better off and therefore in better health, and lower cost to insure."
http://www.northshorelij.com/hospitals/news/behind-new-yorks-2015-health-insurance-rates

Keep the weather warm & hurricanes out of there tampabay. We'll be hanging out next month.
---
I've found we tend to adjust our life styles to our income by and large. Pitch cable and save $100+ a month.
Rely soley on public wifi and save another $50-100.
Drive a clunker and save a bunch on car & insurance.
Eat copious quantiles of macaroni & cheese and your grocery bill shrinks - but your waist line expands. :)
It absolutely costs more to eat healthy.

Howdy @mrdarcey
Your points are all very valid. We have always discussed this aspect with the young ones in the family. One in particular, obtained her law degree from the U. of Michigan. 'Course, she was young and inspired and thought about going to D.C. to start work; kick butt and take names thing. We directed her to the below web site or one very similar; so that she could determine how much money she needed for salary to live there, versus Michigan. She has a comfortable job, in Michigan; associated with her degree and a nice home. Most of Michigan is very affordable.
Other family members recently returned to Michigan with their last residence being in South Orange, NJ. They had a decent home in that city; but not the most expensive one in the area; and their annual real estate taxes were $25,000. Ouch!
Compare cost of living
Thanks for your input.
Catch

My two bond funds have annual returns of +9.7% 5yr, 7+% 10 yr
I EXPECT the same for the future, I guess that's stability... or stable enough

I hope you're right. 7-10% annualized returns for junk bond funds going foreward would seem indicative of a robust economy and correspondingly strong stock market (not that I mind). Remember, however, that junk, like most bonds. also had declining interest rates as a tail wind over the past 10 years. I'm not at all certain rates can continue to decline.

Really? A $1000/week isn't enough? Change your lifestyle then.
p.s. I lived in the Bay Area (Berkeley to be precise) on a $1000/month, with 2 kids, no problem. Guess it all depends.

I know I'll probably get scoffed at, but where I live (MD/Wash DC), $52,000 might get you check to check in a studio apartment, frugal or not, particularly if you are younger and just starting out.
If you live in the closest and cheapest livable suburb in VA (which you'll have to do because living out further will mean you need a car, and living in DC or MD will mean much higher taxes), you'll take home $734.50 weekly of your $1000 salary. That's $3182.83 per month.
Almost no leasing agent will even talk to you unless you make over $45k here, and then you better have sterling credit. 400 sq ft. studios start at $1250 as a rule; one bedrooms go for around $1500-$1700. That doesn't include utilities, internet, phone, water, transportation, food, health care, clothing, or any other outstanding debt.
$3182.50 - take home
-$1250 - rent
-$ 100 - utilities/electric/water (my BGE bill + water averaged about $125 for a 1BR for the past 4 years)
-$ 50 - internet (no cable)
-$ 90 - 2GB Phone contract w/ phone through AT&T
-$ 350 - Health insurance (figured @8% of $52k)
-$ 200 - Transportation on METRO (@$8 p/d, 5 days a week + $25 p/m)
-$ 380 - Food (@ $12.50 p/d. It isn't just rent that's steep here)
-$ 375 - Student Loan payments (that's about $50,000 @ 6.8% over 20 years, because you aren't getting a $52,000 a year job here without at least 1 or 2 degrees, usually at a higher cost than this.)
_______________
$387.50, or $89.42 p/w before car, clothes, and other misc. expenses even start. And that is without any investing in a retirement account to get that $1M or savings towards a downpayment on a house. The obvious solution is to get a roommate, but that is only going to knock your monthly rent down about $400. You could also move some place us, but plenty of us are from here and have family, or have skills that are only employable in DC.
And people don't even want to know what NYC costs.

The comment about SS waiting from age 62 to 65 and the comment about CPI not keeping up with "real" inflation are two different things. The SS payout goes up each year you wait based on change in life expectancy, not based on CPI. The inflation change is in addition to whatever the life expectancy adjustment is. For example, if you are 62 you are expected to live another (approximately) 21 years. If you wait a year, you now are expected to live another 20 years so the payout goes up about 5% because of that.

Performance PRHYX More... source morningstar
Growth of 10,000 10,429 9,996 10,563 13,388 16,083 21,131
Fund 4.29 -0.04 5.63 10.21 5yr +9.97 10 yr+7.77
Guess I need glases, I'll live with ultra/low cost VWEHX of +9.43 +6.78

VWEHX has a five year return (annualized) of 9.43%, and a ten year return of 6.78%. Each of those is under the stated returns.
I ran a search on bond funds with 5 year returns of at least 9.7% and 10 year returns of at least 7%. There are only 44 funds - 43 of them have "high yield" or "high income" in their name. M* classifies 42 of those as high yield funds; the 43rd, AGDAX (Alliance Bernstein High Income) is classified multisector.
The44th fund is also classified multisector. It's a high octane version(!) of LSBDX -
Loomis Sayles Strategic Income (NEFZX).

There are lots of different things going on here. It's been many days since I read a brief or two on the case, so this may not be exactly right (and I don't have the time now to review), but here goes:
- IMHO Vanguard should win quickly - not on the merits but on procedure - they seem to be arguing that the plaintiff (as former Vanguard counsel) cannot bring suit (breach of attorney client privilege). He may be relying upon a whistleblower exception to the privilege (assuming there is one - I haven't checked statute; Vanguard seems to be saying that caselaw denies there's such an exception).
But if there is such an exception, he'd have to be saying something new. While he may have new details, the basic argument (that Vanguard charges below market rates) isn't new - Vanguard makes it clear this has been public knowledge for forty years.
Vanguard is also arguing on the merits (that they didn't break a rule), but I don't expect it to get that far.
- Why people should care - not because you're a Vanguard investor/owner, but because you're a taxpayer. The complaint is not that Vanguard customers are losing (rather, they're winning with Vanguard's structure), but that the US Treasury, and thus all taxpayers, are losing, because Vanguard isn't paying its fair share of taxes.
There is a rule that says funds must pay market rate for services. Vanguard Group appears to violate this rule by charging cost - clearly below market rate, since fund management companies charge to make a profit. (In Vanguard's case, those profits would be distributed back to the funds, which own the Vanguard Group management company.)
So why does this matter, if the higher charges would simply flow right back to the funds that paid those extra charges? Because Vanguard Group would have to pay taxes to the IRS and to states. Only the after tax profits would be returned to the funds.
If Vanguard Group charged an extra $1M (to earn a $1M profit for all its management services), it might owe the IRS $350K. $650K would flow back to the funds, but the shareholders of those funds would have paid the full $1M extra in management fees.
At least that's my understanding of some of the issues.

Hi Crash: Generally I don't. But a lot of smart money (smarter than me) does. As others have said, it depends some on the type of fund. I look at the .53% ER on DODBX and their long term track record, the fact that it's a privately held company, their core of long-term investors, their buy and hold philosophy, etc., and I say: "I can tolerate the bloat". However, I'm sure there's a penalty being paid for the bloat and so that's just my own humble perspective..... Now - If it was a bloated fund charging outrageous fees or experiencing unusually big money flows in/out, it would be a different story.
Looking at your list above, Crash, these funds appear much more focused (by sector or geo-political region) than my example above and yes, I'd worry about bloat. However, I'd worry even more about the hot money issue. Narrowly focused funds make prime targets for market timers and momentum players.

With respect to "skimming", do a search on "annuitization puzzle". Here's the first hit I got:
https://www.aeaweb.org/articles.php?doi=10.1257/jep.25.4.143 (Journal of Economic Perspectives)
"In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech given in 1985, Franco Modigliani drew attention to the "annuitization puzzle": that annuity contracts, other than pensions through group insurance, are extremely rare. Rational choice theory predicts that households will find annuities attractive at the onset of retirement because they address the risk of outliving one's income, but in fact, relatively few of those facing retirement choose to annuitize a substantial portion of their wealth." (From the abstract)
"The theoretical prediction that many people will want to annuitize a substantial portion of their wealth stands in sharp contrast to what we observe. Only a tiny share of those who reach retirement age with money in a personal retirement account or other financial assets will choose to annuitize a substantial share of that wealth. Part of the reason is that only 21 percent of defined contribution plans even offer annuities as an option (PSCA, 2009), and virtually no 401(k) plans do." (From the text.)

Thanks, all. Really. OK, so you guys don't say to yourselves: "When this fund reaches $5B I'm gone. It's a very relative term, considering a fund's mandate. Over the years, I've deliberately put $$$ into young funds which ipso facto do not have a big asset base, yet. Funds like SFGIX Seafarer, MSCFX Mairs & Power Small-cap, TRAMX TRP Africa/Middle East, MAESX Matthews Frontier Asia, DLFNX DoubleLine core-plus, MAINX Matthews Asia bonds...... Of the not wonderful choices available in my wife's 403b, I selected Vanguard Small-cap Index NAESX. Still less that a thousand dollars in there. THERE is a fund that M* has even featured re: asset drift, connected to bloat. M* says it owns way too much now in Midcaps to truly be a small-cap fund....

Many 401(k)s offer "brokerage windows" that allow employees to purchase individual bonds. The provider (issuer/guarantor) of these bonds can default.
Are you just asking whether the government is responsible for all losses (such defaults on bonds) in 401(k) plans, or do you have something more specific in mind?
While the article talks about several different types of offerings where the Treasury Dept has relaxed regulations on what a 401(k) can contain, unfortunately it offers a citation to only one of those changes. So it is difficult to figure out exactly what else is now being permitted. Or frankly, even exactly how the annuities within target date funds would work. (I found I had more questions after reading the cited IRS Notice 2014-66.)
A keyword here is "permitted." Treasury is adding no requirements, no mandates. Are you suggesting in your question that employees' 401(k)s choices should be further restricted by the government (e.g. closing brokerage windows)?
There's a case to be made for that. As you point out, the more freedom employees have with their retirement investments, the greater the possibility of total loss (as well as the possibility of greater gain).

It varies with the strategy. The more stocks you wish to own, the greater your capacity will be. Likewise, the lower down on the capitalization scale you wish to go, the lower your capacity will be. For example, let's say a fund wants to own 40 stocks and it's will to go down to $1 billion in market cap. Assuming you don't want to own more than 5% of any stock you get:
$1 billion x .05 = $50 million x 40 (the no. of stocks held) = $2 billion.
So roughly measured, you get a $2 billion capacity for that sort of strategy (GAINX might be a good example). That would be my rule of thumb, anyway.

Well it depends. Some strategies have a lower capacity than others. But speaking generally, a billion AUM is a nice round number and anything more than that I think we can start talking about bloat. I've seem some funds soft close from 1 to 2 B. But I don't have hard and fast rules on bloat, personally. I invest in some funds with much higher AUM. I'm not sure if I would invest in them today if I did it all over again (Is that a sign that I should sell and move money elsewhere.). I think it's very difficult to deliver top tier returns with AUM over 10 Billion, but there are exceptions. (DODFX has over $64 billion, 5 stars from M* and nearly an MFO great owl (RG of 5 for 10 year, 3 year, and 1 year, RG of 4 for 5 year).)

Howdy folks,
Interesting article and approach to a miner ETF. It will be curious to see how it actually performs. The gold/XAU ratio is 16.71 (this is where the author talks about mining stocks undervalued relative to bullion). Note that historically (before the advent of the bullion ETFs, 5.0 was the equilibrium point - below which pointed to bullion and above which pointed to overweighting miners. The bullion ETF through this metric completely out of whack and while I haven't been following the trade, I don't think anyone has really quite figured out how to use it today. My best guess is that within your pm holdings, you should overweight miners relative to bullion. BTW, also for the record, the gold/silver ratio is 1/71 which points to overweighting silver to gold as the 'equilibrium' ratio here is historically 1/17 (more realistically 1/30-40).
And so it goes,
peace,
rono