Here's a statement of the obvious: The opinions expressed here are those of the participants, not those of the Mutual Fund Observer. We cannot vouch for the accuracy or appropriateness of any of it, though we do encourage civility and good humor.
The sidebar mentions the nascent use of APIs by aggregators. The idea is that instead of giving a password to the aggregator, you can go to the site being scraped and grant the aggregator just the permissions you want the aggregator to have.
H…
The thumbnail version, through my lens (I'm not rereading it now):
Longevity insurance is a useful product for people who want or need a guaranteed stream of income late in life. But like anything else, there ain't no free lunch here. You get so…
All I was trying to communicate was (and is) that the child's IRA, however the parent gets the money into it, is a gift. So if you make other gifts to the same child in the same year, be aware that it could put you over the $15K gift exclusion for …
Wriggle?
The attorney you spoke with said: "You can absolutely put money in a child’s IRA. There is no issue there."
No wiggle room there. So that's just plain wrong when it comes to multiple gifts (including the IRA funding) adding up to ov…
It doesn't say that Sears stores will stock "Amazon" tires, just that Sears will install them. How does this differ from my buying tires at TireRack, if I'm going to indicate "ship to installer" while purchasing either way? (Well, except for Sears…
He told you what worked for him, and said it would work for you. Not that it would work for everyone.
You found a lawyer, I can find a lawyer. Even one with a name who explains things:
Assuming that the parent or grandparent does make a gift to …
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not watching you. It's been going on forever, "they" are just getting "better" at it.
Too obvious I know: Somebody's Watching Me
This is curious. Here, the article suggests using QLACs (longevity insurance policies within IRAs) to defer RMDs. But earlier on his site, Kitces had a whole long article saying what a bad idea that was.
Here's the question I just posted on Ki…
Oh, so not only can i stash some money away which can grow tax deferred and then kids don't have to pay taxes when they withdraw it on Mars (because who'll be on Earth then?), I also get a tax break because I "gifted" a Roth to them?!?!?!?!
Just p…
Step transaction doctrine, end result test.
You could not have stated it more clearly: "you give the child equivalent amount to make up for it."
Regarding what you "usually do in supporting a child": "Payments for support (paying for food, clothing…
Also, funding a child's IRA is no different from funding a UGMA - it's a gift, so it counts against your yearly gift tax exclusion.
Not that $5,500 (or less, if the child earns less) comes close to the limit, but this does affect how much extra …
Bitzer, it's bench mark is large value, not the S&P 500. Against it's benchmark, the LV category, it is not performing poorly. Seems LV may be taking a pause right now with higher than normal valuations.
I respectfully disagree on the benchmark…
Charles, as you observed, rates are in flux. ISTM that prime MMF rates are finally pulling ahead of internet bank rates. That's the normal order of things, since they don't have the same reserve or insurance requirements that banks have. OTOH, …
I've been to a couple of mutual fund meetings. (They're generally "special" meetings because funds are not required to hold annual meetings; they're usually only held if something requires shareholder approval.)
One was a T Rowe Price meeting. V…
The offer is exclusive (no quotes) because it says (see image in original link):
Note: This offer is only available to recipients of this email and cannot be
forwarded to other individuals. Employees of Charles Schwab Corporation, its
subsidiaries…
One can decompose DSENX into three components:
1) CAPE
2) Bond fund + leveraging costs (i.e. cost of getting the roughly 100% extra cash to buy the bonds)
3) ER
Over the past year, DSENX has underperformed CAPE by about 0.75%. (CAPE in turn has u…
Forget about SIMPLE and SARSEP - those are employer-sponsored IRAs.
Pretax or post-tax, you made it clear that the money you have is in traditional IRAs, not Roths. You keep track of that with 8606 forms.
Rollover IRAs are something of a hack. …
That's the point. The question asked was: Would you continue working when the government is "confiscating" more than 50% of your earnings?
Your answer is: of course. These people may gripe about it, obsess about it, but they'll take the money a…
They may be aggrieved, but they are apparently loathe to give it up. That is, they are keeping that $10k/week to gripe about; they are not forsaking it on principle.
(You did say that it was their $10k/wk that caused their consternation.)
Perhaps I wasn't clear enough - give me a $1M salary, and I'll gladly give up half in taxes for the opportunity to rake in $500K after taxes. Put me in a minimum wage job, and I would not gladly pay 50% of my wages in taxes.
Your question implied…
I'm having a hard time remembering any time I've had problems with Vanguard service. That could be because I'm a model Vanguard client - invest, make tweaks every couple of years, do ACH transfers online, and not much else.
Same sort of pattern wi…
It sounds like you're conflating wealth (affluent, rich) and income.
Taxes on the affluent are way lower than those figures - just ask Warren Buffett and his secretary. Taxes are even lower now that the supposed "double taxation" they "endure" …
Just Florida.
Cristobal Young, The Guardian, Nov 20, 2017
Higher income earners show low migration levels because they are not searching for economic success – they’ve already found it.
When millionaires do move, they admittedly tend to favour …
I'm with @PRESSmUP here. While an independent FP may accurately state that there's no obligation if one attends, that disclaimer pertains to becoming a client. There is an obligation, whether legal or moral, to be attentive and to consider what …
We agree that few elites (those earning $1M+) move annually, whether from high tax states to low tax states or vice versa. We agree that the impact of any out migration from higher tax states is sufficiently small - so that states could safely incr…
"Figure 1 shows the income–migration curve over the whole distribution of income, as income rises from nearly zero to millions of dollars per year. The highest rates of migration are seen among low-income tax filers: migration is 4.5 percent among p…
Which is why, immediately preceding the paragraph I quoted, I wrote an even stronger statement: that the elites' relative immobility means that from a tax policy perspective, it doesn't matter why they move.
IMHO it is important to be clear what on…
I cited the Young research recently.
https://www.mutualfundobserver.com/discuss/discussion/comment/100628/#Comment_100628
My suspicion is that most people are misinterpreting what "millionaire" means. As used by Young, it is not a measure of weal…
If you want to manage your own glide path, and you want to keep it simple and cheap(er), why use hybrid funds of funds rather than the underlying funds?
Cheaper, because you won't be paying Barclay's second layer of management fees. (Since the th…
I haven't played with ORP, so I can't comment on it.
Still looking at the "Simple" Formulas page (for complex withdrawal strategies). "Simple" is definitely in the eye of the beholder. In the sense of easily expressible and computable, the formu…
@bee, thanks. The first one seems to be the one that best follows the idea of seeing how different portfolio strategies compare.
With the managed futures link, beware of investment costs. Nearly all papers/simulations are done without consid…
Unfortunately, every approach has its own risk and costs. It's a matter of deciding what one is comfortable with, both rationally and irrationally. By rational, I mean that if one has a certain preference for some risks over others, one selects a…
@MikeM - I appreciate the idea of having a core holding and then tweaking. One may want a little more EM, or some foreign bonds, or whatever.
However, when you mix a target date fund with other funds, you may significantly alter your portfolio's…
Is this better: It sounds like you're trying to rationalize someone having bought iShares?
"you can always do what a member of my family does, AOA and AOK 50-50 (or whatever other proportion suits you)"
https://mutualfundobserver.com/discuss/discus…
What are the differences that concern you? If you were only concerned with their portfolios, why add the remark that the iShares are a lot cheaper? Presented with the fact that the iShares are 67% more expensive than the most similar Fidelity fun…
" I explain that years of underfunding have forced an understaffed IRS to significantly scale back its enforcement efforts."
AFAIK, that's reduced the number of audits, and hence the probability of facing an audit. But it hasn't scaled back the a…
I suspect that for a few years, maybe a decade, we'll continue to see significantly higher salaries in the field. Sooner or later, it will become more of a commodity field, like databases, though still a better paying field.
At the top end, salar…
