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I caught just the last couple of minutes of the interview portion when flipping channels. One of them was saying that you should invest in active bond management because you can't buy a bond index - too many securities for full replication as with …
ISTM that the advantage of robo advising is the ability to segregate fixed income and cash from equity. So you're able to draw from more stable investments for cash and wait out downdrafts in the market. (Think three bucket strategy.)
You can't…
The worst case for how much one loses because of the windfall elimination provision is 5/9 of one's benefits. That only happens if one has a relatively small SS benefit to begin with (below the first "bend point" where one gets 90% of average inco…
The cited Connecticut doc does a fair job of explaining how the amount of SS benefit is reduced, but not the underlying principle.
Social security is a progressive system - the higher your "average income monthly earnings" (AIME), the lower the per…
FWIW, my take on Buffett's 90% equity/10% short term bond is that this was a retirement portfolio recommendation, and assuming 4% withdrawal rate, that is enough "cash" to wait out a 2-3 year market drop. Even if the market doesn't fully recover i…
What about all those public employees with defined pensions, sitting with plans that are dreadfully underfunded? Are you going to "pay more in taxes than what you OWE!!!" to bail them out since they did "plan accordingly"?
One could always get TPINX or GIM in an IRA if one didn't have access to TGBAX. They're all clones of Templeton Global Bond VIP Fund - Class 2 shares that you have. Here's a chart that shows the performance of the VIP fund before subtracting off…
Tony, adding the percent expenses together is correct, because they're both computed off the same amount. Each day the annuity takes its cut of the current annuity value and each day the fund takes its cut of the current underlying portfolio value.…
The NYMag article contains a link to the budget doc:
https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/whitehouse.gov/files/omb/budget/fy2018/budget.pdf
I suppose it could be viewed as a joke book for the green eyeshade crowd.
It also looks like the computation of expenses for 50/50 VIP Contra/VIP IG Bond is off.
The prospectus for the Fidelity annuity you're looking at (Personal Retirement Annuity) says that the share class used for the underlying funds is "Investor …
Tony is correct with respect to the return on your current annuities. The blended return is 5.14% (I haven't checked the arithmetic, just the method). This analysis also suggests that you can reduce your break even by exchanging just the lower y…
Dashing now, more comments to come. Two quick comments now:
- not all VIP funds are clones, e.g. VIP Contra is team managed - 10 managers, none of them being Danoff.
- I think TIAA is better than Fidelity (slightly higher cost, dropping to 10 bas…
You mean you can become a lawyer and "earn" millions of bucks without going to school? Okay, honest Abe did (well, the lawyer part, anyway), but who else?
@MFO Members: Let's not get to excited, its a budget that will never see the light of day either in the House or the Senate.
Regards,
TedDidn't they say the same thing about the AHCA, with 17% public support?
It's worth highlighting the NYMag article. (This is the one I saw yesterday, there are many other ones out now.)
Yesterday, reports (e.g. NYTimes here) that broke down the changes in this "spending neutral" budget showed $2T in savings from econ…
"Mexico will pay for the wall" - $1.6B budgeted
"$1T in infrastructure spending over 10 years" - $200B budgeted over ten years,
hoping that the private sector will add $800B more that but for Trump would not have been spent
"No one wi…
Rule 8 : Your school may have done away with winners and losers,
but life HAS NOT. In some schools, they have abolished failing grades
and they'll give you as MANY TIMES as you want to get the right answer.
*This doesn't bear the slightest rese…
Where to begin?
We can start with the fact that stock volatility has increased significantly in the three decades since the graph in the article was drawn. That means that even though market volatility has not increased, you need more stocks now …
Just a quick reminder - the Financial CHOICE Act is the legislation that would eliminate the new fiduciary rule on retirement accounts as well repeal rather than temper the Volcker Rule (controlling risk by prohibiting TBTF banks from short term spe…
While Bloomberg called her a "seasoned financial reporter", in her WSJ article Fuller states up front that "I don’t have a finance beat".
Her WSJ bio talks about her work process (with spreadsheets and databases), but virtually nothing about dom…
http://mutualfundobserver.com/discuss/discussion/32897/what-s-my-investing-fee-a-frustrating-quest-how-to-get-a-straight-answer
(No follow up discussion, just Ted's links including link to original WSJ article.)
I agree that the article was lame. …
Last performances are at the Nassau Coliseum on Long Island, birthplace of the Islanders and Nets (the Nets had played as a different named team in NJ for one year before LI). Both teams are now at Barclays where the last RB B&B NYC performanc…
Somehow I'd missed that the screen scrolls to the right. Okay, I see Total Client Investment, but as I speculated, all it reports for me is my single initial investment (ignoring dividends), since I've made no more purchases or sales. I don't kn…
What I have with Merrill Edge is more limited - I just bought once and am holding forever, almost literally. I see the data items you described (Symbol, Description, etc.). But when I open the line for more detail ("drill down"), what I see is just…
I'm really not clear on what people are looking for. Let me give an example of a hypothetical investment and ask what figure you're looking for and what help that would give you. The figures are real, only the trades are hypothetical.3/6/2009 buy …
If you're interested in performance (as opposed to capital appreciation, i.e. unrealized gain), Fidelity provides a performance tab on the portfolio positions page. That gives you your rate of return based on how much you put in. At least I assum…
I agree with Crash (and Bee) that PRIDX seems like a solid, stable fund for long term investing.
I hadn't taken a close look at VINEX in a few years (it had a pretty long poor stretch prior to 2013), but seems to have regained its luster - despi…
Not sure what you mean by "orphaned". The fund lost its "parent" category (multi-sector bond fund) around 2012-2013; the world bond category "adopted" it. Around the same time M*'s analysts also abandoned the poor little baby (last analyst report…
"Wells Fargo & Co ( WFC ) may have opened as many as 3.5 million unauthorized customer accounts, far more than previously estimated ...
"The new estimate was provided in a filing late Thursday night in the federal court in San Francisco, and is…
AAII discussion of defined maturity funds (from 2013):
http://www.aaii.com/journal/article/defined-maturity-funds-a-bond-alternative-with-compromises.touch
I like one of the comments, that a perpetual bond ladder resembles a bond fund in many ways.…
Typical of Zacks - describing the bullet fund concept as unique to Guggenheim. There have been American Century (Treasury zeros) target maturity funds since 1985, when they were Benham funds. There are only two remaining maturities, BTTTX (2020)…
Such a portfolio will have some of the attributes you describe, but may not do quite what you're hoping for.
We can see the hypothetical portfolio you looked at here (set the slider on the page to five years to get the five year ladder).
The YTM a…
Babka - an exquisite delicacy, based on eastern European recipes.
http://www.yesterdish.com/2014/12/25/yesterdishs-chocolate-babka/
Both the loaf of Seinfield fame and its European cousin are yeast-raised, butter-enriched loaves that exist halfway…
According to the SEC press release it seems that "overcharging" might be considered the least of it. (To me, overcharging is charging a fee higher than agreed upon.)
Barclays charged for services not provided (2,000 customers). Barclays collecte…
Bob, I feel your pain :-) I really do. Have you ever dealt with TRS? I spent something like 6 months to a year, including meeting in person at least a monthly basis, to get my parents' retirement accounts straightened out with them. Dealing …
Gosh BobC, am I sensing a little hostility here? You used to say (correctly) that TIAA Traditional (what you called the "traditional bucket") provided "limited options to make changes". But now here you are saying that they always "treat client …
I have my doubts about PMCPX being available, since the fund and its VA clone (PVC Mid Cap Account) have been closed for some time.
But if you can get in, it's a fine fund (as one can see from the summary page I linked to for the clone fund). P…
Thanks for the praise, though rather overstated. Thanks also for the reminder that the biggest problem (at least for me) with the BofA cards has been their simultaneous paranoia on card use (e.g. refusing a $500 car repair charge 15 miles from hom…
As it turns out, what I keep with Merrill Edge is a fund that they won't sell me (they'll only hold it). A good place to drop a fund that I'm just going to let sit for years. Also, while brokerages make money lending securities that can be sold s…
@BenWP Interesting about the 2% cash back VISA at Schwab being dropped. Fidelity had a simple 2% cash back card offer through AmEx. I think it was in 2014 or 2015, they negotiated a deal with VISA for the same offer, and upon implementation dropped…
