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Assuming historical returns of the S&P500 and ignoring the valuable mortgage interest tax deduction, in fifteen years before you retire your mortgage, it will cost you on average $351,000 in nominal 2031 dollar returns or about $239,000 in 2016 inflation adjusted dollars to put $170,000 into a 4.125% mortgage instead of in an S&P index fund. You can make your own assumptions about returns and asset mix to suit your personal taste. It makes more sense in my mind to take the cash, refinance your home to a much lower interest rate than your current mortgage without paying down the current principal, and gradually use small amounts of the cash to supplement if necessary.
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May 4, 2016 04:03
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It's always a decision between the two. Paying off mortgage principal could exceed the return of an index fund, but on the mortgage you are saving flat line interest versus compounding gains on the index fund. Over 15 years that could be a big difference. There is a third option of hedging. Put half towards the mortgage principal and half into an index fund. You won't get the optimal return, but you will get half the optimal return and half of the lesser return if that makes sense. There are other factors to consider like if you will have enough invested at retirement to live your preferred lifestyle. If so eliminating the mortgage makes sense. As this eliminates risk around potential higher interest rates at a (much) later date. Devian666 fucked around with this message at 04:55 on May 4, 2016 |
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May 4, 2016 04:48
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Here's another way to look at it. If you invest the money now, there is a chance that in 15 years you will have enough to pay the rest of the house off, and have money left over. To me it's just risk tolerance. If yours is lower, pay off the house. If you have a higher tolerance, invest it.
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May 4, 2016 06:51
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I'm not sure what I would do in that circumstance, but one opinion I've also heard is considering the opposite situation. If you had your house paid off, would you take out a HELOC at 4.125% and invest it in the stock market? If not, maybe you shouldn't invest it.
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May 4, 2016 15:01
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Appreciate the feedback. As we are mid career and both a little risk adverse, we are still leaning towards paying down the house, but your comments are useful. Freeing up cash now and lowering our rate are modest but likely gains.
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May 4, 2016 16:01
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Inept posted:I'm not sure what I would do in that circumstance, but one opinion I've also heard is considering the opposite situation. If you had your house paid off, would you take out a HELOC at 4.125% and invest it in the stock market? If not, maybe you shouldn't invest it. In this situation I would sell the house, invest it all, and start renting. Then I'd buy a house when I retire.
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May 5, 2016 04:44
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It's even simpler than that, if your house is appreciating in value or you reasonably expect it to in future years don't pay an extra dime on the mortgage, because you lose the amazing power of leverage and few people get to benefit from that in any other way in their financial lives. If it's flat or depreciating over 5-10 years then yeah for sure paying more principal can be good but you're probably taking a bath in that situation by not renting anyway. People generally have too much local risk without realizing it, if you own a lot of your house the value of that equity is tied to the strength of your local employers, if a few of them go away your housing value will tank almost invariably, along with you possibly losing your job and any equity you may have from options or what have you. Don't invest too much locally, it's incredibly risky and companies collapse all the time bringing entire cities/regions with them. That's a long winded way of saying 90% of the time you should not be paying extra on your mortgage, it's far better to invest that extra cash and make sure you're not investing it in local companies as much as you might love them. Pryor on Fire fucked around with this message at 16:38 on May 5, 2016 |
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May 5, 2016 16:36
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Pryor on Fire posted:It's even simpler than that, if your house is appreciating in value or you reasonably expect it to in future years don't pay an extra dime on the mortgage, because you lose the amazing power of leverage and few people get to benefit from that in any other way in their financial lives. If it's flat or depreciating over 5-10 years then yeah for sure paying more principal can be good but you're probably taking a bath in that situation by not renting anyway. De-leveraging is not taking on risk jesus christ. Yes, it means risking a suboptimal return. Difference is, if you have a big mortgage and the price falls, you're screwed. Either you declare bankruptcy or you're stuck. Potentially in a location with no jobs. Yes you shouldn't put all your eggs in one basket, but a house is the only asset class which you actually depend on to live in your day to day life. You're not a loving company, if you go bankrupt it has immediate and drastic consequences on your personal life and finances. Over-leveraging can have amazing returns and that's because it's extremely risky and not something someone should be doing with their personal finances unless they are already rich. If you have a private company go right ahead, there it is contained, you can only lose what you've put in. MiddleOne fucked around with this message at 16:55 on May 5, 2016 |
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May 5, 2016 16:51
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Xoidanor posted:De-leveraging is not taking on risk jesus christ. I've tried to explain this to people in the past but had no luck, so kudos. If you manage to get it across people will still try to compare deleveraging to stock returns (instead of Treasuries), grossly overestimate the utility of mortgage interest tax deductions, or just present a sea of arguments that affect both scenarios equally until you give up.
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May 5, 2016 18:51
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I paid off my SF bay area house last month, after thinking and talking about it with lots of people over the course of a year. In the end it really came down to this: Inept posted:I'm not sure what I would do in that circumstance, but one opinion I've also heard is considering the opposite situation. If you had your house paid off, would you take out a HELOC at 4.125% and invest it in the stock market? If not, maybe you shouldn't invest it. I'm risk-adverse. It's something I grappled with for a while, trying to convince myself that leaving the money in the market was a smarter decision financially. Lots of people whose opinion I respect told me that, and I still believe it probably was in terms of dollars and cents, but my gut wasn't having it. I wanted to get out from under a bank. After accepting it I've been much happier. I ended up selling about 60% of my after-tax investments to do it, leaving me with 80k in index funds and a 6-month emergency fund. The mortgage was set up to come out of my checking account every two weeks, coinciding with my paychecks, and it was an amazing feeling to see money come in without half of it going out immediately. I'm not very worried about the price of the home dropping or us losing our jobs and being unable to find work. The SF Bay Area will likely always have tech jobs for the wife and I. We bought the house in 2010 at $357,500, and comparable houses in the neighborhood are selling for $590,000 these days, so even a halving of the current market won't leave us too hosed over. There's always the chance of a huge earthquake or fire destroying my house and leaving me with debris on a plot of land, and part of my brain does worry about such things, but I've felt very contented with our decision. We'll see what shakes out over the next few years.
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May 5, 2016 19:08
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Congratulations! What a position of security  Are you and your wife still hoping to adopt?
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May 5, 2016 19:12
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What people seem to be struggling to cope with is the fact that the events that will cause your house to plummet in value are likely the same events that will cause stock markets to fluctuate. Liquidity should always be your main concern when saving because if you end up on the wrong side of a liquidity crunch you will have to sell off a lot of assets at a loss to avoid bankruptcy. Your assets falling in value only matters if you have to sell them. This is the prime reason why index funds are so much better than a mildly divested holding of individual stocks, it will always recover eventually if you give it time.
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May 5, 2016 19:14
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Mocking Bird posted:Congratulations! What a position of security The security feels awesome, but it's still so new my wife and I look at each other in disbelief that we've paid it all off. We get to live in the south bay for $6k/yr in property taxes and maintenance/repairs, which we were paying anyway! Yep! We really want an infant for our first kid, and the wait times are a lot longer if you're not looking to adopt/foster an older child. We're doing an "open adoption", where the child's birth parents are involved in the child's life and we've been out there for a while now, waiting for a birthmother to choose us. We've gotten in touch with five different birthmothers, two of which were written off as scammers and three that got close, but ended up choosing another family to place their baby with. It's been a year an a half, which is the average wait time according to the adoption agency we're working with. Xoidanor posted:What people seem to be struggling to cope with is the fact that the events that will cause your house to plummet in value are likely the same events that will cause stock markets to fluctuate. Liquidity should always be your main concern when saving because if you end up on the wrong side of a liquidity crunch you will have to sell off a lot of assets at a loss to avoid bankruptcy. Your assets falling in value only matters if you have to sell them. This is the prime reason why index funds are so much better than a mildly divested holding of individual stocks, it will always recover eventually if you give it time. This is definitely true of where I live: If the Bay Area housing market goes down, the tech sector will be down too, and likely drag the market down with it. And if my house burns down to a pile of ash, I'd rather it be a pile of ash I own free and clear and not a pile of ash I owe $2k a month on, even if I'd have more money in my brokerage account. Personal preference.
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May 5, 2016 20:48
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No you have the relationship backwards. The local real estate market is driven by the success of local employers, the correlation is very strong. Anyone who has lived in the bay area since the 90s can talk a lot about how the three tech bubbles bursting have changed things, that's probably the most striking recent example. Since you're likely employed by your local employer you're consolidating that risk even more by paying extra on your mortgage. Of course it's better than pissing that same amount of money away on a Tesla or whatever, but it's still not optimal for either returns or risk mitigation, so don't do it unless real estate values are declining predictably year over year for several years. And you're triple hosed if you get equity compensation and just hold that forever too. Suddenly a serious problem with one company/industry can wipe out substantial amounts of your entire net worth not to mention leaving you unemployed. This isn't theoretical, history is littered with these events that wipe out companies and the local areas that were tied too heavily to one employer, turning former millionaires into bankruptcy very quickly. Detroit used to be the most affluent city in the world And please stop investing in local companies just because you want to "support" them or have a friend that works there and think the brand is cool or whatever, you need to diversify your money away from where you live as much as possible for long term security. I don't know why this local investing trend came about alongside the locavore farm to table trendy stuff, but it's a terrible idea. You can't be financially independent over the long term if your eggs are all in one industrial or geographical basket. I mean you might get lucky and nothing bad ever happens, but it's not ideal.
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May 5, 2016 21:17
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On the other hand, with housing costs of about $500 a month, even if they both lose their jobs, unemployment will allow them to live fairly comfortably without cutting into their emergency fund at all.
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May 5, 2016 21:25
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Pryor on Fire posted:Since you're likely employed by your local employer you're consolidating that risk even more by paying extra on your mortgage. You're missing Xoidanor's point. Once you own the house, you incur the risks associated with the local market. Whether or not you have a mortgage is of no consequence to that risk*. It doesn't matter if you have 50% equity or 100% equity - when the value of your $800k house drops by $200k, you have lost that 200k. *Technically if you go into negative equity you have the option of bankruptcy, but we're talking about deleveraging vs investing; if you have investment accounts you are not going to get away with that in bankruptcy court.
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May 5, 2016 22:28
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Having hundreds of thousands of dollars in a diversified after tax portfolio is another method by which you can live comfortably should you suddenly become unemployed for some amount of time.
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May 5, 2016 22:41
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Hey thread, it's been a while. Recently decided to give the finger to my current job (due mainly to abuse of my 'on-call' status out of working hours) and live off our business (15-20 hrs per week work) for a while. Given myself (and the employer) three months, setting aside the extra money from that time to buy/make an RV for travelling around in. Working for a specific goal makes it easier to stay a little longer - watching a large number in Excel gradually get larger is not motivation enough at this point. I'd say I'm about 1/3 of the way to actual FI, but our business brings in significantly more than we need so we'll be making good monthly contributions and won't be withdrawing from the stash at all. If the business holds steady for a decade or more that'll bring us up to the magic FI number, though I'm not opposed to working in future if the right opportunity comes along. No idea at this point what I'll do with all the free time, it'll be interesting to find out. I'm gonna have a coffee and rewrite the OP, the rant about my own situation is probably not the best landing pad. Chadzok fucked around with this message at 02:08 on May 6, 2016 |
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May 6, 2016 00:04
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Congrats man, that's awesome. I'm hoping to go part time in the next 3-5 years, still trying to make that large number grow a little larger. While you're updating the OP, a blog I found recently that I really liked that might be worth adding to the OP was Living A FI.
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May 6, 2016 03:30
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Saint Fu posted:While you're updating the OP, a blog I found recently that I really liked that might be worth adding to the OP was Living A FI. I've only read a bit of that, it's hilarious and worth contemplating.
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May 6, 2016 03:52
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Done. I'll throw up any other suggestions to the link list or the glossary.
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May 6, 2016 04:57
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Saint Fu posted:Congrats man, that's awesome. I'm hoping to go part time in the next 3-5 years, still trying to make that large number grow a little larger. The most recent article is an April Fool's one, which is pretty annoying. I feel like bloggers should actually delete those after April 1, or at least not let it be the headline of the website over a month later.
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May 6, 2016 23:45
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Yeah he's pretty much done with the blog. That's actually one thing I like about it, he actually made a post about how good blogs eventually come to an end.
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May 7, 2016 03:58
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That blog is really good. I read the one where he posted an entry from his anger diary, and the next day I had a day at work which was very close to the one he described. Can't wait to not need this poo poo anymore!
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May 7, 2016 17:50
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Dessert Rose posted:Can't wait to not need this poo poo anymore! Even running my own business there are clients I would do away with. I am at a good point now where my savings rate is very high and my income is up. Everything to spare is going into investments or accelerating the repayment of my mortgage.
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May 7, 2016 22:36
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Wife and I are finally going to max out both our 401ks and Roth IRAs for the first time ever. Last year we managed to save 32% but most of that went towards a down payment on a fixer upper. This year the goal is 50%. It's going to be difficult since it's so easy to put money into the house. How do you guys handle home improvement spending while trying to save as much as possible? It's hard for me to really stick to an annual budget when my new back yard is a mud pit, my AC is 13 years old and my guest room has ugly painted wood paneling.
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May 16, 2016 18:25
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Ignore the guest room, use the AC until it breaks, and throw down $10 worth of grass seed. Also, cancel your cable so you can't watch HGTV anymore.
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May 16, 2016 18:49
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Or, decide that you can afford to do what you want or decide what you can afford to do and just loving do it.
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May 16, 2016 18:55
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Yes, you need to rank in order of things that are "right now", "in the next year", and "when we have a surplus." A mud lawn that could cause damage to your lot/home seems more imminent than an ugly guest room. I second grass seed if your yard is leveled and ready to be planted - make sure there isn't a slope towards your foundation without adequate drainage. You're going to want to get this done before the end of summer if you're in a place where it storms or snows. Is your AC central? Has it been serviced? 13 years isn't unmanageably old, with proper maintenance, so that might be something to investigate if you haven't already. Are you handy? If not, get handy since it's the best way to save money on your new home. You can pull down ugly paneling yourself and either repair, replace, or install the drywall yourself in a weekend (or two since you may still be learning.) If it does come down to the framing, take a glance at your electrical while you're there. Fix the things that are a danger to your property first, quality of life fixes second, and aesthetics must adhere to your budget regardless of time frame! MrKatharsis posted:Also, cancel your cable so you can't watch HGTV anymore. The truest.
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May 16, 2016 18:57
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Definitely get your AC serviced before you waste several thousand replacing it. I had a very specific HVAC unit in my condo that would have cost about 8k to replace. The unit was over 40 years old. I was still getting it by with $130ish preventative service calls here and there. Sometimes a part needed to be replaced and it would run a couple hundred, but sometimes not.
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May 16, 2016 19:35
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MrKatharsis posted:Ignore the guest room, use the AC until it breaks, and throw down $10 worth of grass seed. The thread title should've made me realize this was coming. simble posted:Or, decide that you can afford to do what you want or decide what you can afford to do and just loving do it. Mocking Bird posted:Yes, you need to rank in order of things that are "right now", "in the next year", and "when we have a surplus." Yeah I'm probably overthinking it. But if we were flipping the house we would budget everything based on ROI and I could sleep easy knowing that refinishing the wood floors was an "investment". If we were planning on staying in the house forever or we weren't going to get any ROI we would budget improvements with fun money. But instead we are somewhere in between, so I'm stuck thinking about whether putting $4500 in a Roth IRA is really that much better than putting $4500 into a new furnace (it had a cracked heat exchanger =/) I guess we should just set a minimum savings goal for the year and if a "nice to have" improvement puts us under that it will have to wait.
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May 16, 2016 21:11
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Hi Guys, I need some advice but it's kind of personal and a lot of Goons know me on here, so I made a new account to ask. Hope that isn't against the rules or anything. So I'm currently in a good financial situation but I really don't know what to do next and there are some other factors which I'll get into. I want to be financially independent. Or at least, not work as hard. I live in Australia, so I might use some Aussie financial terms and everything is in AUD. I'm in my mid 30's, my wife is in her late 20's. My yearly salary package is 110k. My wife's is 55k. This is salary and superannuation combined We own our home completely. My rough guess at value would be 420-450k. We have 80k is savings, it's sitting in the bank earning about 3% PA. We have about 110k in superannuation. No other major assets besides my car. My car is on a novated lease. Which costs me about $1,100 a month, with all running costs included. I have a balloon payment of $20,000 due at the end of the lease, in December. After which the car is mine and will have a resale value of $30,000 or so. We have no other debts to speak of. My wife is off work as we had our first child 6 months ago. Her work will hold her job for up to 2 years. My take home salary is $5,000 a month (after the lease, it's $6,100 before the lease). Living expenses are $3,000 a month, which covers everything. I hate my loving job and would love to leave but I'm not about to walk away. We have lost customers and I think they are looking at redundancies in the next 6 months. Which would net me a $20-25k payout. I would like to work a less stressful job or less hours, or both. I know that a lot to take in there... But I really don't know what I should be doing. I have always been to scared to invest but I know our money could be doing better. I would love to leave my job but am not sure what the future hold, what kind of work I could do (I hate my industry, not just my job). What are some thing I could do to become more financially independent?
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May 17, 2016 05:01
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It sounds like you are interested in a lower stress and income job to pay for living. That's not strictly FI by the definition being used in the thread, and your current savings are not enough to live on without using up the capital. I am in favour of setting goals. At the moment you do still need a job, but you also need to consider eventual retirement. So living costs + retirement savings needed to maintain current lifestyle. I'm assuming you are part of the Superannuation scheme as well so that will form a part of your required retirement savings. You can calculate what you require to retire on https://www.sorted.org.nz/tools/retirement-planner Sorry it's the NZ version but it's a start. Then for actual FI you need enough investments to be able to not need to work prior to retirement. Normally people would look at living costs but yours are pretty low anyway. I don't think I've provided a very complete answer but does this sound like what you are trying to do?
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May 17, 2016 05:25
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Do you have any skills you could leverage into part-time work, self-employment, or a different career track? Anyone you've run into during your career time doing something tangentially related but more self-directed? Hard to know without some career details but maybe you can think about this yourself. Your car seems unnecessarily expensive, especially if FI is your primary goal, but it's probably too late to back out of the lease now? I dunno, never leased before. Leasing is dumb and your car costs too much. Any options here? $3000 a month living expenses seems excessive considering you have no mortgage or rent. I see you have a new kid, but again - if FI is your goal here, every dollar you chop off this is invaluable. How's your budgeting muscles? Great job on owning your own property outright! That's a massive hurdle particularly for people in Australia and honestly with that in your pocket you're running downhill to FI and the wind is at your back. Can you put your hand up for the redundancy payment? That could give you a couple months breathing room to pivot, especially if you had some better ideas about what direction you want to go in. Finally, work out how much of that 80K you want to keep as an emergency fund (6 months livings-worth?) and put the rest of it to work somehow (I suggest index funds, Vanguard specifically) - 3% is not 'earning', that's just matching inflation. Your financial independence 'stash' needs to be invested in the market, bank account returns will not cut the butter. If you want more info on this, ask away, I'm an Aussie too, most of my money is with Vanguard.
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May 17, 2016 09:01
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Hey friend. It's me again. I couldn't stop thinking about your car lease and what a horrible deal it is. Here comes what is commonly known as a facepunch. You are spending a third of your total budget - what most people allocate for housing - into a vehicle. Moreover, you seem to be eagerly charging forward with this so you'll have the privilige of spending TWENTY THOUSAND DOLLARS MORE on this solid gold blowjob-giving machine. Destroy that lease with the fury of 10,000 suns, take the $8800 you would have spent on it between now and December and buy a perfectly good rectangular metal box with wheels that serves the purpose of getting you around, instead of the purpose of trapping you in a perverse cycle of hard work and despair. How much have you already fed to this demonic automotive wealth-devouring hellspawn? Don't fall for the sunk cost fallacy, the resale value is not worth working towards. You'd have to replace the vehicle if you sold it anyway. EDIT: Hmm, read your numbers again. You put it differently, subtracting your car payment from your income. I think you're tricking yourself there - it's an expense, even if it is pulled from your pre-tax income (I read up what a novated lease is!), because otherwise you'd be getting that money as income. I really hope that it's a deal you can pull out of, transportation is not worth what you're paying, over 25% of your total expenses. Are you in some sort of career where you have to be 'seen' to be having the fancy car and all that tripe? If you're looking for tax advantages you'd be better off salary sacrificing into your super. Chadzok fucked around with this message at 13:51 on May 17, 2016 |
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May 17, 2016 09:43
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Hi Guys, Thanks for the input, greatly appreciated. So, in regards to the car. It's a Novated Lease. I own the car. The only way to get out of it would be to sell the car and pay off the lease in full. This would be a bad idea since the lease payments are deducted out of my salary before tax. That $1,1000 a month I'm paying, that would be more like $1,500 a month if it wasn't before tax. It's a $45,000 car, no matter how you slice or dice it, a 45k car and 3 years of running costs gets you close to $70,000. The novated lease was the best way to buy the car. But I completely understand that it was pretty extravagant, I can very much afford it, but I could be putting my money to better use. I'm going to sell it when the lease is up and use what I have left over from the bubble payment to buy a second hand car. Saves me dipping into savings. I'm not in a career where I need a fancy car or anything. It made sense when we were both working, had no child, owned only one car and made $160,000 a year between us with a paid off house. Makes less sense now. As for my living expenses, they are pretty low. 3k per month is what most people spend on a average mortgage on a home here. There are some savings that we can make, but nothing substantial, unless I want to kill off our private health care, or something like that. For the most part we live pretty modestly, the car was the first time I have done anything crazy in a long time. I had my previous 10k car for 11 years. But I need to budget more properly to see if there is anything I'm missing, going to start keeping track of expenses more closely. But I can't see any big savings, maybe a couple of small wins. As for the redundancy payment, can't put my hand up now, but perhaps in 6 months time I can. I am definitely not leaving this job until they pay me out. I'll just have to wear it for now. I guess I would like to keep $30,000 or so as an emergency fund and make the rest of it work for me. But I'm scared of the stock market and have no idea how to even start or who to speak to. Should I find a financial adviser or go see a financial institution.. or something. I don't even know what vanguard is. I'm bad at this  A lot of people here buy second homes and negatively gear them, but the thought of being in debt again makes me feel ill and being a land lord is work, and work is something i need less of. In terms of FI, if I did keep working a job paying what I get now, how much would I need and how long would it take? How do I go about investing? As in... the very basics, who should I talk to? And what should I look at? (Vanguard funds? I take it these are low risk long term kind of a deal?)
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May 17, 2016 23:02
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Have a read of the retirement thread. One of the top recommended books is the Four Pillars of Investing. It teaches you how to invest (primarily passively) and to select funds with low fees (why Vanguard gets recommended). By the end of the book you will understand Modern Portfolio Theory. http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=2892928 While heading to FI negative gearing is probably the worst idea. Negative gearing into one of the world's largest property bubbles is a really bad idea. Great for tax benefits and capital gains but a big risk and it's not the direction you would like to head in. More debt isn't your friend. I don't want to go into too much detail with respect to the problems but hedge fund managers are betting that the Australian housing market will crash badly. There's also a risk that the Reserve Bank of Australia may copy ideas that RBNZ may implement in conjunction with the Government in the next 2 years. One of those ideas could eliminate negative gearing. Also gently caress being a landlord. Say you work at your current job and invest $2000 per month, say you get an average return of 7% after 15 years you would have over $600,000. That might be enough for you to live on from a mix of savings account and shares. I've just picked some numbers but it's not short term. At this point people look at either cutting costs (to save more or to need less to be FI), or increasing income. Most going for FI tend to have a savings rate of 20 to 50% of gross income.
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May 18, 2016 00:34
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I think he could do way better than that. If you both kept working at your current wages, found $500 savings on your living expenses (shop at aldi), put the 1000 a month after the lease is up towards savings instead, and also set up a substantial weekly salary sacrifice into super (there is a reason rich people do this - a 15% savings on your tax is an instant 15% return on your money), you could do it in under a decade. Light reading: http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/01/13/the-shockingly-simple-math-behind-early-retirement/ In fact if you really want to start educating yourself, read his whole blog post history cover to cover. You'll know a hell of a lot more than when you started, he covers investing and you will learn to not be afraid of the big bad market. All your instincts about property and negative gearing are correct. Bad idea.
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May 18, 2016 01:02
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Lots of great info and suggestions thanks guys, going to look into all that reading. Glad you think that property and negative gearing are a poo poo idea. Lots of my mates are doing it and are trying to talk me into it but the whole thing makes me feel very uneasy, glad my instincts are right on this one. Back when my wife and I were both working, we were saving $5,000 a month, even with the car. So we have the potential and the financial ethic to be able to do it. So I guess my plan of attack is going to be: *gently caress the car off once the lease is over. *Look at cost cutting as much as possible right at this point in time. *Salary sacrifice into super. *Investing my current lot and putting more in each month. On all points but the cost cutting I'll have to wait a couple of months to see how things pan out with work, but this gives me a good idea. Just in terms of investing: Who do I talk to about that? Can I do it myself or do I need to talk to a stock broker or...? Is there any institution I should trust over another, for example? Sorry I have no idea on the terms or processes for doing such a thing, never done it before. The main reason my money sits in a pile doing nothing.
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May 18, 2016 01:50
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Sgt67 posted:Just in terms of investing: Who do I talk to about that? Can I do it myself or do I need to talk to a stock broker or...? Is there any institution I should trust over another, for example? Sorry I have no idea on the terms or processes for doing such a thing, never done it before. The main reason my money sits in a pile doing nothing. You don't need a broker if you use Vanguard (which is the forum's go-to for index fund investing due to the low expense ratios), but if you don't know what you're doing you should probably ask around for advice on the retirement thread, or talk to a fiduciary financial advisor (fiduciary means that he/she is bound by oath to represent your financial interests, as opposed to Bob from Fidelity who just happens to have a hot tip on some great deals that by pure coincidence are ALSO from Fidelity). TwoSheds fucked around with this message at 02:09 on May 18, 2016 |
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May 18, 2016 02:06
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