|
I bonds just seem like too much of a hassle to me when TIPS exist right over there. Assuming you are using a tax advantaged account anyway.
|
#
?
Nov 1, 2023 02:17
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 30, 2024 23:23 |
|
|
What would be a good strategy for moving towards less aggressive ETFs as I'm in my early mid-50's now, I do have around $50K in cash with my IRA right now, (from multiple 401K rollovers primarily) the higher percentage of my Roth is based towards VTI, but I thought about trying to focus on funds that are more in the middle regarding risk, where are some places to start so far as research?
|
|
#
?
Nov 1, 2023 02:37
|
|
|
The classic way to reduce risk is bonds. BND is the defacto total bond fund. There are equity funds that try to go for some sort of "stable value" approach but I feel that you can get the same effect with less expense with some mix of VTI and BND.
Antillie fucked around with this message at 02:50 on Nov 1, 2023 |
|
#
?
Nov 1, 2023 02:43
|
|
|
Antillie posted:The classic way to reduce risk is bonds. BND is the defacto total bond fund. There are equity funds that try to go for some sort of "stable value" approach but I feel that you can get the same effect with less expense with some mix of VTI and BND. What's a good fidelity equivalent? FXNAX? Also thanks for everyone who weighed in on my earlier 401k questions, I think I can present a decent case to my employer. They're already revising benefits so I'm hopeful.
|
|
#
?
Nov 1, 2023 16:36
|
|
|
Killer_B posted:What would be a good strategy for moving towards less aggressive ETFs as I'm in my early mid-50's now, I do have around $50K in cash with my IRA right now, (from multiple 401K rollovers primarily) the higher percentage of my Roth is based towards VTI, but I thought about trying to focus on funds that are more in the middle regarding risk, where are some places to start so far as research? Target date funds are a good fit for IRA accounts. But, if you prefer your own blend of individual funds, taking a look at what target date funds do can be useful. For example, Vanguards Target 2035 is currently: 43% US Equity 28% International Equity 20% US Bonds 9% International Bonds Reasonable people can disagree with how much international is appropriate, but I think the overall roughly 70/30 equity/bonds allocation seems pretty reasonable for someone 10-15 years from retirement. edit: just to add, I hope you dont literally mean $50k of cash and actually mean cash equivalents like a money market fund. Any funds that aren't in a long term allocation like the above should definitely be earning at least 5% right now. Look for federal/treasury money market funds or treasury bond funds with a duration under 1 year, and dont pay more than 0.10% in fees. drk fucked around with this message at 16:43 on Nov 1, 2023 |
|
#
?
Nov 1, 2023 16:40
|
|
|
Mu Zeta posted:Fixed interest rate for November Ibonds is 1.3%. The composite is 5.27% for 6 months. Subvisual Haze posted:Wow, kicking myself for buying earlier this year. That's a really good fixed rate. Same, if you go back in this thread you can find me being all smug for breaking with conventional wisdom and waiting, then scoring them at .9%. Honestly I should have at least waited until October, I guess there's no real advantage in buying I-bonds until the tail end of the 6 month interest period when you'll at least have a decent guess at if rates are going up or down. Live and learn.
|
|
#
?
Nov 1, 2023 19:56
|
|
|
Jabarto posted:What's a good fidelity equivalent? FXNAX? Yeah. Total US bond funds are fairly interchangeable.
|
|
#
?
Nov 1, 2023 20:00
|
|
|
Bremen posted:Same, if you go back in this thread you can find me being all smug for breaking with conventional wisdom and waiting, then scoring them at .9%. Honestly I should have at least waited until October, I guess there's no real advantage in buying I-bonds until the tail end of the 6 month interest period when you'll at least have a decent guess at if rates are going up or down. Live and learn.
|
|
#
?
Nov 1, 2023 20:31
|
|
|
I'm very overweight in equities in my 401k based on my previous posts. I need to move 17% of my portfolio into bonds. 20% of future contributions are now set to FXNAX, but I need to do a rebalance for what I have in there now to get the current balances to match the contributions. Should I be spreading these exchanges out over time or just do it all at once? I have 13 years to retirement and it's not a small amount of money that I need to move.
|
|
#
?
Nov 1, 2023 20:40
|
|
|
daslog posted:I'm very overweight in equities in my 401k based on my previous posts. I need to move 17% of my portfolio into bonds. 20% of future contributions are now set to FXNAX, but I need to do a rebalance for what I have in there now to get the current balances to match the contributions. In a retirement account, just do it now.* *(Exception could be if you're also doing taxable brokerage contributions, wash sale nonsense.)
|
|
#
?
Nov 1, 2023 20:50
|
|
|
Some mutual funds have excessive trading rules and restrict buying shares again after you've sold, so you definitely want to rebalance out of those all at once.
|
|
#
?
Nov 1, 2023 21:42
|
|
|
been glumly looking at the price of my total bund fund dropping for the last year, but now seeing that on the bright side, my quarterly dividend on the fund is now greater than the cost of an entire additional share. one day years from now, the additional yield will catch up to the drop in price...
|
|
#
?
Nov 2, 2023 01:16
|
|
|
Subvisual Haze posted:Yeah and it does seem like the person at TIPSWatch.com predicted the new fixed rate pretty accurately. There's no formal method published for how the fixed rate is set, but TIPSwatch seems to be correct that it's related to the real yield on 10 year treasury bonds. I'll have to remember to check out their predictions in the future if I'm on the fence. I predicted (or hoped for) 1.5% earlier in the thread - nice to see I wasn’t too far off, but 1.3% does look a bit weak compared to TIPS, even with the tax advantage that I Bonds give. I’ll probably still pick up some in the new year though.
|
|
#
?
Nov 2, 2023 04:17
|
|
|
Not sure if people are using Mint but I see it is shutting down.
|
|
#
?
Nov 2, 2023 17:57
|
|
|
Two years ago I got stoked about HSA. Last year I was on the fence whether paying a little more for a compliant plan was worth it. This year there's one compliant plan available and it's $400 more a month. It was a nice idea I guess, what a tease.
|
|
#
?
Nov 2, 2023 19:54
|
|
|
spwrozek posted:Not sure if people are using Mint but I see it is shutting down. It used to be good, then it got more and more cluttered with junk. I stopped using it years ago now.
|
|
#
?
Nov 2, 2023 19:59
|
|
|
I'm disheartened about Mint shutting down because it's still the best automatic transaction aggregator I've found especially for being free. I really don't care too much about building out budgets or anything like that, I just want something that pulls all my transactions for all my accounts and lets me look at category trends and makes sure my bills are paid. Mint has a lot of warts and flaws and it's been obvious abandonware for a while now, but it still mostly does transaction aggregation and reporting pretty well and mostly-automatically. I absolutely under no circumstances want to enter transactions manually from all my accounts. Every competitor has a flashier UI but focuses on all the features I don't care about and charges $100/yr. I'd even be happy to build my own dashboards and reports in a spreadsheet or whatever, if only I could reliably get my transactions synced automatically because that's the hard and valuable part. Most competitors dig on Mint for being backward-looking instead of forward-looking, but that's exactly why I like it. It's just a reporting tool to me. Guinness fucked around with this message at 20:09 on Nov 2, 2023 |
|
#
?
Nov 2, 2023 20:04
|
|
|
I just use the one Fidelity has on their website. Fullview.
|
|
#
?
Nov 2, 2023 20:17
|
|
|
I switched to Tiller earlier this year due to ongoing enshittification of Mint. It is $79/year (first month free) and required a bit of DIY effort to make it do the stuff I was using Mint for (as well as the stuff I always wished Mint could do), but I'm a spreadsheet nerd so that was fine. Basically it is an interface that automatically puts all of your account transactions and balances into a google sheets document daily, which you can then categorize, slice, dice, and generate reports from however you want. It has a bunch of built-in reports and budget tracking tools that you can use and there are extra community-developed ones also if you aren't into the DIY aspect. There is a fairly active development community. I was able to download ~15 years of data from Mint and import it after a bit of manipulation. I then took it back out except for the last year or two because google sheets runs like poo poo with that much data in it. withak fucked around with this message at 20:42 on Nov 2, 2023 |
|
#
?
Nov 2, 2023 20:32
|
|
|
Tiller looks interesting, I might have to give it a whirl. Just getting all my data into a spreadsheet automatically would do 90% of what I want. That's my biggest frustration is that it's my data that is so drat difficult to get in a reliable, consistent format from all my financial institutions. Also been peepin' Monarch and Lunch Money, but they focus on budgeting and planning features I don't really want/need. I guess I know what an upcoming weekend project is.
|
|
#
?
Nov 2, 2023 20:48
|
|
|
Best part is the auto categorization feature is just a plain list of "if transaction matches X then category Y" rules that doesn't make any attempt at learning or guessing what categories you want. For some reason Mint would always ignore rules or try to outsmart me at the wrong time. Pretty much the only thing I have to categorize by hand now is farmers market booths and amazon.
withak fucked around with this message at 21:02 on Nov 2, 2023 |
|
#
?
Nov 2, 2023 20:57
|
|
|
spwrozek posted:Not sure if people are using Mint but I see it is shutting down. Thanks, I had not seen that… I had started making my own budgeting app a little bit ago when I got mad at Mint over some messed up auto importing stuff, but had stopped working on it when they got the issue fixed. I guess this is a good motivator to get back to working on it
|
|
#
?
Nov 2, 2023 22:22
|
|
|
daslog posted:I just use the one Fidelity has on their website. Fullview. Where is this? I've been using Personal Capital or now Empower. I guess it's selling my data but the aggregated view with all my accounts is damned good.
|
|
#
?
Nov 2, 2023 23:13
|
|
|
Trying out Fidelity Fullview since my 401k is there already. Found it by searching on thier website and enrolled my account in it. Added Ally and a CC and it looks like the transaction tab is pretty much the same as Mints, which was the only thing I used anyway.
|
|
#
?
Nov 3, 2023 00:36
|
|
|
Crosby B. Alfred posted:Where is this? On my PC, I go to Accounts & Trade in the top left hand corner and its an option about 2/3rds of the way down the list. Never tried it on the app before today, but it's in the planning section there. daslog fucked around with this message at 12:02 on Nov 3, 2023 |
|
#
?
Nov 3, 2023 11:30
|
|
|
Crosby B. Alfred posted:I've been using Personal Capital or now Empower. I guess it's selling my data but the aggregated view with all my accounts is damned good. I recently decided to stop being a moron and turned on two factor auth on my Fidelity account. However doing so appears to have broken Empower's ability to import data from Fidelity. Is there any way to fix this or do I have to pick between reasonable security and being able to use Empower?
|
|
#
?
Nov 3, 2023 14:12
|
|
|
I have a referral link for Tiller that gives a slight discount if any Mint refugees want to take the DIY spreadsheet nerd route.
|
|
#
?
Nov 3, 2023 14:59
|
|
|
a retread on a question I had asked a while ago: I have $12k I would like to set aside, earmarked for a new roof for my house. I have the money now but I don't need the roof yet – just carving it out for the future. I would be surprised if I need the new roof in 5 years, probably closer to 10 years down the road. Are there tangible benefits (tax or otherwise) to keeping these funds in ibonds as opposed to, say, rolling them in CDs? I saw earlier in the thread that there is a $10k per year maximum ibond purchase – if I decided to go with ibonds for this money could I do a $10k purchase before Dec 31 and then buy another $2k on Jan 1?
|
|
#
?
Nov 3, 2023 19:32
|
|
|
Serious_Cyclone posted:a retread on a question I had asked a while ago: The interest the ibonds earn would be exempt from state taxes, if you live somewhere with a state income tax. And it would all be taxable income on the year you sold it, as opposed to spread out each year with rolling CDs, which might be a pro or a con depending on your situation.
|
|
#
?
Nov 3, 2023 19:45
|
|
|
So i moved my emergency fund into VFMXX and included an extra 7k to put into an IRA at the beginning of the year. I will have extra cash to throw into a non-tax advantaged account, 33 years old at the moment and i am wondering about dumping it all into VTI/VSTAX versus 80/20 VTI/VSTAX and VBTLX for bonds. Or should i just try to replicate the current ratio of the target date funds i have everything else in. I am pretty risk tolerant right now so i think the all IN VTI for a good number of years seems reasonable but if anyone could shoot some holes in this plan or hit me with better vanguard funds i would love the input.
|
|
#
?
Nov 4, 2023 02:39
|
|
|
Mr.Fuzzywig posted:So i moved my emergency fund into VFMXX and included an extra 7k to put into an IRA at the beginning of the year. I will have extra cash to throw into a non-tax advantaged account, 33 years old at the moment and i am wondering about dumping it all into VTI/VSTAX versus 80/20 VTI/VSTAX and VBTLX for bonds. Or should i just try to replicate the current ratio of the target date funds i have everything else in. I am pretty risk tolerant right now so i think the all IN VTI for a good number of years seems reasonable but if anyone could shoot some holes in this plan or hit me with better vanguard funds i would love the input. Instead of waiting until 1/1, you can put it in a taxable brokerage account now, shove it in (whatever allocation you pick), and then when 1/1 rolls around you can move $7k (or maybe a bit less) into the IRA (Roth or Backdoor Roth, right?). Consider every account you have as part of a global portfolio and try to hit your desired asset allocation across the entire thing. All in VTI is probably best. 80/20 will be fine. Replicating target-date funds will probably get you somewhere in the middle, with more int'l exposure. All of these are fine. You are in great shape. Pick something you think you can stick with for a long time and don't mess with it.
|
|
#
?
Nov 4, 2023 03:27
|
|
|
CubicalSucrose posted:Instead of waiting until 1/1, you can put it in a taxable brokerage account now, shove it in (whatever allocation you pick), and then when 1/1 rolls around you can move $7k (or maybe a bit less) into the IRA (Roth or Backdoor Roth, right?). I would just leave it in VMFXX. Plenty of yield for two months without the risk of loss.
|
|
#
?
Nov 4, 2023 04:33
|
|
|
spwrozek posted:I would just leave it in VMFXX. Plenty of yield for two months without the risk of loss. OP is 33 and seems to be crushing it. Time in market > etc. 2 months won't matter either way in the grand scheme of things, but seems right to push good habits.
|
|
#
?
Nov 4, 2023 04:41
|
|
|
drk posted:I hope you dont literally mean $50k of cash and actually mean cash equivalents like a money market fund. Any funds that aren't in a long term allocation like the above should definitely be earning at least 5% right now. Look for federal/treasury money market funds or treasury bond funds with a duration under 1 year, and dont pay more than 0.10% in fees. Correct, that's in equivalents.
|
|
#
?
Nov 4, 2023 11:51
|
|
|
CubicalSucrose posted:OP is 33 and seems to be crushing it. Time in market > etc. 2 months won't matter either way in the grand scheme of things, but seems right to push good habits. The problem is you can only contribute cash to an IRA. If OP buys, say, VTI now with that $7k earmarked for their 2024 IRA contribution and it loses value before January then they have to liquidate and take the loss in order to contribute to the IRA. Funds you need sooner than a few years (including an emergency fund, or next year's IRA contribution) should be kept in a savings account/money market/other cash equivalent for this reason. SamDabbers fucked around with this message at 12:05 on Nov 4, 2023 |
|
#
?
Nov 4, 2023 12:02
|
|
|
SamDabbers posted:The problem is you can only contribute cash to an IRA. If OP buys, say, VTI now with that $7k earmarked for their 2024 IRA contribution and it loses value before January then they have to liquidate and take the loss in order to contribute to the IRA. " i moved my emergency fund into VFMXX and included an extra 7k" OP already has the eFund covered. Plus an additional 7k. What's the bad case here, 7k goes down to like 4k before 1/1? So you get a 3k capital loss, you shove 4k into a Roth, and you have to come up with another 3k to contribute later over the course of a year, which I expect is not going to be an issue. This is basically the same problem as lump-sum vs DCA a windfall, and I think the overall thread consensus is lump-sum has a better expectation. Folks recommending holding off seem to be "letting the tax tail wag the investment dog" or whatever the right phrasing is.
|
|
#
?
Nov 4, 2023 13:20
|
|
|
SamDabbers posted:The problem is you can only contribute cash to an IRA. If OP buys, say, VTI now with that $7k earmarked for their 2024 IRA contribution and it loses value before January then they have to liquidate and take the loss in order to contribute to the IRA. Agree. I would keep it in a money market fund or SGOV until the new year and then put it in the market once its inside the IRA.
|
|
#
?
Nov 4, 2023 13:21
|
|
|
I think I have this correct, but please let me know if I don't. I currently have an HSA and a HDHP. If I switch to a more conventional insurance plan, the HSA becomes... sort of like an orphaned IRA? I can't contribute or withdraw from it without penalty until 65. Right?
|
|
#
?
Nov 4, 2023 15:06
|
|
|
Agronox posted:I think I have this correct, but please let me know if I don't. You can still withdraw for qualified medical expenses. You don't lose your HSA, it's still an HSA, you just can't contribute.
|
|
#
?
Nov 4, 2023 16:04
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 30, 2024 23:23 |
|
|
Agronox posted:I think I have this correct, but please let me know if I don't. You can withdraw from the HSA at any time regardless of current plan coverage. The withdrawal will be tax and penalty free as long as it is reimbursing qualified medical expenses. What is a qualified medical expense is pretty broadly defined. Also the expenses don't even need to be same year as the withdrawals. As long as the medical expense occurred any time after the HSA was established it can be reimbursed any time later, even potentially years after actual expense occurred. Age 65 only comes into play if you're withdrawing money without matching medical expenses. In that situation before age 65 you would be penalized and taxed, after age 65 only taxed.
|
|
#
?
Nov 4, 2023 17:53
|
|