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Question: I'm a grad student, making little money. Before that I had a decent job, and put away some money in an IRA with WaMu. It's in two funds: SACAX $1800 SABPX $2600 (both rounded) I put the money in here 3 years ago, and haven't added any money since. Now I'm thinking that Vanguard's Target Retirement Funds might be a better fit for future investing once I graduate in a year and start making the  Would it be better to transfer these to Vanguard right now, or just leave them alone and save up the $3000 needed to start a new account there. I haven't found out what fees I might have to pay yet since WaMu apparently requires me to cash out the IRA before transferring it to Vanguard. Vice President fucked around with this message at 06:33 on Jun 25, 2020 |
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Sep 22, 2008 06:02
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I'm a public employee, and my state has this pension and retirement system called PERS. The non-pension part is a defined contribution plan where 6% of my salary gets put in there automatically and I can't put in any more/less then that. I'm definitely going to put as much as I can into an IRA to complement the state's retirement plan, but I'm wondering if I should take part in the optional 457 plan the state offers to us as well. The only way I can put money into it is to have monthly paycheck deductions (minimum $50/month), though it comes out pre-tax. It's set up like the Vanguard targeted retirement fund where there are different funds to join based on your expected retirement year. I may be one of them lazy government employees out to suck every last dollar of the taxpayer's wallet, but the pay ain't that great and I'm not sure if I can afford to contribute to all three things just yet. I guess really I'm wondering if having even a small pre-tax deduction every month + whatever's left going into the IRA is better then putting everything I can into the IRA.
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Mar 6, 2010 11:40
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Through the state 457 I can only invest in the various "LifePath" series of funds which are based on your expected year of retirement, and the employer does not match any contributions. Mine would be the Lifepath 2045 or 2050. The expense ratio is 0.25%.
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Mar 7, 2010 07:37
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I'm finally going to transfer my IRA away from Chase, who sucked it in after they bought out my bank. They want to charge me a $75 fee to transfer it. Is there any way to escape this dickery, or to convince Vanguard to pick it up for me?
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Mar 19, 2010 23:25
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Several years ago I signed up for some "Make a trade and get a $XX gift card" in some deal with Costco and Sharebuilder, and over the years when I had disposable income and thought I knew what I was doing I built up a tiny portfolio (about $600 worth now) of stocks. I set up an IRA with Vanguard recently and am liking the company so far. Would it be worth it (or be a huge hassle) to try and move the stocks over to Vanguard's brokerage service somehow? I'm not really planning to buy or sell any individual stocks in the near future, but I figured it might be simpler to keep everything with one company I like and I think I'll use Vanguard's services a lot more then I would Sharebuilder.
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Aug 16, 2010 10:55
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If you've pretty much gone all-in on a Vanguard target retirement fund as the only thing in your Roth, is it a better approach to just stick with that or to diversify a little bit more and split between that and maybe another mutual fund or two? About 10 years ago I didn't know much about investing so I went with VFORX right out of college because I figured, wow 30 years is forever off in the future surely I'll be retired by then and the economy will never ever dive into the toilet again. I've been contributing what I could ever since although there were a few years where I couldn't put much in there and only within the last 3 years have I been able to max out contributions. I'm wondering if I should add something like VTSAX into my IRA and split the contributions into that as well to add a little more long-term aggressive growth to it. Or just leave it as it is because I have 10 years of contributions compounding in the targeted fund. I poked around the fund overlap calculator thing on the Vanguard site and it didn't say there was any overlap between the two funds.
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Feb 8, 2021 11:56
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In a general sense, don't Schwab and Fidelity pretty much treat their low-fee funds as loss leaders for their other services, whereas Vanguard while their low-cost fees might be slight more than their competitors keep the fees lower across the board?
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Jan 3, 2022 23:22
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So there's been I Bonds talk here recently, but what about EE Savings Bonds. I have some old savings bonds from my dear departed grandmother, generally 3 or 4 of them a year between 1992 through 2002. I pretty much just stuck them in my safe deposit box and forgot about them for 20 years. I ran them through the savings bond calculator on Treasury Direct.. and I was pretty surprised to see the interest rate on almost all of them is either 0.52%, 0.74% or 0.77%. If I cashed them all out now it'd only be about $2000. Even if I did nothing more than put the cash in my emergency fund I'd be getting almost the same interest rate (0.50%) so I should just.. cash them all out right? Looking at the interest rate history it doesn't seem worth keeping them around another 10 years hoping the savings bond interest rate goes up higher than inflation.
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Jan 7, 2022 08:31
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Vox Nihili posted:EE bonds are guaranteed to double in value after twenty years regardless of the associated rate. The old paper bonds had a face value equal to half of what was actually paid for them (i.e. you would pay $25 for a "$50 bond"), so they should be worth at least their face value now (or soon, for the 2002 bonds). Cool, thanks for the info. Yeah according to the treasurydirect calculator my 2002 bonds which are the last year I have them are now worth $52.04. So they haven't reached exactly 20 years yet but have all reached the magic double your money mark so I'll just cash them now. I don't see the value in holding on to them for another 6+ months just to squeeze out a little more interest. Plus I have some educational expenses I can use to reduce some of that interest I need to pay taxes for, looks like https://www.treasurydirect.gov/indiv/planning/plan_education.htm
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Jan 7, 2022 21:34
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since this is bond chat, is anyone laddering treasury bills or CDs to park cash instead of a HYSA? I started looking into them after shopping around for higher HYSA rates and saw some discussion about using them as alternatives since their rates are generally higher at the moment for the 1-3 month treasury bills. I don't have a huge emergency fund so it doesn't really seem worth it to try and manage this (although Fidelity has an auto-roll feature that does it for you) just for a slightly higher interest rate and a return that's state tax free. I could see it being useful if you have $20, 30, 40k you want to park and know you won't touch it for a year plus though.
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Aug 6, 2022 09:04
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Duckman2008 posted:I’m considering CDs since it has a guaranteed interest , which is useful for when HYSA rates go down like we saw during the pandemic. I really like Fidelity's CD ladder tool, just enter an amount you want to invest and pick 1,2,3 years and it auto finds the bonds to divide your initial investment into CDs that cash out each quarterly or auto-reinvest into a new one. Playing around with it today a minimum $4000 1-year CD ladder would average 2.75% ladder. It looks nifty (although I could do the exact same thing at Vanguard or anywhere with just some extra clicks) but I still can't get over my hesitation to lock up my emergency fund just to chase 1 to 1.5% more interest.
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Aug 10, 2022 01:29
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Antillie posted:As much as I love Vanguard's funds I keep hearing that their website, and tech ability in general, is kinda crap. Vanguard's website is... fine. I log in once a month to check my statements and I've never had any real issues. Over the last year or so there's been a big redesign to make it somewhat more mobile friendly (the old site definitely was not) but it's functional if no-frills. Many people on the Bogleheads forum hate the change and complain about it constantly. Fidelity imho has a nicer website with more features though the counter argument is Vanguard's whole thing is the Bogle "just set up automated regular investing and never touch it" philosophy so who cares if the site isn't flashy as long as you stick with investing. There is also the argument that Vanguard's ownership structure lets them generally charge lower fees vs. Fidelity and other brokerages but that's also debatable. You can easily transfer your holdings between brokerages but I've had any real compelling reason to switch from Vanguard even though I also have a Fidelity account. The only thing to keep in mind about the zero-fee funds at Fidelity is they are loss leaders to get people onto their platform and unlike most other mutual funds it can't be transferred out of Fidelity so if you ever changed brokerages the funds would have to be sold, which wouldn't matter in an IRA but would for a taxable account.
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Oct 5, 2022 09:44
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Antillie posted:Vanguard doesn't do fractional shares of ETFs on their platform which makes using ETFs instead of the mutual fund equivalents super clunky. Vanguard starting allowing factional shares earlier this year, at least for their own ETFs. Not sure about others. When you go through the buy process now you can enter quantities of whole shares, or dollars (for fractional) Still can't auto-invest into ETFs as far as I know, only mutual funds though.
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Oct 5, 2022 23:37
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Muir posted:How much extra money is anyone really earning in a year by chasing an extra half a point on their online savings account? drk posted:$50 for every $10,000. It wouldnt strike me as odd for someone to have $20-50k as emergency funds and/or short term savings, so potentially several hundred dollars per year. Personally I'd spend a couple hours moving my emergency fund to a different HYSA to chase a few hundred dollars because I figure, well, if I spend an hour signing up and setting up the transfer and an hour babysitting it to make sure my emergency fund doesn't just vanish, I earned like $100/hr for the 'work'. It's low effort-reward to me. But there is value in simplicity of resisting the urge to tinker and just leaving your emergency fund be your emergency fund and not mess around with it. If you have $100k in your emergency fund already it's probably not likely you're going to starve because you didn't earn an extra $2k in interest by switching banks.
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Nov 4, 2022 18:48
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SpelledBackwards posted:Does that include the Estados Unidos Mexicanos? no, that's obviously the EU
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Nov 23, 2022 03:21
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:Basically, every time a fund you hold rebalances its holdings, you get realized gains. You owe capital gains taxes on these gains. A target date fund by nature is constantly rebalancing because it changes its holdings over time. In order to do that it must sell and purchase different assets, and the gains/losses resulting from those purchases are passed to the fund's owners (you). https://www.cnbc.com/2022/03/15/vanguard-created-big-tax-bills-for-target-date-fund-investors-lawsuit-claims.html Vanguard recently created some huge tax headaches for holders of TDFs in taxable accounts, a thing which they expressly do not recommend, but many people do anyway. The TLDR is Vanguard did an extremely unlikely to repeat change in how some of their TDF funds work and caused some of them to have to sell off a lot of assets generating huge capital gain distributions for holders, and it hosed over a lot of people with taxes on that.
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Feb 22, 2023 02:48
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We all know Ramsey is terrible but I often forget the details until something reminds me, like how he insists on calling the only four types of mutual funds you should invest in "growth and income, growth, aggressive growth, and international" which are terms nobody uses anymore. And then there's this: Why Dave Likes Front-End Load Funds posted:Many investors hate the idea of paying around 5% of their investment for up-front commission. But because it's a one-time expense, the value of your investment grows without being bogged down by expensive fees. And, as your investment increases in value over time, the commission has less impact on the overall cost of owning the fund. The bolding is in the original. quote:What people usually forget with no-load funds is that they come with plenty of ongoing fees that add up, which could make them more expensive than loaded funds. For example, a no-load fund may charge up to 1% in marketing and service fees (The expense ratio of VTSAX is 0.04%)
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Sep 11, 2023 04:16
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trying to figure out what "growth and income" mutual funds was I found this on bogleheads:quote:A few months ago, there was a large trove of data provided by Ramsey Solutions to the attorneys of the plaintiff in one of the lawsuits that Ramsey is facing, as part of discovery. That data is now public record. In that data dump, there is a retirement plan election form for an employee that includes the following four funds, at 25% each: I didn't look up all of them but the first two mutual funds listed have numerous share levels with an expense ratio from 0.50ish to over 1% so at least ol' Davey is screwing his employees with fees too.
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Sep 11, 2023 08:03
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more lol from the ramsey website:What is your debit card policy? posted:To clarify, we do NOT accept credit cards! Accepting credit cards is something we will NEVER do! DEBIT means CASH. CREDIT means CREDIT, and we don’t do that around here!
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Sep 11, 2023 08:12
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Subvisual Haze posted:Nobody posting in a thread about investing is Ramsey's target audience. This is true and those are exactly the type of people 10 or 12 babysteps or whatever is meant to help. I guess it's debatable over whether you should just continue treating the people who need help like this as total idiots who can't handle anything more complicated than "cash in envelopes for the rest of your life" or actually try and educate them on how to continue improving your situation. KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:I agree with that and also the concept that Ramsey is immoral for flogging front load fee mutual funds on his audience. And this pretty much is why Ramsey is poo poo because he just can't help himself and pitches only the products that will line his pockets at the expense of whatever goodwill he managed trying to legit help people who do need extreme help to get their finances in order.
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Sep 11, 2023 21:44
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| # ¿ May 4, 2024 20:52 |
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TurboTax (I know, boo) has something called "It's Deductible" built in which claims to use a totally amazing proprietary formula to provide fair market values for donated items, presumably values less likely to throw huge red flags with the IRS. I wouldn't buy it just for that but if you plan on donating a bunch of stuff it might help squeeze out a higher deduction.
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Oct 11, 2023 09:27
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