Bogleheads.org

A factor I can't speak to, because I don't have a pure EV, is how nice the feel of the driving on a pure EV is and how much that might be worth to you.

Our across-the-street neighbors recently bought a plug-in hybrid, and a charger, I think it's a level 2, that can recharge their car fully overnight, but it does take hours. "How much does it cost" is complicated because they have a deal with the electric company and timers and so forth on the car so that mostly it charges between (IIRC) midnight and 4 am or something like that. They are clearly into it, and their opinions, which sound so reasonable that I believe them, is that if the charging is done during the low-rate time period, the cost per mile for electric driving is lower than gas, but not dramatically. A nearby park, less than half a mile away, has a high-speed pay-with-credit-card Chargepoint charger. He says they somet...

Let me try one last time. The article referenced by MalteseLover--which (as they note themselves) is a copy of this article here --mentions the name "Rockefeller" twenty times. And yet the only evidence that the Rockefellers use life insurance is an assertion that "are thought to." Thought to by whom, and on what basis? What is the evidence that the Rockefellers use life insurance in the manner suggested? Appropriate Google searches seem to turn up nothing except articles from insurance advisors making unsupported assertions that this is how the Rockefellers preserved their wealth. I have to add that there are many differences between the Vanderbilt and Rockefeller families that might well explain the difference in their...

In the mutual fund world, there was a name for this: "incubator" funds, which were multiple funds that were started up, but not made available publicly for a few years until they could identify the ones that had outperformed.

Trade what? Which "trading page?"

Within one of my accounts, the "transact" heading gives me a list including "trade stocks and listed securities." It comes up, show me available balance, shows me a quote for a stock. I'm not going to try going any farther.

As always, user experience can be quite variable, "works for me" doesn't mean "all OK" by any means.

I have a simple three-fund portfolio. Classic. FSKAX, FTIHX, FXNAX with Fidelity. 45% US, 25% int'l, 30% bonds. There are plenty of Bond funds recommended for this type of portfolio: AGG, BND, VBTLX, whatever. My question isn't about the specific fund I should choose. Rather, should we have these funds at all? Over the past 20 years, it seems like these funds have been as good as putting money under the mattress. if you round down, they don't increase in value... You must have made a bad mistake and looked at price per share rather than growth. Please bear with me, this is super important and a lot of people make the same mistake you made. Over the past twenty years, a $10,000 investment in either AGG or VBTLX (BND and FXNAX don't have twe...

The assumption in the article is that no one will retire before age 55 and certainly not while they are under 30 years old. I care if stocks plunge because that's an opportunity to buy more shares of a broad stock market index fund that I don't want to miss. And before anyone asks where I get the cash to buy more shares: I get the cash by selling broad bond market index fund shares. I do not have cash laying around waiting for a stock market plunge. If the only source of funds to buy stocks in a plunge is from selling bonds, then every time the stock market plunges your stock allocation permanently increases. How does your asset allocation get back to target, or do you just allow it to drift up steadily? Opportunities like 1994 or 2022 to ...

The assumption in the article is that no one will retire before age 55 and certainly not while they are under 30 years old. I care if stocks plunge because that's an opportunity to buy more shares of a broad stock market index fund that I don't want to miss. And before anyone asks where I get the cash to buy more shares: I get the cash by selling broad bond market index fund shares. I do not have cash laying around waiting for a stock market plunge. If the only source of funds to buy stocks in a plunge is from selling bonds, then every time the stock market plunges your stock allocation permanently increases. How does your asset allocation get back to target? Do you just allow it to ratchet up steadily? Because the reverse opportunity, lik...

Jules Verne ("we were astonished by the brightly-colored panoply of lithodomes, ophiucans, echinodermata, lepidoptera, golfingia, elasmobranchs, [fifty more list items], phragmites, and strongylocentrotidae disporting themselves for our edification in the bright light provided so abundantly by the Ruhmkorff apparatus" kind of thing). Was that a Jules Verne or a Cormac McCarthy quote? I imagine Jules Verne but can't discount McCarthy... I was trying to evoke Jules Verne because I was too lazy to look up an actual passage. I threw in a bunch of biological terms I happen to half-know, some of which are legitimate sea-creatures, some of which aren't. I think they're all real words if I didn't mis-spell them. The "Ruhmkorff appar...

Note that the "gap" is basically the difference between staying the course and not staying the course. The Barron's article is a reporter's selective summary of a Morningstar report, Mind the Gap 2024: A Report on Investor Returns in the US . Morningstar does not say anything about John C. Bogle, nor is it focussing solely on mutual-fund-versus-ETF. The link above gets you to a page where you can request a free copy of the 21-page report. You need to provide email address, a country, organization category and role. "Individual investor" were included as category and role choices, and I selected them. I also selected "no" as my choice for "Send me emails from Morningstar or its affiliates about their resear...

I think he was right. But, of course, cue old, sterile debate: a) Do ETFs tempt investors to stray from the path of virtue? Is it only the weak-minded who yield? If ETFs are in fact tempting the weak-minded to yield, is this a bad thing, or are they legitimate prey who deserve to be eaten? b) Are ETFs a superior and lower-cost structure from the point of view of the provider? If so, do they actually pass any of the benefits on to the customer or do they keep it all for themselves? c) Suppose for the sake of argument that "temptation" is a non-problem for the big, low-cost index ETFs. That is, suppose that there is no behavior gap between VTI investors and VTSAX investors. That said, does the availability of what I will call "...

I had cataracts in both eyes. I had operations for intraocular lens implants. Very happy with the results. I have traditional Medicare plus high-end supplemental ("Medigap"). I paid $1,600 each upfront for "premium" toric lens implants. Medicare so my total out-of-pocket cost was exactly $1,600 per eye. If I'd opted for basic lens implants, I believe it would have been zero. If I add up the total bills submitted to Medicare, I get $8,075 per eye. If I add up what Medicare and Medigap paid, which was accepted by the provider, $2,715 per eye. I don't know what "manual" means, but no laser equipment was involved in the procedure. I was given a choice of three categories of lens: single vision basic; "toric&qu...

Just got hearing aids at Costco. Very impressed, very good experience so far. The Costco experience seemed 100% professional and thorough, it isn't any cheap-and-cheesy lick-and-a-promise business. a) The hearing test and fitting were conducted by someone whose credentials were "licensed hearing instrument specialist," not "audiologist." The licensing is through a state board just like plumbers, dentists, etc. and I checked the license... I mean, it's a real thing. b) I've had half-a-dozen tests by audiologists, as part of ENT consultations. This test was very similar and seemed to cover all of the individual tests the audiologists have used. Bone conduction, bone conduction with masking, tones, speech... I think it took...

Our details don't match yours, but we had an energy audit done on the house we moved into two years ago. They noted that although there was six inches of insulation in the attic, it actually didn't cover everything--there was no insulation above the kitchen ceiling. They recommended adding insulation to bring it up to nine inches everywhere--and air-sealing the attic, and doing something or other in some of the walls to close off some channels that allowed air to pass between attic and basement. Yes, there was a perceptible comfort improvement. As you might expect, it was particularly noticeable in the kitchen. It also seemed to make the house perceptibly cooler in summer. Energy savings? Hard to tell, because of differences in winter sever...

What "Achilles heel" is that, exactly? Here's how the Vanguard Balanced Index Fund has performed since inception: Source https://i.imgur.com/6tm8zPp.png That doesn't look half-bad to me. The three dips are all associated with periods of stock market dips. We can see whether bonds made things worse by comparing it to a bond-free portfolio, 70% stocks and 30% T-bills, where we add the T-bills to damp down the stock volatility: red curve. https://i.imgur.com/HCHf0PF.png WIthout the contribution from the bonds, the results were perfectly OK, but did combine very slightly lower return with a deeper drawdown, higher volatility, and lower risk-adjusted return (Sharpe and Sortino ratios). So in fact, the portfolio with the bonds was an im...

1) Reject the hard sell. 2) Take your time and read up on the options. Ignore the phony urgency ("interest rates are about to fall"). Ask a few questions here in the forum. Decide on what terms and options you want. Get ballpark ideas of prices from online services. I've personally used immediateannuity.com. I'm reluctant to even mention stantheannuityman.com because I've never used them, but other forum members have mentioned it favorably. 3) Although I never actually did business with them, I was very impressed with the thick package of helpful information I once got from immediateannuity.com , and they honored my request and never phoned me. I believe they sent one (1) followup email. At that time, Vanguard offered SPIAs (not a...

Well, what happened the last time? The big one.

Source



VNQ = Vanguard Real Estate Index ETF

Source

Once upon a time there were mutual funds.* They were and are special products that are transacted in a different way from stocks. The first index fund was the fund now named the Vanguard 500 Index Fund, VFINX. Around the time I started investing in mutual funds, around 1998, VFINX had an expense ratio (ER) of something like 0.50%, which was a bargain because most mutual funds had expense ratios like 1.50%. By around the year 2000, the expense ratio was down to maybe 0.20%. Vanguard--and I believe Vanguard was the first to do it--got the idea of introducing Admiral shares, which are basically the "large economy size." Some of the expenses of managing an individual mutual fund account are per fund, rather than per dollar. At that th...

What defines meme in the way folks are using it? This Forbes Advisor article gives PLTR as a representative example of a "meme stock." You can read the article for their analysis, but the shortest definition I can draw from the article is that a meme-stock is a very-high-volatility stock whose volatility is driven by social media. Meme Stocks: What Are They And How Do They Work? ... Examples Of Meme Stocks In addition to GameStop (NYSE:GME), some of the top stocks that have been hyped, bought and held by retail investors on the back of social media sentiment include: AMC Entertainment Holdings (NYSE:AMC) Bed, Bath & Beyond (NASDAQ:BBBY) Nokia (NYSE:NOK) Virgin Galactic (NYSE:SPCE) ContextLogic Inc (NASDAQ:WISH) Palantir Techn...

I used personal-domain email addresses for over ten years. A major problem is that whether or not it's fair, many corporate email systems use aggressive spam filtering that tends to discriminate heavily against personal-domain email addresses. I was constantly encountering problems with legitimate and important email (e.g. to my lawyer) getting trapped in the recipient's spam filter. (It was particularly confusing because it didn't all get trapped, a lot went through, which made both of us unaware of the problem). Due to shenanigans by my hosting service, I was more or less forced to switch, and gmail is what I switched to. For me and what I use it for, it was a great improvement in every respect. My gmail message never get misidentified as...

About the caps on guaranty association coverage - I’ve talked to my local guaranty fund (Alabama) and this is what they told me. (In my state, the coverage limit is $250k for annuities). —- My coverage is limited to $250k per company. For example, if I bought $200k from NYL and then bought $200k more from NYL the next year, I would have coverage of only $250k if NYL went bust. —- My coverage is by company, not in total. So if I bought $200k from each of two companies and they both went bust, I would have full coverage for both annuities. I believe that most, if not all, states interpret coverage limits in the same way. Nope, I really don't think so. It's pretty clear from a quick review of the details on the nolhga website that no, they do...

I just spoke with "Stan the Annuity Man's" people. They said the insurance was by policy not company. For instance - I could by a NY Life policy now for $250k and another NY Life next year for $200k. Both would be covered at 80% each even though same company, but different policies. Sound right? No, it does not sound right to me... Thanks - could it be more confusing? It could be and is fifty times as confusing! Because insurance law is state law, and there are fifty different guaranty association laws, one for each state. I believe there are fifty although I've never tried to verify it. There's no federal law requiring states to have one. Wait... the nolhga.com website shows yes, there is one for every state, plus one for the Di...

I just spoke with "Stan the Annuity Man's" people. They said the insurance was by policy not company. For instance - I could by a NY Life policy now for $250k and another NY Life next year for $200k. Both would be covered at 80% each even though same company, but different policies. Sound right? No, it does not sound right to me. I am no expert, just trying to apply what I'm seeing on the California Life & Health Insurance Guaranty Association website. The broker seems to be suggesting that total protection is 80% of $250,000 + 80% of $200,000 = $200,000 + $160,000 = $360,000. But the California website FAQ, here , under question #17, says: If I bought three annuities each worth $250,000 from a company that becomes insolvent,...

I am not sure what link they gave you, but this is a good reference: California Life & Health Insurance Guaranty Association--Frequently Asked Questions If you're going to buy six figures' worth, it's seriously worth taking the time to run down the full list of FAQs and read the ones that matter to you. In your case, #13, #17, and #18. #13 reads: Are covered life insurance and annuity policies fully protected? No. The maximum amount of protection for which the Guarantee Association may become liable for life insurance and annuity policies is as follows: Life insurance death benefit protection: 80% of the policy death benefit up to a maximum of $300,000; Life insurance net cash surrender and net cash withdrawal values: 80% of the policy ...

The violence doesn’t bother me. Reminds me of the Punisher. You haven't gotten to the puppies yet. ...Several pages of long sentences describing in glorious detail the southwestern desert landscape and its 1849 inhabitants, perforated by one gruesome, gory massacre after another...another trek through landscape....another massacre....another trek...another massacre....no real direction or anything to captivate the reader with surprise past the first fifty pages or so. The one thing I will really give McCarthy is that this is one of the few books I've ever read that contains long, descriptive passages about landscapes and landforms that I actually liked. I don't know if he's hearkening back to 1800 novel-writing style by including them, but...

(I don't like the word "bucket" because that typically refers to a system for drawing down a stock portfolio in retirement: empty the cash bucket, refill it from the bond bucket, when the bond bucket empties refill it from the stock bucket.) This is just part of the endless debate on "how much international?" Sometime phrased as "don't multinationals effectively give you enough international exposure?" John C. Bogle's own answer to this was, in fact, that they do, and that he thought it was unnecessary to hold international stocks. (For absolutely no good reason, my own stock holdings are 20% international). One obvious point is: VTSMX = Total Stock VGTSX = Total International VBMFX = Total Bond Source https://...

[Cussing deleted], Consumer Reports continues to perpetuate a misunderstanding: Q: Will You Be Penalized If You Go Back to Work After Claiming Social Security? Yes, but only if you’re under the full retirement age (67 for those born in 1960 or later). In that case, your benefit may be reduced by $1 for every $2 you earn above the annual limit, which is $22,300 for 2024. But your earnings will no longer be reduced once you reach full retirement age, says Michael Piper, a certified public accountant and founder of Open Social Security, a free online Social Security calculator. Statistically, you are not penalized at all. Your benefits are not confiscated. You are not punished for working. When you reach full retirement age, an ARF--adjustment...

edge wrote: ↑Mon Sep 09, 2024 10:34 am Just seems like he is trying to make it seem more complicated than it is, which makes sense given his profession.

Usually when someone says ‘buy an index fund’ it is about a broad market index fund.

That's definitely what John C. Bogle meant. He complained in 2004 that

...the original idea of the index fund—own the entire U.S. stock market, own it at low cost, hang on to it forever—has been, to put it bluntly, bastardized. The core idea of relying on the wisdom of long-term investing is being eroded by the folly of short-term speculation. And index funds are one of the principle instruments for this erosion. Why? Because the term “index fund,” like the term “hedge fund,” now means pretty much whatever we want it to mean.

1) As the core US stock holding in a general-purpose retirement savings portfolio, yes, the best option still is: a) A total market, or an S&P 500 index fund (which historically was a 1957 attempt to come as close to the total market as possible given available computing power). b) from Vanguard, or Fidelity, or Schwab, or iShares, or T. Rowe Price, or other good providers with low expense ratios. For specific suggestions including ticker symbols, see: Three fund portfolio: choosing three funds 2) Seriously, when reading attacks on indexing, always consider the source. Nobody on Wall Street makes much money from indexing. That's why it is a good choice for investors: it's bad for Wall Street . Even firms that provide excellent index fun...

...The discount plans that nisiprius mentioned, do not report to CMS. However, I use Publix Pharmacy and they maintain subscriptions to GoodRX, Paramount, and other discounters. Whenever I pickup my prescriptions, I automagically receive the lowest price, whether it is my Part D plan or one of the discounters previously mentioned. Also, I use Mark Cuban's Cost Plus... Good for Publix. But my point is that you need to get oriented on discount prices before you start Part D shopping, and if you have located sources that sell drugs cheaper than insurance co-pays, you need to plan not to use your insurance for them--and leave them out of the drug list when you go part D shopping on the Medicare Plan Finder website. And if you haven't stepped i...

He made money. He had a positive rate of return. Everything else is just Abbott and Costello proving that 7 times 13 is 28.

arcticpineapplecorp. wrote: ↑Sun Sep 08, 2024 8:15 pm ...So if A < B how have you lost money?...

I believe he got confused, or Vanguard's presentation confused him, about a third number $D, reinvested fund dividends. He was under the impression that when your fund kicks out $D in dividends and you turn around and stuff it right back in, that $D represents a cost to you, that ought to be subtracted from your return. The thing is, though, that if you subtract the $D when you put it back in, you should first add it to your return at the moment it came out.

Hey, we can even go farther than that, without any Excel formulas or "internal rate of return" calculations. Even if you had put in ALL your money, your 8x, in 2009, and even if you had done it at the very end of 2009... let's say x = $1,000... so you started with $9,000... Source https://i.imgur.com/sqviHAO.png ...you would now have $12,970, i.e. almost $13X. So your total investment of $9X made you almost $4X In reality, since money invested in Total Bond in 2003 grew between then and 2009, and so did money invested in 2005, and so did money invested in 2008, since you probably didn't invest at the end of 2009 and there was growth during 2009, you must have made more than that. Don't get too hung up on methodology. All you need ...

I put in an orgiinal amount of X in 2003 and reinvested all dividends. IN 2005 I invested another amount of x. In 2008 I invested another amount of x. Then in 2009 I invested 6x. We don't even need the actual numbers. You made money. We can see that at a glance from the chart. And with ten minutes' work fiddling with the starting date in testfol.io, we can determine that you made, on average, more than +2.78% per year. On the growth chart, we see that the levels at 2003, 2005, 2008, and 2009 are all lower than the value today. So every dollar you contributed made money. The only way you could have lost money would have been to have put in almost all of your money between 2020 and 2022. Source https://i.imgur.com/RbVqmBl.png That means the ...

I put in an orgiinal amount of X in 2003 and reinvested all dividends. IN 2005 I invested another amount of x. In 2008 I invested another amount of x. Then in 2009 I invested 6x. In each instnace all returns from the investements were reinvested. My "source" of having a negative return comes from Vangaurd's monthly report which they send me via US mail. According to them, the Total Cost column, which they told me is all the money I invested, i.e. the 9x amount with four different periods when such was invested as detaield above, plus all the reinvested dividents, is less than the balalnce I currently have today at the end of August 2024. If my total cost is less than my balalnce, I've lost money, right? No, I don't see that at al...

After you get an AI interpretation, you need to pay a medical professional to find out whether the AI's interpretation was correct. Does that actually cost less than having the medical professional just interpret the image in the first place?

I know because I had some first-issue TIPS and some reopened TIPS, which, having the same CUSIP, got commingled when I moved them to another brokerage, and ended up with a tax mess when they matured. Thank you, this is good to know. Is it reasonable to assume that moving of the TIPS from one brokerage to another was the root of the problem? If held to maturity at the the brokerage that did the purchases, 1099-OID would likely be correct. Is this the moral of the story? Yes, the problem was a result of moving them to another brokerage. And yes, the moral of this one, particular story is if you have both TIPS bought on their first issue and also more TIPS with the same CUSIP number bought at reopening, it is a good idea to be careful to keep...

I'm pretty sure there is a difference in that the auction price--the premium or discount--will be different. That means that when the bond matures, the calculations for how much taxes are owing and how much was already paid based on 1099-OID forms, will be different.

I know because I had some first-issue TIPS and some reopened TIPS, which, having the same CUSIP, got commingled when I moved them to another brokerage, and ended up with a tax mess when they matured. One of those deals where the amount involved was small, but the amount of work involved to calculate it was large.

ADDED: Yeah, I think it's the exact situation Artsdoctor is talking about.

It suddenly struck me.

Are people concerned about... THIS?



Had they seen... THIS...



and thought that AVUV was the new meme stock and that this would continue?

Without noticing that every other small-cap value ETF was doing the same thing... and that AVUV has had dozens of ups and downs as big or bigger before, and that they are just normal fluctuations?



Did r/wallstreetbets suddenly discover AVUV?

No, don't be silly. Nobody could be concerned about that.

One IMPORTANT CAUTION. The medicare.gov "choose a plan" tool used to be great, but now it suffers from a serious flaw: it does not do anything to take account of the "real-world" price of prescription drugs from discount sellers such as Amazon, Costco, Walmart, or discount plans like GoodRX. Many common generic prescription drugs are lower in cost, quite often a lot lower, without insurance through a discounter, than when bought with insurance. So step one, before entering your drug list, is to identify drugs that are inexpensive without insurance through a discounter, and leave them off your drug list. The problem is not a misleading comparison between out-of-pocket costs with and without part D. The problem is that inc...

monkeytoad wrote: ↑Sun Sep 08, 2024 11:15 am I am concerned with AVUV's performance...

Why? I would seriously like to know.

Or do you just mean that you are concerned with the performance of small-cap value generally?

My guess is that many people who buy AVUV expected or hoped that it would perform similarly to the DFA US Small-cap Value Portfolio, DFSVX. They hoped for a DFSVX clone with no need to buy through an advisor, and it has performed very similarly--but better. Source https://i.imgur.com/docBqLy.png AVUV's chosen benchmark is the Russell 2000 Value index, and since inception it has beaten an ETF (IWN) that tracks that index, a Vanguard ETF (VBR) that tracks a different small-cap value index, and OUSM. https://i.imgur.com/FBqLAs1.png Morningstar's star ratings have no persistence or predictive value, but they are a "smart" measure of past performance that take risk, style, and category into account, and as of 7/31/2024, Morningstar gav...

Why is that chart so different than this one, showing that VBTLX is down from 2001? https://www.google.com/finance/quote/VBTLX:MUTF?sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiCp9nZjbKIAxVW7skDHVHtNQkQ3ecFegQIHBAa&window=MAX Because that's a price chart. It's what you get if you burn or give away most of the money the bonds made. It's the exact counterpart of saying "I invested in Berkshire Hathaway and I've tracked all the dividends it has paid me, and I didn't earn one red cent, so Berkshire Hathaway sucks." No, it didn't. It paid you a different way, all from price-per-share increase, nothing from dividends. Bond funds pay you the other way, almost all through dividends, almost nothing from price-per-share growth. I think tenleyjohnson miscalcul...

I invested in this fund back in 2003, and I have a negative rate of return after reinvesting all dividends and capital gains. Are you sure? How did you get those numbers? I don't understand how that's possible except by bad timing--that is, you put in a whole lot of money at a very unfavorable time. The fund return from 1/1/2003 through today has been an average of +3.13%/year ( source ) Someone who put in $100/month, starting in 2003, would have made 260 contributions. They would have invested a grand total of $26,000, and would now have over $34,000. Not very exciting, but more than they put in. Not a negative return. And if they had put it into T-bills instead--which would roughly approximate the best bank accounts available--they would...

?????

What concerns you about AVUV performance?

Why are you "concerned with AVUV performance" but not concerned with OUSM performance?

Source

I think it is. Of course, the way to find out is to call Fidelity, with a specific ticker symbol, and ask.

I say "pretty sure" because years ago I had the opposite problem. A Fidelity rep said they could accept transfers of Total Stock, Admiral shares. When the transfer failed, they said they were mistaken, they could only accept Admiral shares of active funds. So it was news when Fidelity began accepting Admiral shares of index funds.

arca wrote: ↑Sun Sep 08, 2024 12:07 am Index Annuity:
- 100% protection of principal
- 10% withdrawal from principal
- 3% guaranteed return even if the market dips below 3%
- Rate cap: If annuity is fixed at 5%, you get 5% even if the market returns above that.

Suppose you put your money into a 5% bank savings account.



You get:
-- Same 100% protection of principal
-- 100% withdrawal from principal
-- 5% guaranteed return, not just 3%, "even if the market dips below 3%"
-- Same rate cap--you only get 5% if the market returns above 5%.

How is this product better than a high-yield savings account?

I forgot this one. Yes, 100% of economists were dead wrong about yields And the chart, which basically summarizes the whole story. I should say--because the headline and chart caption were sharply criticized in a Bogleheads' discussion . The issue is that "100%" doesn't refer to all economists in the world, it refers to a 100% of a panel of 67 economists surveyed by Bloomberg. Still, getting 67 out of 67 economists to agree about something is pretty remarkable--and having it then be wrong is not only remarkable, but important. It probably is likely that they are all working from about the same data, analyzing it in about the same way, and listening to each other, so 67 different economists probably don't have 67 independent opinio...

Include some graphics. 1) A good one is the one from this article : https://ei.marketwatch.com/Multimedia/2019/06/06/Photos/ZH/MW-HK953_slok_c_20190606152445_ZH.jpg?uuid=be3e8fec-8890-11e9-a6a6-9c8e992d421e Or another example: Source https://www.raymondjames.com/-/media/rj/dotcom/images/wealth-management/market-commentary-and-insights/bond-market-commentary/img/221205-1.png Fifteen years of interest rates going up and down, and the market has always forecast a rise, and by my eyeball it has been wrong ten times out of fifteen. 2) Postings and observations that "interest rates can only go up" were common more or less continuously from about 2009 on. This is shown in the chart above, but here's an actual example of a forum posting. ...

A problem with all forms of whole life insurance is that you probably do need life insurance; pure life insurance, i.e. term insurance, is cheap during the time when you need it, which means you can easily afford to buy enough. All forms of whole life insurance have much higher premiums, meaning it may be difficult for you to afford to buy enough. It's illogical to commingle insurance and investment. Keep them separate. Focus on buying the insurance you need, pure insurance. Don't get distracted by mix-ins of miscellaneous extra bells and whistles. I don't personally think it makes sense to buy any products that give you partial "participation" in the stock market, provide protection on the downside, but cap the upside. (People un...