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Northern Flicker

Wire the money. No pull, no wait, $30 or whatever (or free if you have money at Fidelity or many brokerages). Or, and this is probably what I would do, call their bluff and walk. "I'm not thawing my credit, I don't remember my PINs and I drove 2.5 hours to get here. If I leave I'm not coming b...

Northern Flicker

Also, if you have the cash to do the HSA contribution but are just trying to convert the tIRA funds, you can do an HSA contribution and Roth conversion for the same amount. There is no net taxable income, and it is equivalent to the QHSAFD plus a Roth contribution in the same amount, but you don't n...

Northern Flicker

CloseEnough wrote: ↑Thu Apr 15, 2021 7:22 am Suggest taking a look at TIREX (TIAA Cref real estate fund). I think a small but meaningful allocation to REIT is good for diversification.

All you need is a large enough portfolio to meet the $2M minimum for TIREX with your REIT allocation. TCREX has a $2500 minimum.

Northern Flicker

abuss368 wrote: ↑Thu Apr 15, 2021 8:32 pm I believe in many respects we are dancing on the head of a pin. It simply does not matter.

Tony

That certainly is not the case if you buy individual health insurance on an ACA exchange and qualify for a premium tax credit, or are on medicare and trying to stay under IRMAA limits.

Northern Flicker

Dividends force you to realize those gains based on their schedule. So, if everything else is equivalent, as you mentioned, selling stock is better than dividends. There is a reason to prefer capital gains and no reason to prefer dividends. Agreed. There also is a 2nd issue. Suppose a mutual fund i...

Northern Flicker

Do you have a reason for buying REITs other than a comment from your advisor? I find his stated rationale ("you have cash"), while it might be a good point to invest in *something*, I find the pivot to REITs, *specifically*, to be worthy of more elaboration for investing in a particular s...

Northern Flicker

...Intentionally or not, Vanguard is effectively burying the cost of managing their Target Retirement and LifeStrategy funds within the cost of the underlying funds, and the amount isn't small. In fact, it's probably 5 or 6 bps of expenses being reported on the financial statements of the underlyin...

Northern Flicker

Wire the money. No pull, no wait, $30 or whatever (or free if you have money at Fidelity or many brokerages). Or, and this is probably what I would do, call their bluff and walk. "I'm not thawing my credit, I don't remember my PINs and I drove 2.5 hours to get here. If I leave I'm not coming b...

Northern Flicker

And I believe it was Alex who raised an interesting point, why the heck are the expense ratios on the Target Retirement funds more than their underlying funds? Example: Target 2025 fee is 0.13%; TSM is approx. 0.04%, International Index is 0.11% and Total Bond is 0.05% - so HOW do they arrive at a ...

Northern Flicker

If you have zero REIT exposure, then you are not holding a market index fund. Whether you add a REIT fund can only be answered in the context of reviewing the portfolio. If sidelined cash needs to be deployed, and you are not just deploying into an existing asset allocation, then that is implying th...

Northern Flicker

One other thing to be aware of: There is a “once per lifetime” annual funding option [“Qualified HSA funding distribution” in IRS-speak, see Publication 969] from a tIRA which moves money directly from tax-deferred to tax-free. I did that in 2020. The once per lifetime is a technicality. All this r...

Northern Flicker

What they should consider is instead of having a few years of low taxes followed by high taxes for the rest of their lives (after 72), it may be better to "level" their Taxable Income throughout all their reaming years, in order to "level" out their taxes. They can make a big di...

Northern Flicker

It is currently set up to convert our 401(k)s to Roth which will hurt us from a subsidy viewpoint. We will make the calculations at that point to determine which is more valuable to us. Have you considered that maybe it would be worth it to give up a year or two of subsidies (costing you an additio...

Northern Flicker

Holding a treasury fund instead of packaging treasuries in BND makes their interest state-tax-free.

Northern Flicker

Your asset level also means you likely don't need to make that tradeoff. But cash is not the lowest risk asset for funding the first 17 years of a retirement. Color me curious... What do you view as lower risk? That said, I'm not approaching this from a "lowest risk" viewpoint. More "...

Northern Flicker

My view is that if portfolio liquidity is properly managed, a very large cash position will just be a drag on returns while meeting a need for more liquidity than is required. If the portfolio has N years of expenses in intermediate treasuries and N years of expenses in some combination of i-bonds,...

Northern Flicker

My view is that if portfolio liquidity is properly managed, a very large cash position will just be a drag on returns while meeting a need for more liquidity than is required. If the portfolio has at least N years of expenses in intermediate treasuries and M years of expenses in some combination of ...

Northern Flicker

Asset allocation changes have market timing risk. Nobody can predict the future. I don't think this was an active management decision so much as a change in market position of the product. It is still undesirable for investors in the fund.

Northern Flicker

If you don't want to be an attorney, maybe a master's in legal studies is worth considering? Here is some info and an example:

https://legalstudiesmastersonline.northeastern.edu

Attorneys posting to the thread may be able to offer an opinion of such a degree.

Northern Flicker

VNM is +1.72%. Good morning, Vietnam stonks! I wonder how long it will take before people stop turning up their noses at these markets. So far 35 years and counting. Tony 35 years? FM and VNM haven't been investable that long. Believe Portfolio Visualizer goes back to 1986!😂🤣 Tony With which countr...

Northern Flicker

It had been in existence for over 25 years when they made the change.

Northern Flicker

This I don't understand. Don't we have to be employed with a high deductible health plan to contribute to an HSA? Can a retired person (not employed) with a high deductible health plan (if there are such things) contribute to an HSA? You can contribute to an HSA and get the deduction whether or not...

Northern Flicker

One other thing to be aware of: There is a “once per lifetime” annual funding option [“Qualified HSA funding distribution” in IRS-speak, see Publication 969] from a tIRA which moves money directly from tax-deferred to tax-free. I did that in 2020. The once per lifetime is a technicality. All this r...

Northern Flicker

000 wrote: Even Vanguard has bailed on strategies in its fairly tame active funds (Precious Metals / Mining fund...

That fund originated in 1984.

Northern Flicker

If living in or near natural or wooded areas but not wanting birds nearby, where do you propose that the birds should live?

Northern Flicker

Seasonal wrote: Doing things to improve the economy tends to help stocks and other assets.

Improving the economy also tends to increase tax revenues for the govt.

Northern Flicker

It doesn’t matter what you call it, this is just one of the many tools the Fed and the government have to print more money—stimulus checks, lowering taxes, buying t bills, it’s all just adding to money supply. We have been printing money very aggressively since 2009. Stimulus checks and tax cuts th...

Northern Flicker

My main issue with VPGDX is that the asset allocation has been actively managed to an extent that it seems like tactical asset allocation to me. Until 2020, it had held int'l stock at well above global market cap. I think the change to the current portfolio was in June 2020 but the change from month...

Northern Flicker

They did hold some CAT bonds the last time I looked at their portfolio, but it was somewhere around 15% of assets if I remember correctly. They do say this in the prospectus, which suggests they may rely on the risk modeling done by the seller or broker for what they are buying if I am interpreting ...

Northern Flicker

It doesn’t matter what you call it, this is just one of the many tools the Fed and the government have to print more money—stimulus checks, lowering taxes, buying t bills, it’s all just adding to money supply. We have been printing money very aggressively since 2009. Stimulus checks and tax cuts th...

Northern Flicker

As I understand it, reinsurance companies sell slices of their reinsurance portfolio with contracts that would essentially be de facto actuarial risk swaps. There is unlikely to be much of a secondary market for these, so this depends on the interval structure functioning as expected. The asymmetry ...

Northern Flicker

I would like more information about this. Who actually managed the fund and did they use actuaries? It would seem to me that properly valuing reinsurance contracts would be a big part of the business and it is hard for me to believe that Stone Ridge left this out. Sort of like running an actively m...

Northern Flicker

What is the difference of buying a range of treasuries, short, intermediate, and long, with lets say, an average duration of 10 years, and just buying 10 year treasuries? Would there be a difference in behaviour as interest rates change, or a difference in yield? The range of maturities will provid...

Northern Flicker

I don't think a 1-size-fits-all rule is feasible. Different people have different situations. Self- employed people or people who own rental property or people whose income is driven by commissions often have a higher variance of income and expenses than W2 employees who save for retirement with 401...

Northern Flicker

Although it is difficult to distinguish unlucky outcomes from mispricing of actuarial risk with an insurance product, it would not be a surprise to me that a fund manager buying slices of reinsurance portfolios but not employing an actuarial staff to value the investments may well have overpaid for ...

Northern Flicker

The no-fee options are more recently available. There was a time where investment fees were such that it was not as attractive to use an HSA as a retirement savings vehicle. I suspect the author has not revised her thinking on this. But a saver without enough budget slack to maximize 401K, HSA, and ...

Northern Flicker

Roth contributions are earned income and are taxed at your marginal rate during working years. It also would be suboptimal to use Roth withdrawals for tax-deductible expenses such as medical or long-term care expenses. The tax rate on future trad IRA withdrawals is a random variable. Having it taxed...

Northern Flicker

A portfolio diversified with alts does not have to be expensive, and does not require an advisor charging an AUM fee:

https://investor.vanguard.com/mutual-fu ... olio/vpgdx

I do not invest in VPGDX and have no idea if I would prefer it to a conventional portfolio.

Northern Flicker

The nice thing about diversifying equity risk with a mix of treasuries and TIPS is that wildfires, hurricanes, weak advisor hands, long run of negative value premium etc. do not have to cooperate for equity risk to be diversified. When people talk about diversifying across multiple sources of risk a...

Northern Flicker

So, the main difference between buying t-bills and reverse repos is that, under reverse repos, the Fed is just temporarily buying bonds? Is that the only difference between the two? I don't have any more understanding of the repurchase agreement market than what you or I can read online, but the Fe...

Northern Flicker

:sharebeer In October 2019, the Federal Reserve said it would begin buying $60 billion of Treasury bills per month. How is this not classified as quantitative easing? I know that, normally, QE is carried out by buying long term bonds, not short term bills, but short term bills are still traded on pu...

Northern Flicker

I had AVRPX right up until it went away. The new fund, SRDAX, I believe incorporates the strategy. If another fund were to arise, solely focused on the variance risk premium diversified across asset classes, I’d again be highly interested. The intuition behind the concept just seems so rock solid t...

Northern Flicker

AVRPX - Stone Ridge All Asset Variance Risk Premium Fund 3 Month Return 1.71% YTD Return 0.70% 1 Year Return -21.17% 3 Year Return -10.78% 5 Year Return -3.02% This isn't the stuff that would make me want to jump out of an office building window. The point is that it was not delivering on its purpo...

Northern Flicker

I'm sure Stone Ridge does their best to determine fair value when an investor deposits or withdraws from one of their funds, and I'm sure they do their best to value well assets that they purchase for the funds. Nonetheless, mispricing of less liquid assets is always a greater risk than it is for as...

Northern Flicker

Transparency (i.e. lack thereof) is a major issue with interval funds. When assets are not very liquid, there is not an efficient market to price them, so that volatility is difficult to measure, and their effect on portfolio volatility is difficult to measure.

Northern Flicker

Apparently lots of investors pulled out at one of the interval liquidation points. It was a levered portfolio, so this was like a big margin call. Residual investors and their assets were merged into another Stoneridge fund. Wasn't this an interval fund? If so, this theory being kicked around isn't...

Northern Flicker

Apparently lots of investors pulled out at one of the interval liquidation points. It was a levered portfolio, so this was like a big margin call. Residual investors and their assets were merged into another Stoneridge fund.

Northern Flicker

I think bottom line, the Alts were a disappointment but not a disaster. When investment funds are shut down, they tend to just disappear without much of a trace. They typically disappear from the provider web site and often disappear from investment return databases and datasets so that they stop s...

Northern Flicker

TIPS have had a high correlation with corporate bonds. I would prefer 50% nominal treasuries and 50% TIPS to 50% total bond and 50% TIPS.

Northern Flicker

Hi, OP. I personally would prefer not to carry around a full frame DSLR and flash for most of these uses, given the size and weight of the equipment. It's also distracting for family and friends when you pull out a huge camera, and this tends to change the way your photos turn out - so usually, the...

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