Tag Archives: investing

Investing

Fun with Tax Loss Harvesting When the Stock Market Goes South

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What’s a girl to do when her short term and long term “gains” are actually bright red losses?

Sell! Sell! Sell!

Now, before you berate me for selling when the market is down, let me explain, I am not selling to get out of the market.

My Vanguard shares were down significantly enough that I wanted to take action. Investing in index funds, I don’t have a strong opinion on one or the other. I had a dividend appreciation fund and a small-cap fund that today were mutually down about $500. That’s a $500 loss I can take against any gains made this year. I could wait for it to go down even more (it probably will) or, I could just pull out the money now and plop it straight into another “different” investment to reap the potential gains (or further losses) of being in the stock market this year.

I pulled out a good $23k from these two investments, and moved them into my Vanguard Healthcare fund which I’m slowly but surely plugging away at the $50k minimum for the Admiral version (I love me a good low-fee admiral fund.) So now my healthcare fund is at about $34k and I’ll have $500 in losses to write off come tax time next year. Not so shabby.

Note I’m not a tax professional and I don’t actually know what I’m doing, so get some real advice before you take any of mine. 🙂

Class & Wealth

How to Give Financial Advice to People Who Ask But Won’t Listen

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Recently a friend of mine from childhood, who now lives in a different part of the state, was in town on a road trip and stopped to have dinner with me. While we grew up in the same middle class neighborhood, her family was definitely more “middle class” versus mine which was “upper middle class.” So when she asked me for some financial advice due to a potential windfall from a recent family death, I paused before sharing my typical spiel.

Said friend currently owns property with a mortgage (her parents helped her with the downpayment), but otherwise lives paycheck to paycheck. She makes $60k a year and to her that’s a lot (I did not mention that my income is north of $150k right now, but that’s neither here nor there because that’s a short-lived situation anyway.) She mentioned that she was considering investing in Primerica Financial Services, which I hadn’t heard of before, but sounded a bit like a god-awful pyramid scheme. She acknowledged that it sort of a pyramid scheme, but she was interested in it anyway. If you tell me that and ask for financial advice, I’m going to give it to you.

My advice was fairly simple. I asked her if she had any retirement savings and she said yes, she had invested in 401ks at other jobs before, up to the match (great) but then went on to tell me that she had no idea where any of these accounts were. “Is there one 401k account somewhere that I can just call up?” She asked. I tried to explain to her that she should call her old employers, locate where her accounts are, and ideally roll these over into a Vanguard IRA. In the meantime, if she were to get the small windfall, to invest this in a Roth IRA in order to continue saving for retirement. She wanted access to the money sooner than that, so I recommended a taxable Vanguard STAR fund, but to consider putting it into a Roth anyway and forgetting it ever happened.

When she was asking me about stocks, it became apparent that she understood practically nothing about personal finance. It also became apparent to me that I’ve learned quite a bit in the last 10 years of my life since starting this blog – not enough to be a CFP but enough to hold my own in advising on basic money moves. I enjoyed providing advice and helping her, but I have a feeling she isn’t going to take a bit of my advice. Oh well. At least I tried.

Networth

February Wrap Up & Networth Update

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February, despite being a short month, was quite a productive one financially. The stock market was going up and up and up, which provided quite a nice bump in my networth.

For the new readers:
My Objective: $500k in networth by 1/1/17, $400k by 1/1/16. First kid by 1/1/18.

Well, despite being in a bit of a funk/depression this February, my bank account looks quite healthy. So healthy, in fact, that according to my bi-monthy networth report, I’m actually ahead of plan. This is extremely exciting to me as this is the first year I’m attempting to see a $100k increase in my annual networth. Being as I hope for a more flexible career when I have children, I have only a few more years to achieve my goal. Including my material assets (namely my car), my networth is now somewhere between $327k and $337k. My goal for 3/1/15 was $316k to be on track to $400k this year.

chart

Now, not every month is going to be so great in terms of stock growth, and likely my portfolio will see a correction soon. It’s just fun how the more money you save the more it can go up in a month when the market is also going up. Also, I’m fortunate to have a job and lifestyle that enables me to save, save, save. Well, I did go shopping last month and bought a few new items, but overall I feel good about the month in total. Makes up for a fairly flat January.

My focus is really on being exceptional in my work so I can maintain this level of growth without flatlining or seeing a decline this year. This year can really go any which way. I’m hopeful I’ll continue to have good news next month, and be well ahead of plan by mid year.

 

Digital Finance, Investing

Addicted to Loyal3 Investing

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Screen Shot 2014-12-05 at 3.30.57 AM

My investing hobby started with a few hundred dollars of fun money after maxing out my Roth to invest in individual stocks and ETFs to better understand the stock market. This same Sharebuilder account is now worth $101k and is filled with dozens of stocks and funds. Selling them will be a tax nightmare. I plan to hold them for the long run and sell during a few frugal years in early retirement so they get fairly decent capital gains tax rates.

One thing that always bugged me about my Sharebuilder investments is the trading fees. They used to have a better system where you could pay $12 for 12 auto trades per month — $1 trades weren’t bad, but even with the $1 trades you had to pay $8 or so to trade each individual stock/fund out. Now Sharebuilder got rid of the auto-investing plan and made the cheapest auto trade be about $4. That’s not so bad, but it is bad when you consider the whole premise of Sharebuilder is to build your shares slowly – by investing a little bit at a time. When you really start doing the math you realize these fees are massively cutting into your prospective earnings over time. I often wondered – isn’t there a better way?

The good news is – now there is. Loyal3 (not getting paid for this promo, I genuinely am excited about this company) makes it possible for the average everyday investor to invest directly into companies whenever they want for 100% free trade in and out. The companies are footing the bill to help everyday investors buy their stock. While generally speaking investing in index funds is the best bet, if you’re going to be a hobbyist investor and want to pick up a few individuals stocks without getting jipped on fees, now you have a great resource to do so.

So I got a little carried away tonight and purchase 6 individual stocks. They are limited in what stocks are available – but it turns out about 50% of my existing sharebuilder purchases are available. Unfortunately they don’t allow transfers in (bummer) so I’d have to sell my current shares in order to buy them again and trigger a capital gain just to consolidate my shares, not worth it. But the good news is now instead of wasting $4 per transaction on buying more shares of companies from Coca Cola to McDonalds to Apple, I can just buy however much I want to buy at whatever time and never have to worry about fees again. At least for the companies available to buy… which, granted, is limited at this time, but I bet will grow in the future.

I’m also testing the water for some new investments — I stopped adding new individual stocks to my sharebuilder account because the list was getting ridiculous and I couldn’t justify all the diversification with fees cutting away at my gains… but now diversification is easy, fun, and free. My investments aren’t showing up yet (they take 3 days to transfer in) but tonight instead of splurging on a new pair of jeans I bought some stock for $10 here, $25 there. I’m impressed.

*Note if you are new to investing I still recommend buying Vanguard Index funds!!!

 

 

 

 

Compound Interest, Investing, Wealth

How Much Will Your Investment Be Worth?

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One of the open questions I have re: investing is what – realistically – my investments will be worth after X # of years. Of course, one can estimate 3% annual return on the S&P 500 to be “conservative” and 10% to be the opposite, but in reality, what is the likely average annual return of the stock market?

While there’s no way to predict the future, lucky for us, there is a way to look at historical data to understand how we’d answer this question if we were to begin investing, say, in 1980.

According to this calculator – The S&P 500 Dividends Reinvested – we can find out that answer:

Scenerios

  • We started investing in 1990, and stopped in 2010, giving us 20 years of investment.
    • Total S&P 500 Price Return: 256.374% (inflation adjusted: 118%)
    • Annualize S&P 500 Price Return: 6.6% (inflation adjusted: 3.974%)
    • S&P 500 Return, Dividends Reinvested: 437.278% (inflation adjusted: 228%)
    • Annualized S&P 500 Return, Dividends Reinvested: 8.770% (inflation adjusted: 6.13%)
  • We started investing in 1984, and stopped in 2014, giving us 30 years of investment.
    • Total S&P 500 Price Return: 1094.274% (inflation adjusted: 427%)
    • Annualize S&P 500 Price Return: 8.6% (inflation adjusted: 5.7%)
    • S&P 500 Return, Dividends Reinvested: 2299% (inflation adjusted: 960%)
    • Annualized S&P 500 Return, Dividends Reinvested: 11.175% (inflation adjusted: 8.19%)
  • We started investing in 1974, and stopped in 2014, giving us 40 years of investment.
    • Total S&P 500 Price Return: 2829% (inflation adjusted: 538%)
    • Annualize S&P 500 Price Return: 8.8% (inflation adjusted: 4.7%)
    • S&P 500 Return, Dividends Reinvested: 1204% (inflation adjusted: 1963%)
    • Annualized S&P 500 Return, Dividends Reinvested: 12.049% (inflation adjusted: 7.8%)
  • We started investing in 1964, and stopped in 2014, giving us 40 years of investment.
    • Total S&P 500 Price Return: 2239% (inflation adjusted: 206%)
    • Annualize S&P 500 Price Return: 6.5% (inflation adjusted: 2.2%)
    • S&P 500 Return, Dividends Reinvested: 10367% (inflation adjusted: 1270%)
    • Annualized S&P 500 Return, Dividends Reinvested: 8.748% (inflation adjusted: 5.3%)
  • We started investing in 1999, and stopped in 2014, giving us 15 years of investment.
    • Total S&P 500 Price Return: 37.5% (inflation adjusted: -2.845%)
    • Annualize S&P 500 Price Return: 2.1% (inflation adjusted: -.192%)
    • S&P 500 Return, Dividends Reinvested: 81% (inflation adjusted: 28%)
    • Annualized S&P 500 Return, Dividends Reinvested: 4% (inflation adjusted: 1.6%)

Well, what this shows us is that generally investing in the S&P index over the long term works out fairly well. After inflation with dividend reinvestments 5% is a reasonable conservative estimate annual return for a long-term investment. However, if you started investing in 1999 and have invested for 15 years, you’d pretty much be at break even at this point (assuming you put all your money in up front.)

I’m still looking for a more robust calculator that enables one to input annual investments and see what these would have turned out with historic data. Do you know where one exists or care to build one I can use? 🙂

 

Wealth

How to Get Rich Long

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Good luck on getting rich quick. I gave up on that dream long ago. But getting rich (not super duper rich, but relatively compared to the rest of the U.S. population rich) is within reach for everyone. It really comes down to making more than you spend, spending less than you earn, earnings as much as possible when you’re as young as possible and investing that as quickly as possible into index funds.

Yes, it’s that simple.

If I could do it all over again, I’d get a job at the youngest age I legally could and start contributing as much as I could to a ROTH IRA each year. The best time to contribute to a ROTH IRA is when you’re making next to nothing. Why? ROTH IRAs are taxed up front, meaning if you’re making $10k a year you are not paying a whole lot in taxes but you’re still eligible to max out the ROTH IRA. Even the NY Times agrees with me.

Unfortunately, when I was 14 I had no idea what a ROTH IRA was, nor did I understand the magic of compound interest in terms of how it applies to personal finance over the years.

Let’s say a 14 year old contributes the maximum to her ROTH IRA (just $5500 a year) from age 14 through retirement. This smart gal wants to retire at 75. If she begins investing $5500 a year at 14 for 50 years, she will have $1,272,055 in retirement. That’s a lot, and should be enough to inspire kids to start saving young. But that’s with 5% ROI compounding annually. What if the stock market performs even better? Say, over 50 years the stock market is up 10% YoY on average? That same investment will be worth $7,687,296 at retirement.

Forget about inheritances, there is nothing more helpful for your children then to support them in maxing out their Roth IRA from the youngest possible legal age.

While it’s not possible for every family, offering your teenager a match on their earnings as long as they commit to putting what they actually earned into a Roth IRA, up to $5500, is a good way to start. If not possible to do a full match, think about what you can afford to match (50%?) to encourage them to save. Also, create charts which show them how much their dollar today will be worth in 50 years. While teens want to spend now more than later and aren’t thinking about their golden years yet, letting them know that your help could turn them into a millionaire in retirement by saving just $5500 a year will go a long way.

I wish the government would offer this program for youth — you earn $5500 and we’ll match it by putting $5500 into your retirement account. I guess that’s social security, but it’s not a 1 for 1 match. This should be a program for people under the age of 21 to teach them about the value of savings and give everyone a head start for retirement. I don’t know how that would work, but it would certainly help out families that cannot afford to match their children’s contributions.

Even if your kids can put away just $1000 per year in a Vanguard STAR fund, this will go a long way in retirement (though I recommend maxing out the Roth IRA every year from age 14 on.)

So you didn’t start a Roth IRA at 14?

Investing ASAP, whenever that is, will help you get to wealth. For better or worse our economy is set up where riches only come with some risk. If you don’t take risks, you may very well lead a comfortable life, but it’s unlikely you’ll be rich (unless you have a trust fund.)

If you give yourself 40 years until retirement at a 5% YoY return rate, you’ll have $736k when you retire at 65 (and start investing at 25.) A 10% YoY return rate will give you a nice $2.9M in retirement. Given that today people should try to reach $2M before retiring, starting investing at 25 at the latest is an ideal move.

Ultimately, if you wait longer to invest, you have to invest more per year in order to catch up. That can be very hard when you’re not earning a lot in your 20s and then if/when you have kids and find it harder to save in your 30s. Starting early when you are supported by your parents but can still earn and invest the best way to prepare for retirement, so you don’t even have to think about it beyond the $5.5k annual contribution throughout your life. You can also start to max out your 401k if you have access to one ($17.5k) at some point, but there will be less pressure on doing this and you can enjoy your money when you’re still young enough to travel and have a very active life.

Rich, IMO, is not about the $ amount you have in the bank, but about the financial security you have so you feel comfortable spending money NOW to enjoy life. This is not the same as wasting money on frivolous luxury items (though if this makes you happy and you have saved for retirement and your other basic needs, then go for it) but this means being able to afford a house, a car, family vacations, dining out every once in a while, and the lifestyle YOU want. That’s what “rich” is. Working towards reasonably hitting $2M in retirement (which again, is very possible if you start at age 14 – 20), will make you rich.

Retirement, Taxes

How to Estimate Your Tax Rate in Retirement

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As I’ve been running calculations on whether or not it makes sense to do a Roth Conversion, I came back to the question — what will my effective tax rate be in retirement?

That’s a question a lot of us considering a Roth Conversion should ask, but it’s not one that is easy to answer. What’s important, though, is that the numbers you plug into your calculations are reasonable. After all, expecting a 40% income tax in retirement each year can greatly skew your calculations if in actuality you’ll see a 20% effective tax rate.

This Forbes article by Erik Carter was really eye-opening: Why Your Taxes in Retirement May Be Less Than You Think

Article Highlights 

  • You are probably overestimating what you will have to pay in taxes at retirement
  • Withdrawls from Roth accounts are tax-free at 59.5
  • Social Security is taxed at ordinary income rates but only part of it is taxable
  • Long-term capital gains are taxed at lower rates than income tax (*at least according to current tax law)
  • Your income will probably be lower and put you in a lower tax bracket (i.e. experts recommend 80% of your pre-retirement income, but you may need less)
  • When you are older than 65, you get different deductions than younger people. For instance, you have a $1550 higher standard deduction than us young folk
  • A lot of 401k contributions withdrawn yearly will be taxed at lower rates, especially if you plan on taking out less than $36k per year (note, that’s no where near 80% of my current salary, but I could live on it in another state if I owned a house free and clear)
  • Tax rates could be higher when you retire but that’s unlikely (*not impossible)
  • Lots of people retire in states that don’t have income tax like Texas, Florida and Nevada. (*check out this handy-dandy state income tax calculator and weep… unless you live in a state with low income tax.)
  • Move where all the old people live and you’ll be fine.
Investing, Retirement

Vanguard Admiral Funds: Rebalancing for Lower Fees

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One of the things I realized recently that I’ve been spending more than I have to on fees inside of my IRA accounts. While Vanguard funds are low fee to begin with, did you know that Admiral funds (which require $10k minimum investment per fund vs $3k) still have significantly lower fees?

Fees can significantly eat away at your investments, especially over time in your retirement accounts. I know for a fact my old 401k that I haven’t rolled over is wasting money with some of its funds at .90% fees or higher! I’m holding off on rolling that over in the case I will do a Roth IRA conversion if/when I go to grad school on about $100k of other IRA investments, but for all my other accounts I want to be as fee-efficient as possible.

Expense Fees Add Up Fast!

Here’s a little experiment… (try your own out in this expense ratio calculator) say I invest 100,000 today and plan to keep that money invested for 30 years. I earn an average of 10% each of those 30 years (woohoo.)

If my fund has a low .10% expense ratio then I’ll see a 2.96% reduction of my future value due to fees (costing $51,596.) This sounds like a lot, but it really isn’t compared to the cost of most funds.

Say you have a still relatively low-cost fund at .20% expense ratio. You are then spending 5.83% of your future value on fees ($101,716!)

Some funds have high expense ratios too. If you are investing in a fund that has an expense ratio of .80%, 21.51% of your future value is gone thanks to this fee ($373645.77!!) So you see how a little expense ratio can quickly add up.

After reading a bit more about taxes and what funds to hold in Roth IRAs vs traditional IRAs I decided to shift around funds in my Vanguard accounts. I also changed things up over at Sharebuilder because my $10500 basis Roth over there is significantly underperforming, but I’ll cover those changes in another post.

Also, I read that high-dividend funds make sense in your Roth IRA but not in your traditional IRA. Why?  Because dividends have two purposes — to provide you income today at low(ish) capital gains tax rates, or to compound over time in your investments and to be taken out tax free upon retirement (in a Roth.) Going high dividend in a traditional IRA is silly because you have to pay income tax on it when you retire and take it out — i.e. those proceeds would be cheaper today in a taxable account!

Until today, my Vanguard IRA accounts looked like this:

Traditional IRA

VDAIX / .20%
VHDYX / .19%
VGSIX / .24%
VTTSX / .18%
VGTSX / .22%

Roth IRA

VFIFX / .18%
VTSAX / .05%

Updates to my Portfolio

While there was nothing wrong with this breakdown, per se, I had high-dividend REIT and dividend growth funds in my traditional IRA while I had index growth funds in my Roth. I also had certain funds split between my Roth and Traditional IRA where because I had $10k split between two accounts I couldn’t qualify for the lower admiral fund rates.

Luckily at Vanguard it’s free to trade your funds inside your account, so rebalancing is easy (unlike at Sharebuilder where I’m wasting tons of money trading and will eventually give in and just move my “fun money” to Vanguard.)

I made quite a few (free) trades at Vanguard to fix my portfolio. Here is what I have now, which, as you can see is greatly simplified:

Traditional IRA

VIGAX / growth index fund admiral shares .09% expense
VTIAX / admiral version of VGTSX — .14% expense vs .22%

Roth IRA

VDADZ / dividend appreciation index fund — .10% expense ratio
VGSLX / admiral REIT fund — .10% expense to .24% of VGSIX

I also killed off all of my “target retirement date” funds because I’ve read they are too conservative and at my ripe young age of 30 I want to be aggressive but not stupid (working on the not stupid part.)

Why keep my Sharebuilder account open at all?

Good question! Mostly I keep it open so I can trade precious metals in my Roth IRA (i.e. GLD) since they are taxed at a collectible rate (high tax) unless they’re in an IRA, and I can’t buy gold or silver in my Vanguard fund. I also have some specific REITs which I like to watch to learn more about REITs because they are interesting — especially since I do not actually own any tangible real estate. More on that later.

Investing

AMZN: Sell or Hold the Overvalued Stock?

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As my investments add up (now valued at $298k) I’m trying to make smarter moves when it comes to (mostly) holding and yet selling when all signs point to it being time to let go of a stock. In the case of AMZN, this seems to be one of those times.

AMZN — which I have $3897 in at the moment, a nice 89% gain from my initial $2100 investment — yet the stock sticks out in my portfolio list like  sore thumb due to its 835 PE. Given slowing growth I’m fairly confident that the stock will continue to retreat in value for the remainder of 2014. Starbucks is the only other stock anywhere near this and that’s at a 253 PE. Compare this to AAPL at 16 and GOOGL at 30 and one can say that AMZN is probably overvalued right now. Don’t get me wrong, I think Amazon is a great company, but the stock market has been a bit too kind to it. Now, like many holders of AMZN, I’m trying to decide what to do.

Continue reading AMZN: Sell or Hold the Overvalued Stock? →

Economy, Investing

Investing in China ETFs: It’s Complicated

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Whether or not you believe in any specific countries’ ability to economically eclipse the U.S., it’s common investor knowledge that one should diversify internationally in case sh*t hits the fan in America.

In many cases investing in a good general international index fund, like Vanguard’s Total International Stock Index Fund (VTISX), checks off the global diversification box. Yet for others taking educated bets on particular regions may be ultimately more lucrative. Given China’s fast-growing economy, I wanted to do a bit of research into investment opportunities for the average investor to take advantage of China’s potential reward. Of course, investing in a young market has its many risks. My goal is to educate myself on these so I can invest wisely in the country (I already own a small amount of HAO — China Small-Cap ETF, but nothing too significant yet.)

Continue reading Investing in China ETFs: It’s Complicated →