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Investing for Geeks

training.kalzumeus.com

797 pointsgk1457 comments

Great post!!

I'd add a few things that I've learned over the years:

1) Always be invested in the market. Corollary, don't time the market. This is by far the largest mistake people make.

Investors typically pull money out at the bottom after they've suffered a physiologically devastating loss, like at the end of 2008 and hence they miss the rebound, like 2009-now. This isn't quite the same but it shows what missing the top 25 days in the market over the past 45 years does to your returns.

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/how-missing-out-on-25-days-...

If you are an investor you need to be in the market, period.

2) Accept that you will lose money some years. If you are buying index funds then you will get market performance, ex fees. Markets go down sometimes. Stay the course.

3) Don't look every day or you will go nuts.

Keep in mind that the largest draw down (top to bottom) will be larger than what the returns look like if you just look year over year. Ie if you look and see the S&P lost 28% in 2008, understand that if you watched the S&P every day of 2008 then it probably lost more than 28% from its top to its bottom but rebounded slightly at the end of the year to make the year over year loss less than the maximum loss.

4) Have some exposure to outside of the US markets. Consider the scenario of investing all your money in the company you work for. In a rough time for your company you get the double whammy of losing money and possibly your job at the same time.

Similarly to how you are told to not invest all your money in the company you shouldn't invest solely in the country you live in, same principle.

EDIT see child comment, I mangled the English language in point 4

> 1) Always be invested in the market. Corollary, don't time the market. This is by far the largest mistake people make.

The easiest way to tell if someone understands financial markets is to find out whether they believe they can time the market. If they believe they can predict the market, they don't know what they are talking about.

[edited - removed ending]

There is something very off putting about your comment regarding how you preemptively dismiss anyone who would dare argue with you.

Time in the market beats timing the market - the adage is as old as time itself. Not sure that knowing it makes you understand the markets especially well. Similarly, not sure that not knowing it says anything about you either.

Point taken. I edited it out.

And... just to go a step further. My comment included the word 'easiest' to describe how to find out someone doesn't know what they are talking about. IMO, if someone starts talking about timing the market, I know right away that they do not know what they are talking about.

Other indicators are much harder to diagnose. A self proclaimed market timer is just the easiest to identify.

Knowing that adage doesn't mean you understand markets especially well, but not knowing it definitely means you don't understand markets.

I had a friend in college who played World of Warcraft. When the first expansion was announced, he invested $10,000 in Blizzard stock. His reasoning? "It's going to be awesome and sell a lot of copies!"

He didn't understand that the stock price at the time he made the purchase already reflected that information (that there was an expansion coming out soon).

> There will likely be people that reply to this comment with various comments saying I am wrong. You can judge those comments for yourself.

This is the comment equivalent of a loaded question. Or it's like those people who dismiss those arguing against them because of who they are rather than what their argument is.

Good point, I edited that out.

I like Patrick's restatement of the Practically Efficient Market Hypothesis:

You are astoundingly unlikely to know more about any stock from reading the newspaper, seeing their chart on Google Finance, or consuming their quarterly reports than a team of PhDs who did nothing but study that stock for the last year, and accordingly are vanishingly unlikely to trade stocks in such a fashion that you do better than the market once you account for fees and tax impact.

It gets to why these comment threads can sometimes have people talking past each other. Someone will say "You can't time the market", and mean 'you' in the same way Patrick does, but someone else will come along and think the statement meant "no one can time the market". Then the discussion goes off into a whole rabbit hole about quant hedge funds and the like.

Relating this back to techie-problems, perhaps we need the moderate Practically Secure Crypto Hypothesis:

"You are astoundingly unlikely to create something better and more-secure from seeing a blog-post, reading some Wikipedia articles, etc. than a team of PhDs who did nothing but study mathematical theory, cryptography, and code-breaking for the last few years, and accordingly are vanishingly unlikely to create a new scheme which is more secure than existing standards once you account for performance and maintenance."

Except that security standards are mostly driven by compatibility with all sorts of edge cases (ancient versions of software! COBOL-bound CAs! tiny smart cards! huge distributed systems!) that are probably not relevant to your case and create big random security holes.

If you have a reasonable way of distributing software updates, signed-DH with an AES-based AEAD with termination detection for transport authentication, and a signed hash tree for data authentication, is going to be more secure than RANDOM_SECURITY_STANDARD.

Thankfully, there are some good well-written implementations of that (https://www.tarsnap.com/spiped.html, https://nacl.cr.yp.to), but picking a standard randomly will not get you them.

I don't think that's always a case of people talking past each other. I will often reply to someone (in much the same way you just did) with a clarification about how some people do predict the market successfully, because even if I charitably assume they understand this implicitly, I want to make sure the literal idea that no one is capable doing it is not spread around like a gospel for other readers.

While "If they believe they can predict the market, they don't know what they are talking about" is a cute adage, I think it lumps a bunch of us into a category that we don't deserve to be in?

for example, I'm heavily invested in the market but recent events are leading me to consider halfing my investment rate to be more cautious. I'm not going to take any money out or stop investing but by your def I'm "timing" the market, but really I'm "timing" my life. I don't feel confident that I can afford the risk, and I'm lowering my exposure rate.

If you are permanently lowering your exposure, you are not timing the market. If you are deciding that now the market is too hot and you don't like the risk, but plan on being invested later, you are timing the market.

I don't understand why I have to be permanently lowering my risk exposure. If Trump wins the election, the market will tank. Everyone knows this so lets say a 20% risk of him winning thus causing a 40% drop is currently priced in - the market right now is ~8% lower because of the risk of a Trump presidency. I am not willing to expose myself to that risk so just yesterday I moved my 401k out of the market. If Trump loses, the market will probably pop up but I am willing to forgo that gain to not expose myself to the downside.

The important point I haven't seen mentioned is that the money you put in the market should not be needed for 10 years. Not money you plan to buy a house in about 5 years, or maybe use to get married about 10 years from now. From 1929 to 1933 the DJIA went down 88% before starting to recover. Ten years is really too short a time horizon, you should have a 20 year perspective or longer. If you had invested the day before the 1929 crash and kept your money in the whole time you would not have broken even, adjusting for inflation, until 1957 - 28 years later.

You are market timing.

Yes I am. Trump will probably lose and I will have lower returns this year.

Would I be market timing if instead of moving out of the market to avoid the Trump winning risk, I borrowed money to buy shares in an election market?

https://iemweb.biz.uiowa.edu/quotes/Pres16_quotes.html

If Trump wins, I triple the money I put into election shares but lose in my 401k. If Trump loses, the increase in my 401k will cover my loss in the election market.

I don't think you understand the basics of investing.

I laid out two strategies to hedge a specific, finite duration risk. Instead of an ad hominem attack, do you have any comments on either strategy?

What if trump loses and the market goes down?

What if trump wins and the market goes up, too? Things that "everyone knows" are already priced in.

Yup, exactly

So, if there was a massive crash in the stock market, you wouldn't be tempted to buy some shares at low prices?

I wouldn't think "in the market" meant only in stocks. When the stock market falls, other markets (like bond markets) tend to rise, which makes the bonds look like a poorer value and stocks look like a better value, therefore you would re-balance your exposure by selling some bonds and investing in the stocks

That's not always the case, just making the point that rebalancing a portfolio is not necessarily the same thing as trying to time a particular market.

Rebalancing the portfolio to other asset classes smells a lot like timing the market. The question still remains: When would you move to other asset classes?

You could see cash as a specific kind of market as well with your definition. I'm sure there were time periods when holding cash was your best option.

(Home currency) cash is essentially an ultra-short duration, zero yield (home government) bond.

Edit: Clarified that both are local.

No it's not. Currencies move against one another all the time. Your yield is only zero against the same currency, but it doesn't mean your yield is zero in terms of actual global buying power.

FOREX movement doesn't factor here? I'm talking about a single currency.

> Rebalancing the portfolio to other asset classes smells a lot like timing the market.

Rebalancing is not timing the market, unless you're changing your ratios.

Let's say I want 80% equities and 20% cash. The market bombs, and now I have 50% equities and 50% cash. If I thought all the information was already priced into the market, then reallocating to get back to 80/20 makes sense. Not rebalancing would be more like timing the market, because I would be assuming that the current value doesn't represent some "true value" of the market.

> The question still remains: When would you move to other asset classes?

Somewhat regularly, but not constantly because that takes time and has transaction costs. The specific time doesn't matter.

> I'm sure there were time periods when holding cash was your best option.

Definitely, it's just very very hard to identify which periods they are until after they've happened.

>The easiest way to tell if someone understands financial markets is to find out whether they believe they can time the market.

People also unwittingly imply have actions where, if you asked them, they'd say they couldn't predict the market, but they'll say things like "I'm waiting for the market to cool off"

I believe you can make money in trying to "time" the market, given you have good risk management in place. Nobody can predict the future all the time perfectly, but some educated predictions do come true sometimes. If the aim is to make money and not just trying to hold on to what you've got, you must take risks and that invariably comes down to "timing" the market.

This reminds me of when Fidelity did a survey to find which of their customers had portfolios that performed the best, and they found that the customers who were DEAD had the best performing portfolios: http://www.businessinsider.com/forgetful-investors-performed...

> "...No, that's close though! They were the accounts of people who forgot they had an account at Fidelity."

> Consider investing all your money in the company you work for.

Since that phrase is somewhat ambiguous, let me clarify for anyone who misunderstood it on first reading, like I did. :-)

I'm pretty sure you don't mean "It may be a good idea to invest all your money in the company you work for."

But rather "Consider this very bad thing that may happen if you invest all your money in the company you work for."

I had to reread that sentence a couple of times myself, but I think you captured his intended meaning here.

I think he meant 'Reconsider...'

No, he meant "Think about, for a moment, the scenario..."

Uggh, I wish I had read your comment before I just invested everything into the company I work for. Thanks chollida1.

Yuck!!

Yep, I really mangled that sentence. Sorry to everyone who just invested their life savings into the company they work for.

I guess I really meant...

> Consider the scenario of investing all your money in the company you work for.

Immediate reaction: "Oh, like all those lucky people at Enron!"

Great advice. Given your background (I've really enjoyed reading your previous posts), what are your thoughts on the Bogleheads/Random Walk Down Wallstreet approach of sticking your cash in a couple varied funds, making regular contributions to dollar-cost average, and letting it sit?

Also, what are your feelings about various robo advisors like Wealthfront and Betterment and the competing products that Schwab and Vanguard have out now?

The Bogleheads approach is the best approach for the normal investor. Stash it and forget it. Warren Buffett, considered the greatest investor of all time, highly recommends index funds to active investing.

Robo Advisors like Wealthfront are still just advisors, and that means they're just guessing like real-life advisors. And as has been proven time and again, they underperform index funds.

* http://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/060216/3-reas... * http://finance.yahoo.com/news/buffett-most-mportant-investme...

No, Wealthfront and Betterment are not active fund managers. They invest your money in a variety of index funds and rebalance it often. Due to their hugely managed sums they can do a lot of tricks to try to improve your yield while still being broadly diversified.

The only trick they have is tax loss harvesting, which has limited effect (mostly due to $3,000/year limit on deducting). And you can do that by hand pretty easily.

They also reinvest dividends automatically, and rebalance automatically when you add new funds so you aren't over allocated in a particular class of assets.

Tax loss harvesting is limited to 3000 per year, but you can carry over until you've exhausted the losses.

Of course TLH is only good if you're in a taxable account with them.

I also don't buy it being easy- particularly with trying to avoid the pitfalls of wash sales and the paperwork to actually claim it.

> They also reinvest dividends automatically

Typical brokerages can do that too :-).

> rebalance automatically

The value of which is maybe dubious, as pointed out elsewhere in the thread. It doesn't need to be done frequently, if at all, and is pretty trivial with a simple 3-fund portfolio.

> Tax loss harvesting is limited to 3000 per year, but you can carry over until you've exhausted the losses.

Right. But you only get so many working years.

> Of course TLH is only good if you're in a taxable account with them.

> I also don't buy it being easy- particularly with trying to avoid the pitfalls of wash sales and the paperwork to actually claim it.

You need to be aware of how wash sales work even if you use a robo-advisor to do the TLH. You need to be sure you don't have substantially equivalent securities in your IRAs and 401(k), etc. The actual mechanic is pretty easy — sell one index fund (with shares held over 30 days), buy another extremely similar index (but not the exact same index).

As far as the paperwork — it's imported automatically with Turbotax etc and is exactly the same paperwork as is needed for capital gains.

TLH is also only good while you're working. If you have enough TLH saved up to cover the rest of your working years at $3k/year, you can stop paying the robo-advisor premium.

I think there is a place in the world for a company which simply minimizes risk for individual investors by alerting them of their factor exposures.

I'm sure there are people that are heavily invested in long duration bonds that do not understand how much interest rate risk they are taking.

Its a little different from a Robo advisor, but I'd probably pay 0.05%+ (5 basis points) annually to know my factor exposures.

I am likely exposed to factors that I am not even aware of.

I completely agree. It seems like the only way to currently get this information is through the robo advisors.

The problem many investors run into is that they do not like being referred to as "normal" or "average". This makes them susceptible to investing theses that lose money (ie. most of them other than Bogle style investing).

> And as has been proven time and again, they underperform index funds.

Hmm. Citation needed. They've barely been letting people invest long enough for that to be "proven" once, let alone "time and again".

There's references in the 2 Warren Buffett links

I'm not seeing references to robo advisors, or evidence to support that they underperform direct index funds in either of those two links.

I don't believe said evidence exists, here's why.

First, the robo advisors distribute your money directly against and amongst several index funds.

Second, the money-saving benefits robo advisors provide that direct indexing doesn't, like very frequent automatic rebalancing and automated (aggressive) tax-loss harvesting.

Third, the ability to diversify any amount of money. You can put $1k into Wealthfront and diversify across five Vanguard index funds. But directly on Vanguard, this is impossible because the minimum investment in most Vanguard funds is $3k [0].

With that, take their Total Stock Market Index Fund as an example. If you can only invest $3k in it, your expense ratio is 0.16% [1]. If you can invest $10k in it, your expense ratio is 0.05% [2]. Through Wealthfront, I can hold the VTI ETF at 0.05% expense ratio, which I don't have to pay directly, only indirectly out of the standard Wealthfront fees.

The best possible claim I can imagine then is that for very large accounts, excluding tax-loss harvesting benefits and any benefits of rebalancing, it is cheaper to index invest — for example, if you have a $100k account and can spend less than $225 worth of your time [4] in the entire year keeping up on it, rebalancing if you wish, etc., then in some cases you could beat the robos. The tradeoff of going direct is arguably not free though. I also don't believe this level of investment applies to most people, at least most Americans.

In fact, for accounts under $10k, the Wealthfront fee is zero. I can't think of a good reason why everyone shouldn't take advantage of that.

[0]: https://investor.vanguard.com/mutual-funds/fees

[1]: https://personal.vanguard.com/us/funds/snapshot?FundId=0085&...

[2]: https://personal.vanguard.com/us/funds/snapshot?FundId=0585&...

[3]: https://personal.vanguard.com/us/FundsSnapshot?FundId=0970&F...

[4]: https://www.wealthfront.com/our-low-fees

> evidence to support that they underperform direct index funds

Well, they charge additional fees. They have to make that up somewhere or it's the same (but at higher cost) as buying the indices directly.

> very frequent automatic rebalancing

This actually costs money and doesn't improve outcomes. Scroll to "study for the NYTimes on rebalancing" on http://johncbogle.com/wordpress/category/ask-jack/ . Or http://www.morningstar.com/cover/videocenter.aspx?id=615379 .

> automated (aggressive) tax-loss harvesting

Tax-loss harvesting has very limited benefit. Mostly you can offset income. But it's only $3k/year. You can harvest enough losses by hand to easily take the $3,000 deduction too.

> Third, the ability to diversify any amount of money. You can put $1k into Wealthfront and diversify across five Vanguard index funds. But directly on Vanguard, this is impossible because the minimum investment in most Vanguard funds is $3k.

No... you can buy the same Vanguard ETFs with no minimum.

> With that, take their Total Stock Market Index Fund as an example. If you can only invest $3k in it, your expense ratio is 0.16% [1]. If you can invest $10k in it, your expense ratio is 0.05% [2]. Through Wealthfront, I can hold the VTI ETF at 0.05% expense ratio

You can just buy VTI as an individual. You still get the 0.05% rate.

> The best possible claim I can imagine then is that for very large accounts, excluding tax-loss harvesting benefits and any benefits of rebalancing, it is cheaper to index invest — for example, if you have a $100k account and can spend less than $225 worth of your time [4] in the entire year keeping up on it, rebalancing if you wish, etc., then in some cases you could beat the robos.

Yeah. Reducing expenses is the goal.

> Yeah. Reducing expenses is the goal.

I feel like you may have overlooked some of the nuances in my answer, because I've already specifically pointed out how the robo advisors can be cheaper than buying the indexes directly for a lot of people.

> can be cheaper than buying the indexes directly for a lot of people.

If that's what you think, you've missed some of my post :-). Specifically, I said:

> you can buy the same Vanguard ETFs with no minimum.

As an individual you can get 0.05% VTI directly from Vanguard. No $3k minimum (minimums are a mutual fund thing).

One minor, probably obvious, warning about dollar-cost averaging to new investors: commissions.

Say you have Fund A and Fund B set to automatically invest 50/50 your $100 dollar contribution bi-weekly, with a buy commission of $5. You pay buy commissions on fund A and B 4 total times a month, so you've wasted 10% of your monthly investment ability ($200 - $20). In a year that money is $194 at 8%. (This used to be the case with old ShareBuilder/ING/Capital One---not sure about the new-style other brokers)

Consider a monthly payment to Fund A and two weeks later a monthly payment to Fund B. You saved half commission cost of above, and in a year your return is ~$205.

You can avoid this with a Vanguard account that you use to buy Vanguard index funds. There are no commissions or service fees in that case.[1]

[1]: https://investor.vanguard.com/etf/fees

Same for Fidelity funds (or many iShares ETFs) in a Fidelity account.

Oh, cool I didn't realize that.

Most 401k plans are commission free (just a flat %)

> Always be invested in the market.

I'm glad you don't adhere to the defeatist approach of Efficient Market Hypothesis proponents. Always be in the market, yes. Always follow the market, no.

sorry, but "always be in the market" is a rule predicated on a period of history that's been especially kind to the good ole' usofa. there is absolutely no guarantee or even reason to believe in a guarantee of the same going forward.

here's something to think about, and i know i'll take downvotes to hell for all this: if everyone agrees and everyone is investing (for retirement etc) identically (long stocks bonds whatevers), what are the odds it's "cheap" or represents future extraordinary gains?

"Always be invested in the market" - what does it mean? Always have at least something long in your portfolio? Always be 100% long in your portfolio?

If I have 99% cash and 1% in VTI for 10 years, am I "always invested in the market" during this time?

> Have some exposure to outside of the US markets.

This is the part that kills my ability to "set it and forget it". So many things bother me about this. I know I have to do it (because Japan), but how much and on what markets?

* I don't like the idea of investing in emerging markets. Having grown up in one, I know how shady those can be and how cooked the books are. Growth is often an illusion. If an emerging market is "promising", I'd rather wait until it achieves developed status.

* Developed market indexes are dominated by Japanese stocks, which have gone nowhere in almost 3 decades. You have to accept that a good chunk of your money is going into a no-growth sink.

* I don't know what to expect from Europe. Or even Canada for that matter. When I look at those countries from a distance, I see that 1) their large corporations have been established looong ago (i.e. no new ones are created) and 2) heavy taxation and regulations in those countries doesn't seem to leave much room for profits, at least not as much as in the US. I'm probably wrong though, so please educate me.

I know home bias is supposedly wrong, but the American market is well studied, well known, highly liquid, and there's a cultural aspect to its growth in that its part of the general population's mindset to invest in it for long term goals. I don't think that's the case in all (or even most) countries.

Part of me wants to go full jlcollinsnh/Bogle/Buffet, folks who say you don't need international diversification. Another part of me wants to go as blind as possible into it and just invest in a "world index" ETF like ACWI or VT. And yet another part of me wants to do something in between but has no idea what to do :)

> I don't know what to expect from Europe. Or even Canada for that matter...

Yeah, this is an over-generalization. There are plenty of index funds for European companies at a variety of risk levels, just like in the U.S.

Also, there are worldwide funds too. Capital World Growth and Income Fund (CWGIX) [0] is one example that covers the U.S., Europe, and Asia. Note that this is a mutual fund, not an index fund.

Edit: Perhaps the downvotes are because this is an actively managed fund. The point of giving the example was trying to counter the specific concern OP stated. For passive, a specific Vanguard fund that's similar, at least the closest I found, is Vanguard Total World Stock Index Fund (VTWSX) [1]. It is very diversified.

[0]: https://www.google.com/finance?q=MUTF:CWGIX

[1]: https://www.google.com/finance?q=MUTF:VTWSX

CWGIX is one of those front-end load and high-fee funds you should avoid, though.

Just edited it to point out that it is a mutual fund, not an index fund. Still over the past 5 years, it is +43% total.

S&P500 index funds are up 77% over the past 5 years. I would say that's kind of proving the point, except international indices have done poorly over that time period and I think that explains most of the difference. (VXUS is up only ~7% over the 5 year period.)

(All figures quoted above are "price" and ignore dividends, which is bad but I don't have easy access to dividends-included figures.)

Yeah, I think it'd be a more valid comparison to put it next to something someone would actually invest that's also international. I'm not sure if there is a similar Vanguard fund.

Edit: I think I found one — VTWSX is +35% over the same time period. Accounting for fees vs the managed fund, probably means a better return here.

https://www.google.com/finance?q=MUTF:VTWSX

Well, that's why the original commenter mentioned exposure. You don't invest all your money into just one market. The idea is once again for things to balance out at the end of the day/year/decade.

Invest into multiple emerging markets, chances are they won't all do bad at the same time, especially if they are in different parts of the globe (take India, Brazil and Indonesia for example), put some into an european index fund, etc.

You seem to be most comfortable with the US market, so the bulk of the assets you decided to invest in equities go there, say 70% and to make things easy put 15% into Europe and 15% into emerging markets. Now you have some diversification, but could still feel comfortable enough to not be worried about your money disappearing over night.

Brazil is a disaster. In LA Chile has a quite stable economy and cautious banks (but it could be a pain to bring money into the country because of this).

> Part of me wants to go full jlcollinsnh/Bogle/Buffet

You can investment just like Buffet if you Berkshire Hathaway Class B (BRKB). Currently ~$145 per share.

I got that from the introduction to an investment book about Buffet.

What I meant was that he recommends that the average investor should invest in the S&P 500 or total US market only. He doesn't seem to think people should invest their money abroad.

There's a decent argument that American companies are multinational and therefore already exposed to foreign markets. I don't subscribe to that, but it's not totally unfounded.

That strategy would have lost out in the rise in uk stocks due to the drop in the pound

That rise only exists when you look at the ftse denominated in GBP not USD.

A lot of the FTSE 100 companies do look at how RDSB (Shell) Oil is denominated in $

Whatever you do, if you are a typical HN reader, do NOT invest like Buffet.

Hint: he never sells.

Serious question, when you're accumulating more assets and haven't retired yet, why is it a problem to never sell?

My expectation of a typical HN reader is that they are saving for more things/experiences/goals, not just retirement.

Nothing saved for the short term should be in stocks. That would be an easy way to lose 30% of your vacation fund I'd you needed to sell on a dip.

Probably true, but I would also assume most readers are not putting all of their investments into one single fund for retirement.

I'm curious why you would have that impression and why you think investing is the way to achieve those things.

Berkshire files form 13F with the SEC that anyone can read.

He sells.

All these anecdotal quotes about Warren Buffett who issues bonds in Europe and didn't create Berkshire from index investing

His successful leveraged investments are analogous to negative expected value bets that people would typically relegate to degenerates.

He advocates indexing for the little people. This has nothing to do with what he did, or does now. (And there's nothing wrong with that)

Yes, he doesn't invest in indexes himself, but it isn't just for the little people. He recommends it for his family. The big secret to Buffet's success is not his picking ability, it is his management ability and good business sense. Yes, of course he does pick to an extent, but he also buys large enough positions to sit on the board and install the right people to make things happen. He also uses his already large portfolio to help create opportunities between the companies he owns.

It's unlikely even Buffet himself could replicate his initial stock picking success over a long period of time and he would be the first to admit that.

I don't see anything in the thread to suggest Berkshire was created from index investing. Someone just mentioned investing like Buffet.

I've invested comparatively little in emerging markets for the reasons in your penultimate paragraph plus the standard bogle/buffett advice. I definitely also have a nagging feeling that I could be very wrong about this strategy. For better or worse, I've viewed emerging markets in the same way that patrick views investing in startups: I have little reason to think/presume they will outperform the US markets on average, but I also couldn't successfully argue that they wouldn't.

I thought the Bogleheads usually do recommend intl exposure for us investors. Like, for a not-too-agressive balance, 40% total-stock-market, 40% intl, 20% bonds.

Vanguard recommends it, lots of folks on Bogleheads.org seem OK with it (they tend to recommend a three fund portfolio), but Vanguard founder Jack Bogle has said he thinks a two fund portfolio is sufficient because the US markets list big international companies rather than only those in the US.

In his Little Book of Common Sense Investing, Mr. Bogle recommends a simple portfolio of only two funds for many investors: Vanguard Total Stock Market Index Fund and Total Bond Market Index Fund:

https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Bogleheads%C2%AE_investment_...

The "trick" is probably to pay someone else to think about those problems by buying an international index fund like VXUS. If you're not comfortable with emerging markets, find one that excludes them

If you dont want to invest in emerging markets, its not the end of the world.

The risks can be higher but so are the rewards. The most important thing is to not just invest in a market blindly. Try your best to understand that market and keep tabs on that market.

You don't have to diversify for the sake for diversification. You can invest domestically and diversify by industries.

For the most part of the last 5 years, the risks have been higher and the words have been significantly lower than investing in the USA[0]: +75% versus -11%.

[0] https://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&...

I had similar biases and wasn't able to make a decision because of it, so eventually went with one of the robo advisors (Vanguard) for those reasons. While I don't like not having more control, letting others make decisions has essentially taken my bad behavior out of the equation.

FWIW Vanguard has about 35% allocated to international for me, so it's surprising to see that Bogle wouldn't recommend international exposure.

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Put your money into it. Walk away.

Appply same principle of buying and holding for 10+ years and get the Motley Fool Stock Advisor newsletter and buy their pics periodically. Excellent stock research.

I have a word of warning on Motley Fool. I once invested in a Chinese stock pick that they were promoting, and it shortly went to zero due to being fraudulent. Their research is often second hand and no better than the research you could do yourself.

I'm not in a position to know myself, but Patrick (author of the blog post that originally kicked off this discussion) does not think highly of The Motley Fool.

Hit this link: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2013/04/24/marketing-for-people-who... and search in the page for Motley Fool.

The only other data point I have to add is that a year or two ago, The Motley Fool published a breathless blog post announcing that 3D printing was about to destroy Chinese manufacturing, and that everyone should invest in companies that make 3D printers or CAD software.

My views on the Motley Fool are complicated.

They are a "diversified financial brand" which does a lot of e.g. telling people to get out of credit card debt (a good idea!) and save for retirement (a good idea!). Then they also tell people that "with just a little work, you too can read company numbers and outperform the stock market" (a really bad idea!) and "if you want to do less work, buy our newsletters and we'll give you picks which mumble mumble maybe mumble mumble will make you into Warren Buffet" (a really bad idea!).

Actually, I've tried doing that. It worked for a while until one at I thought, "does Vanguard keep the course?" Turns out that when you look at it, they've made numerous "tweaks" throughout the years, and often bad calls. They definitely chase performance. Increased stock allocation right before the housing bubble crash. Increased international allocation when they saw it was performing well. Besides, they hold international currency-hedged bonds, something that no one seems to be able to come up with a good reason for.

> Turns out that when you look at it, they've made numerous "tweaks" throughout the years, and often bad calls... Increased stock allocation right before the housing bubble crash.

So what? If your target retirement date was 20+ years in the future, this is arguably the right call. If your retirement date was closer, they still more heavily weighted you toward safer assets.

The fact that they did this before a market crash is irrelevant — nobody can predict these things with any reliability. Not you, not me, not Vanguard.

> They definitely chase performance.

They definitely do not.

> Increased international allocation when they saw it was performing well.

Increased international allocation to track overall market better.

> Besides, they hold international currency-hedged bonds, something that no one seems to be able to come up with a good reason for.

From their website: The fund employs currency hedging strategies to protect against uncertainty in future exchange rates, so investment returns are expected to reflect the underlying performance of international bonds.

Canada has less taxation than the US? Most of the banks have been around for a while, but haven't been this big until very recently.

Here's a simple illustration of why diversification is considered "good" in general. If you think of your portfolio as a weighted average of returns, the variance of the portfolio decreases as you add uncorrelated assets (i.e. diversify)[0]. In the simplest case, imagine two assets with the same expected return whose returns are uncorrelated. If you don't believe in stock-picking ability, diversifying between the two is a good idea. When you try to be more sophisticated about this, you get modern portfolio theory.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variance#Sum_of_uncorrelated_v...

You don't need to invest in a foreign company to invest in a foreign market. Take a couple of US companies and see where their revenues come from geographically and diversify your holdings in that way.

> If you are an investor you need to be in the market, period.

This. Another way to think of it: if you are out of the market when it goes up by X% that is functionally equivalent to an X% loss, i.e. you have X% less money than you otherwise would have had.

(Well, OK, technically it's equivalent to a loss of X/(1+X) but that's pretty close to X for X<<100%.)

Agree: timing the market is hard, but it's not impossible, particularly A) given that many big (institutional) investors are not at liberty to enter and exit (almost all mutual/index funds have prescribed what proportion must be in equities, say.) B) given that not all markets are as efficient as the EMH makes them out to be. For example, China fell precipitously from June 2015 ( http://www.bloomberg.com/quote/SHCOMP:IND ), and The Economist (AsiaPac edition) had a cover on 2015-05-30 proclaiming "China's overvalued stock market" ( http://www.economist.com/printedition/2015-05-30 )

To conclude, I think it is prudent to review your asset allocation maybe once or twice a year, and shift things around a bit.

> Have some exposure to outside of the US markets.

The larger American companies are global companies, so you get that anyway. The proof is look what happens to the US markets when some foreign event happens, like Brexit.

Almost nothing happened to the US stock market on the day of Brexit.

2) this is a mind game, you are not actually loosing money in down years (unless you are actively trading), the market is just valueing your assets for less. When the market does this, you should see if prices are cheap, and if so buy as much as you can! - Warren Buffet style

While timing the market is a no go, from 2000, 2008, now 2016 it does seem we're at the peak again so it does not make much sense to invest in recent years? I stopped putting money into the stock market since a while ago due to this obvious trend/concern(interest rate has been zero for too long, stock has overrun the real economy, stock peaks after 8 years since 2008,etc)

>>While timing the market is a no go

>>I stopped putting money into the stock market since a while ago

These two statements are in conflict with one another. You are literally timing the market by not investing anymore. Just invest every month and you will be much better off.

> While timing the market is a no go, from 2000, 2008, now 2016

You realize you are trying to time the market, right?

Are you forgetting about dividends?

The criticism here is silly.

There's a big difference between timing the market and looking at p/e ratios or debt load for stocks (or entire indexes) and deciding that they are way over valued. If you also think bond interest rates are too low likely to climb, hold your cash and come back to pick up stocks when they are cheaper. There's nothing wrong with that strategy as long as you are buying and selling on value and not trying to time a crash. Let the mob chase the yield down the rabbit hole.

If no one did this and everyone was just long everything forever, the market would be immediately broken.

edit: While I think John Bogle is a hero of the investment world with advice that all investors should heed, the Boglehead-Dunning-Kruger-effect can be profoundly annoying. They are a fantastic starting point and they address the most common mistakes, but it's a wee bit more complicated than Bogle's rules if you really want to learn equities and investing.

http://awealthofcommonsense.com/2014/02/worlds-worst-market-...

The US Market 1981 to present is something of an anomaly that isn't likely to repeat. The same goes for the post WWII era. I'm not saying going long everything is a bad strategy necessarily, but like all investments, it's not guaranteed and has risks. There's nothing wrong with taking value into account when buying investments. It's very different from selling stock out of fear or because of a crash.

counterpoint: http://www.economist.com/blogs/buttonwood/2016/01/investing

>Always be invested in the market.

Yes, I've heard that a million times, but that kind of advice presupposes a bull market. What if it's 1967, and you're about to go into a 15 year period of up and down markets, with no real growth in stock prices? And that's before inflation; the market fell substantially during the horrible 70s if measured in real dollars. All kinds of stock enthusiasts (like most folks here) got eaten alive. Pessimism reigned by the early 80s. Most people said "I'll never buy stocks again.".

Ironically, when investors finally capitulated, the great bull market of the 80s and 90s started.

My point is that most people here are mesmerized by that bull market, and by recent gains. But historically the indexes have had huge, long term swings that probably exceed most people's investment horizon.

"Past performance is no guarantee of future results" is not just a legal disclaimer. It's a bitter truth. Our current optimism is strongly colored by recent gains.

What if you had retired in 1929? You would have received nary a return for 25 years.

Sure, indexes average 8 percent or so, over the very long term, but it can be an intolerably long averaging interval.

> "Past performance is no guarantee of future results" is not just a legal disclaimer. It's a bitter truth.

Definitely this. I personally believe "Always be invested in the market" is very irresponsible advice to give, precisely because it completely ignores this fundamental truth.

Just because markets have averaged a positive return in the past doesn't mean they necessarily will continue to average a positive return in the future. And as the saying goes, the market can remain irrational far longer than you can remain solvent.

That said, I still do invest most of my money in the market, but I don't try to pretend it's anything but a gamble. I've weighed my options, and the upside of investing in the stock market is much higher compared to all my other available options for investment, and I can afford to lose this gamble at this early stage in my life.

But when people ask me for investment advice, I will tell them it's a gamble and let them make that decision for themselves, rather than try to propagate this ridiculous urban myth that the stock market will always somehow eventually end up higher, and add fuel to what has essentially become a massive pyramid scheme.

> Yes, I've heard that a million times, but that kind of advice presupposes a bull market. What if it's 1967, and you're about to go into a 15 year period of up and down markets, with no real growth in stock prices? And that's before inflation; the market fell substantially during the horrible 70s if measured in real dollars. All kinds of stock enthusiasts (like most folks here) got eaten alive. Pessimism reigned by the early 80s.

http://awealthofcommonsense.com/2014/02/worlds-worst-market-...

> What if you had retired in 1929? You would have received nary a return for 25 years.

That just isn't true? You're looking at charts without dividends reinvested. Plug 1929-1950 into https://www.measuringworth.com/datasets/sap/ for example. It had bounced back above 1929 by 1937; never falls below the starting value after 1944.

I'll revise my position, but only slightly. Using the data that you pointed me at, if you had retired in 1929, you would have had to wait until 1944 before the market broke through permanently above the 1929 level, with dividends reinvested. So you would only have starved for 15 years, not 25.

Just because the market's down doesn't mean you can't spend retirement savings. You wouldn't need to starve (as someone wealthy enough to retire in 1929). Ideally you scale back your spending and look for work.

Social security was signed into law in 1935 (6 years later).

The problem isn't lasting the first 6-15 years (4% rule of thumb = 25x yearly spending; in very low risk cash/bonds obviously that lasts around 25 years), it's having any money left over to last the rest.

And keep in mind, 1929 and ~1965 are the two worst years to retire in in US history.

Always be invested in the market but make sure that when you need the money that you have invested, it is there for you to spend. It doesn't make sense to keep in the money in the market when you know that you will be in loss when you will have to take it out.

Read Goldstein's (edit: Bernstein's!) book "If You Can".

It's a whopping 16 page book of plain talk and he made it free on the internet, no strings. [1] It's the best introduction to planning for retirement, especially for those under 35, I've read so far.

[1] https://www.etf.com/docs/IfYouCan.pdf

Bernstein :)

Holy shit this is amazing. Thanks for this link. Helped tie together a bunch of scattered finance knowledge I've 'acquired' (or encountered in the wild I guess).

Reads like a fatherly chat with his children about personal finance, it's brilliantly written.

if you trust stocks and live in the US hat is, right?

I agree with most of this, except for the stuff on robo-advisors. You should be very careful about those.

First of all their fees are too high. Wealthfront's 0.25% fee seems rather small and it is smaller than what a lot of human advisers charge, but if you compute it over a lifetime of savings with the negative compounding effect it will cost you a lot.

Imagine you receive some money when you are 20 from a rich uncle and invest it for 40 years using the wealthfront fee structure. After 40 years you will have paid about 10% of your savings in fees. Or, in other words, you will have about 10% more savings if you had taken a couple of hours to sit down and decide which funds to invest in. Keep in mind that the wealthfront fees are in addition of any etf or mutual fund fees you have to pay to get into investment vehicles.

So yeah, compounding interest is a dangerous thing.

There is another problem with roboadvisers -- people put too much trust in them. In our society there is this implicit trust of the computer, probably bred from multiple sci-fi shows with all-wise computers. Well it is a very dangerous thing when it comes to your savings.

You may not be the best investor, but you should take responsibility in your investment choices. You should know what you are investing in and why. Even if the thing you are investing in is a boring simple S&P 500 fund (as it should be for most of you) you should know what it is and why you are investing in it. You shouldn't just blindly follow some algorithm programmed by god-knows who.

> Or, in other words, you will have about 10% more savings if you had taken a couple of hours to sit down and decide which funds to invest in.

If and only if you would have done about as well as the robo-advisor in those couple of hours. (I'm not saying this would or wouldn't happen, but it's pretty big for an unstated assumption.)

Well the thing is that the roboadviser is not even intended to make particular security picks. It is only supposed to decide which broad areas to invest in and what percentage for each area. Thus, the roboadviser can say that for your particular risk profile you should have 60% stocks 40% bonds and within the stocks you should have 60% sp500, 20% foreign large cap ... etc.

My point is this portfolio distribution stuff is not an exact science and there really isn't a right answer. There are some broad accepted guidelines, but they are rather broad and simple and you definitely do not need computers to follow them.

maybe you'll do better, maybe you'll do worse. the prevailing theory is that the expected value is the same (minus the fees). adding up years of fees, and suddenly you're short a nontrivial amount of money

This. The typical portfolio drummed up by roboadvisors corresponds to basically stone age portfolio theory. With a tiny amount of personal responsibility and education, you can replicate the same and net the difference in fees without spending your life thinking about finance to try to do better.

If you just want to 'set it and forget it', consider its an approach you're taking with the fruits of decades of your life.

[edit: typo]

This is true to some extent, although I have found that the automated "Tax Loss Harvesting" being offered by some roboinvestors more than pays for their percentage fee.

Should I also be performing the work of checking several times a year if I should be making sales, recording the losses, buying equivalent securities, and bundling that into a form for the IRS?

One thing I very much dislike about many of the roboadivisors inculding Wealthfront, is their subjective take on what risk means.

Ex: Wealthfront's high risk portfolio back in 2013 had significant exposure to commodities -- mainly oil and metals. That sector has done poorly to say the least, and many a retail investor would not have correctly understood what Wealthfront's definition of risk actually meant.

If you posit that all a robo-advisor does is "decides which funds to invest in" for you, how are you putting too much trust into a computer? A target-date fund from Vanguard also makes allocation choices for you across US/international stocks/bonds; is the conclusion that you should always invest in the underlying asset class directly instead of trusting a fund/advisor/company to do it for you?

The impression I get is that the two areas where robo-advisors shine is UX and Tax Loss Harvesting.

The Betterment site is pretty, which makes me more inclined to put more money into it more often. This is irrational, but for me this makes it worth more than the 0.15% I end up paying them in fees.

I'm less sure about whether TLH is worth the 0.15% fee, though. The premise is that you do some "equivalent" (to you, but not to the IRS) transactions, report them on your tax return, and lower the taxes you pay today ("basis"). In exchange, you would have to pay those taxes later on your investments when you withdraw them. Is this always the right answer (because those later taxes are in compounded-inflation dollars)? What if I think my tax rate now is lower than the tax rate in ten, twenty, fifty years?

The amount I've already saved in tax dollars thanks to TLH is orders of magnitude higher than what I've paid Betterment in fees.

That being said, you won't always benefit from it, and there are caveats you should read about. I've decided to take a slightly more hands on but simpler approach, and have moved all of my investments into a simple 4-fund portfolio at Vanguard.

As you reach the $3k max and your portfolio continues to grow, the benefit to fee ratio becomes worse.

Sort of. Ideally you're trading future long-term capital gains taxes for lower income tax today. You assume the future cap gains rate will be lower than or equal to your income tax today.

You are absolutely right on the fees being a problem here. I opened a wealthfront account a couple of years ago and added some money because I really liked the interface and I was sold on tax loss harvesting. I recently wanted to compare how my wealthfront account did compared to the S&P500 and I was surprised to see a 0.98 beta (almost the same monthly returns as S&P500) and an alpha of (-0.15 almost the fees they are charging) with very little r-squared error. Atleast for my risk profile (10), I would have been better off investing directly in S&P500. I didn't get high returns nor did I get reduced volatility with the wealthfront portfolio.

If you're healthy enough to swing a high-deductible health plan, consider maxing out a "stealth IRA" aka health savings account. With a $3,350 individual / $6,750 contribution limit, it's a great tax-advantaged account that can be treated just like a Traditional IRA. If you use it for medical costs, which you are likely to have in retirement, you get tax advantage on both ends.

http://whitecoatinvestor.com/retirement-accounts/the-stealth...

Agreed, if you have an HSA available it is probably the second places I would maximize contributions to, after a 401k/403b.

HSA contributions are arguably better considering they are not subject to FICA.

Yes, but only if they are deducted from your payroll by your employer, which is usually the situation when you have an HSA, but not always. You won't get a FICA refund if you contribute yourself off-payroll, but you will get an income tax refund at least.

It's like a traditional IRA, but the age for penalty-free non-healthcare withdrawals is higher (65 vs 59.5). Just something to keep in mind if you're older and think you might need the money sooner.

There is theoretically no time limit on taking withdrawals for medical expenses, so if you have enough medical expenses before you retire you can pay them with taxable money and withdraw in retirement those payments(save the receipts in case you get audited!). I wouldn't rely on that though, I'm sure the IRS will crack down on that if it becomes popular.

I don't see how the IRS would crack down on that unless the rules change. I don't see the rules changing without notice (time for people doing this to self-reimburse medical expenses before the rules change).

As with all trustee-run plans, people should evaluate the investment options before moving the money in. The HSA I personally have access to is great for saving taxes on expenses, but if I wanted to use the investment options rather than sit in cash, my only options are high-fee managed funds (there's a lot less pressure on these vendors than on 401k trustees due to less public awareness)

Like an IRA, you're free to open an HSA with another provider and transfer the balance. You get the deduction from your employer and can invest in lower-fee funds. The best options are still relatively expensive compared to the IRA/401(k) scene, unfortunately.

> You should open a SEP-IRA, which is a special account type that is similar to a 401k in mechanics but has very, very generous funding limits.

Actually, both account types have the same yearly limit; it's just that the employer can contribute much more than the employee, and when self-employed you can contribute as the employer.

In fact, the difference between SEP IRA and 401k is not the funding limits, but the fact that the SEP IRA allows only employer contributions. You can actually open a "solo 401k" for yourself if you are self-employed, and make both employer and employee contributions. That will let you put more money away for a given income than the SEP IRA, until you make 275k or so at which point you have hit the cap for both (and the cap is the same for both).

Edit: Vanguard has a calculator to show the difference:

https://personal.vanguard.com/us/SbsCalculatorController

This is exactly right, although with solo 401k, you can hit the cap of $53k contributions with net profit of only ~$185k, not $275k, if you max both employee and employer contributions.

Additionally, with a solo 401k plan, the $18k employee contributions can be Roth.

Ah, good point about the Roth contributions! I'd forgotten about that difference.

> Often when I told people I was building a (toy) stock exchange they’d ask me for stock advice, which is about as well-considered as asking a WoW guild to deal with your terrorism problem.

And you think that's problematic? I have relatives telling me that they'll go with X anti-thrombotic therapy because a cousin of the brother of a guy who they met in the supermarket took it 6 years ago and worked wonders for him. I'm a pharmacist and I have rather strong opinions about some drugs over others, but I can take advices from doctors, physicians, nurses or anyone with a minimum degree of knowledge on the topic. Still, many times I have to argue with with relatives, to the point where I get frustrated.

Question - is it fair to use the 8% historical market average when doing these calculations (which include some of the most spectacularly productive periods in the American economy)? All the predictions I've seen going forward look like the average will be much lower (at least for the current generation), and a rate of 4-5% means you need a much larger nest egg to drawdown a livable amount each year in retirement.

Edit: It's not clear from the essay, but I'm assuming Patrick's 8% rate is not adjusted for inflation (based on his 40k drawdown scenario - the other 3-4% would cover inflation).

Depends on how conservative you want to be. For me personally I've been using an inflation-adjusted rate of 5% annually, but I consider that very conservative and hope to realize a much longer rate over my time horizon. But if I do realize only 5% annualized, I will be sure to have more than enough to not live in squalor.

If realized rates over the next ~30 years are less than 5%, not only are we as a civilization going to have bigger problems than my retirement, but I don't think much anything will save you regardless of how much you are saving, unless you have a very frugal retirement.

Historical long term real rates hover around 6%, and I'd consider real rates of 5% for the next decade quite optimistic, not conservative.

Also, regarding safe withdrawal rates, consider that (depending on the jurisdiction) in retirement you might have to pay taxes on the nominal rates, but then leave enough to compensate for inflation.

Say: 4% nominal, pay 25% taxes, leaves you with 3%, but 2% inflation, so you can safely withdraw only 1%. Thus, conservatively, $1m might give you only 10k a year.

From 1871 to the end of 2015 returned 6.86% annualized in real dollars. Most 30-year periods you can pick out average either that or above, save a few odd periods. [1]

I use [2] to do most of my predictions. I think you are being way conservative with assuming a 4% withdrawal rate will only give you $10k real dollars on $1m invested, but everyone has different risk tolerances and assumptions :)

1. http://www.moneychimp.com/features/market_cagr.htm 2. http://www.firecalc.com/

Agreed, 1% withdrawal is (hopefully) worst case. But given the last decade, 4% strikes me as not particularly conservative.

Disclaimer: I'm looking primarily at Germany and HK, where growth and equity returns, respectively, have been lacklustre over the last decade. Though, even the S&P 500 has only made 2.5% p.a. since 2000.

Personally, no, I don't think it is fair assumption.

US GDP growth has been slowing for decades now. At some point that will be reflected in the markets and the index funds that track them.

https://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&...

(But, yes, I still invest in index funds. I just don't have the same dreamy expectations that many other people seem to have.)

We've also had some spectacularly high inflation in the past, which tempers those GDP numbers somewhat. I otherwise agree that historical norms for equity market returns are probably overly optimistic for the future, but I wouldn't be extremely pessimistic either.

That growth rate is real, not nominal.

So it is. It isn't very clear looking at that chart though, unfortunately. Another reason why I prefer FRED for this kind of data [1].

1. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A191RL1A225NBEA

I think it's ridiculously high. I have a running calculation where I figure the APY of all my 20+ years of retirement contributions, had I immediately put my contributions into an S&P-500 fund. It uses "adjusted close" prices, so it takes dividends into account.

Right now it is at 7.6%. It is not inflation adjusted, so it's lower in real terms. Also, for the great majority of those 20 years, the APY was much lower. And, since most advice says to do some mix of domestic, international, and bonds, most ideal portfolios will have even lower performance.

I know it's just one data point, but one reason this is lower than expected is because people tend to have more money to put into the market when times are good (and the market is high), and less money to put into the market when times are bad (and the market is low). It was true for me in terms of my contribution history, at least.

It's not ridiculously high. He looked at a 10 year window, and you are looking at a 20 year window. 10 year windows show more volatility.

And if you're concerned about "one data point", I'll give you plenty:

http://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2015/Dec/pay-down-mortgage-or-in...

For a 20 year window, it's below 6% inflation adjusted, and close to 8% without taking into account inflation (closer to your 7.6% figure)

If memory serves me correctly, the average number you'd see used everywhere pre-2008 was more like 10%.

The problem with looking at extremely long periods of time (i.e., 50 years) is you see these massive events like depressions and the housing crisis. How many of those will happen in the next few decades... who knows?

Maybe we'd be better off to look at median percentages than averages.

No, it is not fair. If you look at the global stock market (which is 'the market' as such) the returns have not been that high. 8% is based on a nation that has indeed done exceptionally well. If you look at current P/E ratios and dividend yields it is almost impossible we would see that as a consistent average going forward. Also look at bond yields: very very low - so a balanced portfolio will do less well, too.

It's got to be too high. As someone who has survived two steep market corrections and have been in and out of the market as life through me difficult pitches, I'd estimate my "returns" have barely averaged around inflation--I basically have what I put in. It's potentially a mistake to just assume you'll average 8% going forward forever.

What country are you in? As of 2015 the S&P 500's average annualized return was ~8% for the past 20 years. In terms of individual years, the benchmark nearly always beats inflation handily. If you're an American and you were passively investing in index funds, I don't understand how you could only have what you started with, or anything near that amount.

Like I said, unlucky in that I had to stop investing and take money out during downturns (which typically happen at the bottom of the market). Not timing the market or "actively investing", you know--dealing with real life.

The whole "you'll average 8%" (or 5% or whatever number gets quoted) is an idealized figure assuming you always buy and hold periodically and regularly and never need to stop or withdraw to deal with life's many curveballs.

Ah, I understand now. I didn't understand your original comment when you were trying to point that out.

Since the 2000 peak, the S&P 500 has returned ~3% pa. Throw in the fact that many funds back then were charging some 2% pa, and transaction costs with some in and out, and you can easily have not much more than what you started with (particularly in real terms).

I did this analysis a while ago:

http://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2015/Dec/pay-down-mortgage-or-in...

The first question is: What window are you looking at? For 30 years, it's about 6.8% for the last 30 years (inflation adjusted - close to 10% if you ignore inflation).

I've plotted it for each 30 year period going way back. 6.8% is not high. It's been well over 10% a number of times. I think 7% is a good average.

His figure was from a 10 year window. Unless you plan to retire in that timeframe, I would suggest just looking at a larger window. Less volatility.

Oh, and based on my plots, his 8% looks like it is inflation adjusted.

It's ridiculously high. For a better evaluation, see probably one of my favorite visualizations of all time:

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/01/02/business/20110...

THIS

This single diagram explains the market dynamic year over year in a way I've never seen anywhere else. The 1/3/5/10 yr returns figures you see don't even come close to understanding the nuances of one year over another.

I remember when this diagram was published in 2011 and _still_ refer to it routinely.

This is why you do dollar cost averaging and steadily invest every year, to spread out your investments over multiple years.

I'm glad you like it but I don't follow how you infer dollar cost averaging from this. There's no statistical advantage to dollar cost averaging over lump sum investing (actually the opposite due to the median return beating inflation). I'd argue the main benefit is a realistic expectation and understanding of the range of returns to help you plan better.

Dollar cost averaging doesn't have a better expected value than lump sum investing, but it should have a lower variance, no?

Also, there's dollar cost averaging like "I have a lump sum now, but I will invest it slowly over the next 2 years" and there is dollar cost averaging like "I will invest money as it comes in slowly over the next 2 years instead of saving it up and investing it as a lump sum then". The former is the technical definition, but the latter is what most people mean when they use the term informally...

I feel this graphic, while informative and delightful, is insidious in its choice of scale and its lack of comparisons.

On scale, it makes it seem like +3% to +7% real returns is "neutral". This makes it seem like the stock market is sometimes good sometimes bad but overall it may as well be just okay.

On comparisons, it does a huge disservice by not adding a tab showing bond yields and a tab showing cash/treasury yields (which would be dark red across the board except light red around 1930).

I feel these slights make the graphic present stock investing in an unfairly unfavorable light and makes the suboptimal strategy of keeping your money out of the market seem much more favorable than it is.

The graphic isn't presented to compare stocks with the alternatives of cash/bond yields. I think the major service done here is setting a realistic expectation for the returns you might see in your lifetime. It's especially relevant for people who's major investing periods have/will occur in the 2000-2020 timeframe of sluggish growth and ultra-low yield. The Jeremy Siegel '8%' number is a really dangerous number to set your expectations on when saving. If you do, you might be 20 years in and well outside the bounds of a timeframe where compound interest can help you live the retirement you were aiming for before you realize your mistake.

Agreed. That horribly misleading graphic mislead me for a long time as a child.

> "Open a traditional IRA or a Roth IRA. The traditional IRA contributes pre-tax money, the Roth IRA post-tax money. The upshot is that if you believe your marginal rate at retirement to be higher than your present rate, you should pick a Roth IRA, otherwise, you should pick a traditional IRA. If you don’t feel like forecasting that, take my word for it that 90% of you should have Roth IRAs."

I simply cannot fathom why he would state that. I cannot imagine a scenario where my retirement income would (nor should) be as high or higher than my peak earning years.

Typically in retirement you have a home and all sorts of hard goods (clothes, furniture, cars) paid off and thus need less money.

The risk that favors Roth IRAs includes the risk that the tax code will change to include higher rates than the current tax code.

Also note that any increased or decreased "need" doesn't factor in to the calculation.

US income taxes are at historically low levels too.

I would disagree - prior to WWI there was no income tax. Further, not every state implanted income taxes (some still don't have any)

undefined != 0

Seems like in the case of tax, it does. They weren't taking a random % of income in income tax based on what was in the memory cell from the previous call stack. They were taking 0%.

Some states (Texas) don't have income tax but have very high property taxes to offset this. Or they have high sales tax.

There is a difference between nominal rate and effective rate. The effective rates are fairly close to the past for high wage earners, lower for low wage earners.

>...In 1958, approximately two million filers (4.4% of all taxpayers) earned the $12,000 or more for married couples needed to face marginal rates as high as 30%. These Americans paid about 35% of all income taxes. And now? In 2010, 3.9 million taxpayers (2.75% of all taxpayers) were subjected to rates that were 33% or higher. These Americans—many of whom would hardly call themselves wealthy—reported an adjusted gross income of $209,000 or higher, and they paid 49.7% of all income taxes.

>In contrast, the share of taxes paid by the bottom two-thirds of taxpayers has fallen dramatically over the same period. In 1958, these Americans accounted for 41.3% of adjusted gross income and paid 29% of all federal taxes. By 2010, their share of adjusted gross income had fallen to 22.5%. But their share of taxes paid fell far more dramatically—to 6.7%. The 77% decline represents the single biggest difference in the way the tax burden is shared in this country since the late 1950s.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014241278873247051045781516...

This is an interesting point, but not something we can solidly plan on. Vs we can absolutely say what the best way to play the game is based on todays rules.

It's a pretty safe bet that the next 30-40 years is going to explode in entitlements spending and infrastructure costs.

If the government folks don't pay them, then it's going to basically be Mad Max and your IRA (whatever the type) won't really help you much.

If the government folks do pay them, then the money for that has to come from somewhere. It's very unlikely to come from businesses, because the little ones don't make enough and the big ones pay very bright lawyers and accountants to keep the .gov away (cough Apple cough). So, it's probably going to come from income tax.

Get a Roth.

If you consider the risk of massive tax rate increases over 30-40 years significant, due to the need to pay for massive entitlement and infrastructure spending, also consider the risk that they will tax Roth capital gain withdrawls to pay for it as well.

In which case you've lost nothing since that money wouldve been in a conventional account and taxed to hell anyways.

Put it in the IRA and if things don't go to shit, your money is fine. Don't put it in the IRA and of things go to shit, lose the tax advantage.

Do either and things go to shit, it doesn't matter which you did.

No, that money would have been in a 401k, so you would lose out on the initial benefit of not having paid taxes when you contributed if they raid Roths.

But, if you've already maxed out your other tax-advantaged space, and you have more money to contribute, there is no reason not to put it in a Roth instead of a regular taxable account, assuming you are eligible, because then you can have tax-free growth at least(worth less than tax-free contributions, but still worth a lot).

In the same scenario that Roth IRAs are at risk of extra taxation (or fees), 401(k)s are as well. That doomsday scenario isn't worth planning for with money, but with physical assets (property, food, tools) and skills because that's the scenario where the US economy collapses (not a recoverable crash like 1929 or 2008, but a true, complete collapse where the USD value goes to zero).

Roth IRAs make sense if you make too much to contribute to a Traditional IRA with tax advantaged contributions and little enough to still qualify for the Roth.

They also (both traditional and roth) have an advantage over a 401(k): You get to manage the funds any way you want. You also get to contribute even when your employer doesn't have one, you just need income (capital gains don't count, as I understand it, so being semi-retired and living off your earnings does preclude you from contributing).

You're also limited on 401(k) investments to whatever your employer contracted for. Could be shitty, could be stellar, you don't control it.

That's what I try to be mindful of regarding Roth. How strong is the promise that it won't be taxed? Or maybe it isn't taxed, but new fees are introduced as a roundabout tax.

Like a lot of retirement thinking, it's unsettling to think about the negative scenarios.

I think it is unlikely, but the chance that they will tax Roth withdrawals is positively correlated with the very scenario that makes contributing to them advantageous, a massive tax hike in the future. If the government needs money that badly, everything is potentially on the table, down to a flat haircut tax on bank balances.

The rates would need to go up enough so that your overall tax rate in retirement is greater than the marginal rate you pay taxes at today. That would be quite the taxation increase, probably above the historical norm at any point in the US, unless you're well above the 33% bracket, in which case the probability of your rates increasing is a lot higher.

If you live in Silicon Valley, a new grad would probably be in the 28% or 33% bracket just to be able to afford renting a studio apartment on their own.

GP is talking about Federal brackets. 33% starts at $190,150 AGI (after deductions) which is well above what a new grad could expect (from their employer) or require to pay rent, even in the valley.

It's also worth noting that by historical standards tax rates are actually low. So if we assume the possibility of mean reversion they could well be higher.

I see the Roth/Regular as a bet-hedging opportunity - ideally, put some in each type and then you are ensured against either scenario.

I think it's incorrect to compare marginal rates as well. It makes more sense to compare your Effective Rate in retirement versus your Marginal Rate of today. This article explains the math: http://www.gocurrycracker.com/roth-sucks/

Your effective tax rate is likely to be much less than your marginal rate.

Also, for anyone interested in financial independence and simple investing with your 401k and IRAs, I'd like to recommend the Stock Series here: http://jlcollinsnh.com/stock-series/

This is a really good point. Now I'm pissed that I contributed to a Roth earlier in my career.

Another one that no one has mentioned: state income tax. I live in CA but would put a >50% chance that I will live in a lower tax state when I retire. Thus, Traditional > Roth.

If you are going to contribute to a Roth, it is better to do it earlier than not, while your earnings are lower, so at least you have that going for you. It can also make it easier if you ever decide to do a backdoor Roth in the future(for you know, when you have tons of money kicking around after you are contributing the max to your 401k and have your mortgage(s) paid off), since it could be hard to open a Roth account after you are over the income limit.

Also neglects to mention you can have a 401k and a Roth IRA and that if you have a spouse with income they can open up a Roth as well. For financial advice I think it's really important not to miss details like that.

Also an HSA can be used to shelter a bit more income. If you don't consume much health care a HDHP may be the way to go.

There is also the backdoor Roth, but I never wrapped my head around it.

The gist of the backdoor Roth is that you make a traditional contribution and then roll it over into a Roth before tax season. There is no income limit on roll-overs and you aren't taking the benefit of a traditional IRA at tax time so the IRS doesn't care that you set it up in the first place.

> and thus need less money.

Medical bills.

Medicare.

Income early in one's career is typically lower than incomes later in one's career. So even if retirement income is lower than final career income, there's still a good chance it's greater than entry-level income and would be taxed at a higher rate. You've also got to keep in mind that taxes may eventually rise. America's top rate today is much, much lower than the top rate historically--no reason to believe it couldn't swing back the other way.

oh i see the pattern like someone making $50k a year to start, but rises to $150k by end of career and whom is planning for a retirement income of the average (100k)... Then a Roth is a good deal when making $50k (at the beginning) and regular is better when making $150k (at the end)...

Tricky.

If you are making $50K/year - it does NOT make sense to save in order to push retirement income up to $100K/year.

On the other hand, saving when you have $150K/year income in order to push your retirement up to $100K/year could make sense.

(All numbers in this example are inflation adjusted to each other)

Keep in mind Roth is no longer an option after 120k.

The only situations I can think of where Roth might make sense are 1) early stages of your career, before you hit the 28% marginal rate and 2) if you are still eligible for a Roth, but already maximized your other tax-advantaged space in 401(k)s and IRAs.

> if you are still eligible for a Roth, but already maximized your other tax-advantaged space in 401(k)s and IRAs.

Under what conditions could this occur?

When you make under $132,000 but were still able to contribute $18,000 to your 401k.

If you make more than ~$62k (single earner) and have an employer 401(k) program, you're not eligible to deduct traditional IRA contributions. (Non-deductible traditional IRA contributions get a worse tax treatment than a taxable brokerage account.)

At very roughly $120k-$130k (single earner; I forget the exact figure) you're no longer eligible for Roth IRA contributions. However, you can make non-deductible Traditional IRA contributions and then do a Traditional-to-Roth conversion (not "recharacterization"). This is known as a "Backdoor Roth IRA contribution" and is legal and explained in nauseating detail on the internet.

So:

> Under what conditions could this occur?

If you make more than ~$62k, have an employer 401(k), and contribute the maximum to it, funding a Roth IRA is a good idea.

(Unless you have an existing traditional IRA balance which would make backdoor Roth funding counter-productive due to the pro rata …. blah blah. If you don't have an existing Traditional IRA balance it's not a problem.)

When you want to do a back-door Roth IRA for one.

http://www.rothira.com/what-is-a-backdoor-roth-ira

Even if you can guarantee that your retirement income wouldn't be higher, you can't guarantee that your tax would be lower either. So I'd have both traditional and Roth IRA (e.g., 50/50)

A 50/50 traditional/roth allocation suggests you see it as even odds that your overall tax rate will be higher in retirement than your marginal rate today. That would require quite the rise in taxation rates, depending on exactly what your marginal rate is today. It is very easy currently to be married and make > $150k with a marginal rate of 25% and effective rate of < 15%. So, if you decided to draw exactly $150k each year in retirement, much more than you would be likely to need in any case, your effective rate would have to go up by over 10% to make it worth it to contribute to a Roth today. If you are drawing less than $150k, your effective rate on less income would have to go up 10%. This seems incredibly unlikely in our political environment, more like 80/20 or 90/10 odds.

> That would require quite the rise in taxation rates

Take a look at any of the Millenials working in any large-city downtown: they spend every single penny they earn, they have no savings; when they get older, either the State will let them starve to death, or taxes will be raised in order to take care of them.

I don't think the former is politically possible, so taxes will have to go up.

Meanwhile, the same spendthrifts are by-and-large refusing to have children early, which means that there will be fewer workers to pay those taxes.

That means that there will be tremendous political pressure to raid 401(k) plans and IRAs. I actually believe it's even odds whether Roths will end up taxed one way or another (perhaps with 'withdrawal fees' or some form of Social Security clawback or something): it'll be too much money for the State to leave alone.

I agree that the risk of Roths being raided is quite high if we get to the point of taxes being raised that significantly to cause them to be valuable, so I don't really see a benefit personally of making significant contributions to one. I think raiding of 401ks is much less likely, as a lot more people have them and would be affected, and even if they do, you are still going to be better off than having contributed to a Roth unless they outright confiscate your balance, since you will have at least have avoided paying taxes in the past.

Or we could just continue doing what we are currently, and just keep piling up the debt :) No tax increase or Roth/401k raids needed.

While no one can predict the future, I tend to agree with your hypothesis.

The advantage of a 401K over the Roth is that since both can be raided, at least with the 401K your money is being taxed only on the way out. With the Roth you are being taxed on the way in for sure, and you run the risk of it being taxed on the way out as well.

Judging from the past my guess would be that we wont see something as obvious as a penalty or a fee. Instead what you may see is a more aggressive required minimum distribution schedule. Perhaps you could see the date of penalty free withdrawal pushed back from 59.5 to 65 or 67 years of age. Means testing of social security benefits has been mentioned before. If that gets put in place, and you fail the means test for social security, they will have effectively taxed you more your entire working life.

You must know a different group of millennials than I do (anecdata at best).

> Take a look at any of the Millenials working in any large-city downtown: they spend every single penny they earn, they have no savings; when they get older, either the State will let them starve to death, or taxes will be raised in order to take care of them.

Don't forget the more politically expedient (and in my view most likely) choice: Print money to pay for it, causing inflation, which is essentially a silent tax on everyone with money.

Why should you compare using your overall rate in retirement? Is there some assumption here that most or all of your retirement income is coming from tax-advantaged accounts? That's probably the wrong calculation to make for high earners.

Depends on your definition of high earners, but most everyone that earns a living from W-2 income and is in the technology industry will be able to retire very easily by contributing as much as they can, preferably the max(currently $18,500) to their 401k and thereafter maximizing other tax-advantaged spaces such as Roth 401ks and IRAs over their working career. You would need to either be retiring exceptionally early, with less than 20 years of working life, or retire expecting to draw more than you earned in salary, to require after-tax investments to retire. Even if you do require after-tax investments, the preponderance of your income in retirement will most likely still come from those tax advantaged spaces, assuming you are a rational actor and wish to pay as little tax as possible. The only situation I can see where this doesn't apply is when you don't earn the majority of your income from W-2 wages and instead see it as long-term capital gains, in which case almost none of the advice in this entire comment thread is applicable and you should seek a fiduciary advisor.

> retiring exceptionally early, with less than 20 years of working life

This is an assumption I'm working under, but I've thought about it for a more normal case as well.

Still, the usual advice for saving for a normal retirement is 10%-15%, and you only have to break $185k before a 401(k) doesn't cover even the low end of that.

Well you have to consider matching numbers in that as well. My employer contributes 10%, which is on the high end of normal, but not that abnormal for most highly paid positions. It is easy to contribute 20%+ making over the 33% bracket and not even touch 401k total contribution limits that way(total limit is currently $53k). If you are making that much and your employer is not contributing a lot to your 401k it is definitely worth your while economically to convince them to do so(and when you are making that much you will have the clout to make them do so). Remember, the whole point of 401(k) plans initially was as a backdoor way to compensate high earners.

Also, if you're making that much, even if you want to retire early, the normal % rules of thumb don't necessarily apply, assuming you want to live a normal middle-class life in retirement. You should run the numbers on http://firecalc.com, you will find if you live frugally making that much and contribute the max you can easily retire in under 20 years with a >90% chance of success. If you want to retire to the high life you will either have to contribute more than normal(and invest well/be lucky) or work longer, no matter your income.

Edit: I will say that there is a potentially significant disadvantage, especially for high earners, in having a lot of your net worth tied up in a 401k. That is required minimum distributions, essentially forcing you to take out a certain percentage of your account balance when you reach certain age thresholds. You can somewhat easily get around this by rolling over into a Roth IRA(backdoor Roth), but that could offset many of the tax advantages of the 401k in the first place if you have significant traditional IRA holdings[1]. This is mostly deleterious if you are planning on bequeathing an estate in a tax-advantaged way, but you may be able to get around it with a irrevocable trust. Consult a fiduciary, this is not financial advice.

1. https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Backdoor_Roth_IRA#Caution

You can take your contributions (the principal, not the growth) out of a Roth account before you reach retirement age. The exact rules are complicated, but that's the big core benefit that has me putting money in a Roth. I can use it to retire at 40, or cash out some of it to make a down payment on a house.

If you decide to retire early you can always set up a Roth conversion ladder by rolling over IRAs and 401ks to Roth IRAs. It takes 5 years for those contributions to "season" so that you can take them out before 59.5, but you can take out capital gains that way as well. No need to contribute to a Roth today if that doesn't make sense otherwise.

Can you elaborate on this? I've been managing a post-tax account somewhat like a Roth IRA, though it is not an IRA because I plan to retire far before 59 1/2. I'm hoping for something in the middle of the two approaches with flexibility to withdraw early without penalty.

This is the most concise summary I've seen, but you can find some more discussion googling around for "Roth Conversion Ladder" - http://retireby40.org/roth-ira-conversion-ladder-minimize-ta...

You can also take your principal (and earnings) out of a traditional IRA penalty free if you work through the loopholes. http://www.madfientist.com/how-to-access-retirement-funds-ea...

This is info people should be aware of, but it doesn't help me if I only have money in a traditional IRA and want to use $100k for a down payment on a house.

Actually, I think buying a (first) house is one of the loopholes. From the linked article:

> "...you can withdraw retirement account money early to pay for education expenses, fund a first-time home purchase, ..."

Only up to $10k. I can withdraw $10k from my traditional IRA using that loophole, then a lot more from my roth.

not mentioned is the income limits. Almost every engineer I work with is over the limit for Roth, and definitely over the limit for deductible tira. Non deductible has very little benefit, so might as well go with Roth, or back door into a Roth.

I look at it as diversifying against tax law going crazy though, siNce so much of my retirement income is in 401k and pretax. Also the limits are a third of 401k, so it's only a quarter of retirement savings, and principal can be pulled out if needed.

If you aren't contributing the max to your 401k and IRA I would do that before considering Roth contributions, unless you really believe tax rates will explode such that your overall rate in retirement is higher than your marginal rate today. If that is the case you should also consider the risk that the law will be changed to tax Roth on withdrawal of capital gains, which I believe has been floated in the past.

And the risk that the tax laws on 401k will change too. Also, I missed that's in the self employed section so I don't know much about that. But if you have and can afford to max out a 401k, you probably can't get a deductible tira so it's really a question of taxable account vs Roth.

How would 401k laws change, you are already taxed when you withdraw from a 401k normally? The risk with Roth laws changing is you get double-taxed because the government needs money, with a 401k you have gotten the benefit the moment you contribute money to it, after that all they can do is literally confiscate money from it, or change it to a regular taxable account, but you've still already come out ahead of contributing to a Roth in either case.

> How would 401k laws change, you are already taxed when you withdraw from a 401k normally?

I can imagine wealth taxes at some point ('those fat cats never paid taxes on all that money!').

Frankly, I don't think it's possible to be too pessimistic about the future.

If we end up with wealth taxes you are still more screwed by contributing to a Roth instead of a 401k, because at least with the 401k you avoided paying taxes in the past.

Depends on whether the tax is the same on Roth and Traditional accounts (Why are you comparing 401k and Roth? They are completely orthogonal concepts.). If there is a tax, deductions for past taxes paid on Roth accounts are likely.

> Why are you comparing 401k and Roth? They are completely orthogonal concepts.

Because the entire thesis of this thread is that it is better to contribute to a 401k and other pretax accounts before contributing to a Roth under nearly all circumstances(other than at the beginning of your career) that don't involve massive tax raises in the future.

Roth 401(k)s (and traditional IRAs) do exist, you know...

For taxation purposes, traditional tax-exempt IRAs are equivalent to 401(k)s, and Roth 401(k)s are equivalent to Roth IRAs. Whenever someone refers to contributing to one type of account or the other over another type of account, the ones that are equivalent are... equivalent(for taxation purposes).

Right, so the correct classification is traditional and Roth, not 401(k) and Roth.

> Non deductible has very little benefit, so might as well go with Roth, or back door into a Roth.

Non-deductible IRA actually gets a worse tax treatment than an ordinary taxable account, due to the long-term capital gains rate being lower than the income tax rate.

One issue with the Roth is the amount you can contribute phases out with increasing income, to the point that you can't contribute if you file single and your income exceeds $132k (or $194k for joint filings).

"Backdoor Roth."

FWIW, Fidelity makes it very easy to make a "back door" Roth contribution, but only if you don't have a Traditional/Rollover IRA. You make a taxable contribution to a zero-balance Traditional, and then transfer it to the Roth. There aren't income limits on Roth transfers.

That must be a nice problem to have. Realistically this probably doesn't hit many people, and the ones it does hit already afford accountants who conjure up ways to minimize their taxes. Yea, I know, this is HN, where everyone knows that buddy who's cousin's roommate makes $400K at Google. The average geek doesn't have to worry about this.

The Roth phaseout starts at $117k for single earners. That is a lot of money, more than most people in the US, let alone the world, make, but it is not a princely sum for most technologists, especially not ones on HN.

> I simply cannot fathom why he would state that.

Me either, unless he assumes:

    1) His audience is all tech workers, and
    2) all tech workers are making better than $62k (single earner) or
       whatever the higher married-jointly exclusion is.

That's not so unreasonable.

As some others in this thread have said (and Patrick discusses in the post), there are lots of things you can do to much more directly impact your change of becoming rich and retiring well/early than optimizing your investments: get a really good salary and don't spend a lot of money. One blog which I have read is Mr Money Mustache [1], which focuses on those same concepts. Many of the posts are good reads.

[1]: http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/all-the-posts-since-the-begin...

This site was a eureka moment for me, but I've yet to convince my wife that every sacrifice is worth it - and I don't blame her. The comments/forum on the site are some good reading too, tho I think the guy did get a little lucky along the way.

If nothing else, that site made me realize where i stood on the consumer/producer scale, and what i needed to do to feel better about my future.

I don't really agree with that. Investing well is almost always more important than worrying about small expenses. Do you know how many people don't invest? Like, 99% of people.

It depends on how long you have until retirement, which is influenced by your saving rate as a percentage of income. If you can save 99% of your income, you can retire real fast and your investment choices don't impact your pre-retirement earnings very much.

(That's pretty much the gist of this post: http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/01/13/the-shockingly-sim... )

That said, you need to be invested somewhat just to fund retirement. It can be pretty conservative, though.

Something else I would add - if you're working in the ups-and-downs world of startups and technology, you may have meaty and lean years and during the good years find you want to save more fore retirement than 401ks, SEP IRAs and ROTH IRAs (if you're not priced out) allow.

One handy way to extend your tax-advantaged space: buy Series I and Series EE bonds from Treasury Direct. Both are tax-deferred until you cash them in. You can purchase up to 10K of each type per year. They are government-backed, highly-safe fixed-income instruments.

I bonds will pace inflation (like TIPS) for up to 30 years. EE bonds have low 'normal' yields but they automatically double after 20 years (so around 3.5%/year annualized, better than the rates on 20-year Treasuries). These rates are better than what you get on the open market.

And unlike normal bonds, they won't kick out payments that are taxable along the way - you can save the tax bill until you have a lean year then cash them back out (in the case of I bonds at least), or save them to the end of their lifespan (or until they double in the case of EE bonds).

Bonds are a horrific investment in today's market. Rates are lower than they have been since WW2 when they were fixed by the government! The principal and interest risk for owning bonds is essentially at an all time high. You'd literally be better off in cash in rates rise even somewhat in the near future.

The post you are responding to literally explains how EE bonds are better than those you can buy on the open market.

Also, you cannot reliably time the market.

what makes you think this wouldn't be priced into bond yields? There is trillions of paper in the market, an arbitrage is eaten by the entities who make their living doing it. There is no secret edge.

EE bonds don't have 'prices', they have fixed yields if held for 20 years.

To be clear, there is a price for the bond, which is the amount you pay for it. For EE bonds, you pay what you choose, and earn the Treasury-specified rate on that amount. However, this amounts to being priced just like other bonds. If you read the Treasury website, you'll find that they specifically state that the rate for newly purchased bonds is set based on current market conditions (today 0.1%). This balance between principal and interest is why people use terms like 'yield' to accurately describe bonds. An EE bond is no different (because there really is no edge), and if you make any more on it (not much), it's because you're giving up the liquidity of a transferrable bond.

Are you reading what you're replying to? Series EE bonds are guaranteed to double your investment, a return of ~3.5%, if held for 20 years.

If you hold for 19 years, they are, as you point out, a terrible investment. But the 20 year yield is decent, for a low risk product, in today's market.

I feel like I'm taking crazy pills. I said you make a rate based on the market return (as stated on the treasury site). I also said the additional return you get is based on having it be non-transferrable, and in the case of the annualized 3.5%, 20-year term, severely illiquid asset. That's also true. I think the risk of illiquidity is major risk, and I don't at all agree they are decent investments for that reason. I realize this is a zombie thread but can't help but reply. Just because there are other, also terrible, low risk debt products in today's market doesn't make this one reasonable. The value of an investment has to be measured based on what you're getting out of it, not just relative to other investments. That's why I remarked on being better to be in cash than bonds: bonds have a huge actualized and opportunity risk relative to their yield.

EE bonds don't trade on a secondary market. :)

Oh hey, I recognize you u/misnamed. I saw a comment on I and EE bonds and looked up for the username :-).

Also, don't listen to one person. Do your own homework.

https://medium.com/@blakeross/wealthfront-silicon-valley-tec...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9856151

wealthfront is a bad idea.

1. Pay off credit cards & loans

2. Max out 401k, IRA

3. Put most of your money in cheap index fund like https://investor.vanguard.com/mutual-funds/lifestrategy/#/

Note: this is not investment advice

https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/wiki/commontopics

    this is not investment advice

It certainly looks like investment advice!

That's for the lawyerly among us.

By loans you mean the mortgage too? Pay that off first?

In Australia you could pay off your mortgage then refinance in a brand new loan to buy investments. The interest you pay on THAT loan is income tax deductible.

Mortgages are a special case because the debt is usually tax-subsidized, and depending on the state, one effectively has the option of giving the house to the bank in lieu of paying the remaining balance.

That is a difference in the US. In UK/Australia you pay the mortgage from your post-tax salary.

Encouraging some people in Australia to perversely rent their house out and go and rent a similar house (sometimes identical apartment in same block!) from someone else, in order to get the interest offset against tax.

In the UK it is even worse, as you can only claim 20% of the interest cost on an investment property even if you are paying 40% tax on the rental income (!!)

A tax deductible loan, in essence, reduces the actual interest rate you pay. If you only pay 1-2% on a loan, that's fine. Better to make 6-8-10% on your money, than using it as a downpayment for a mortgage which you could finance at 1-2%.

If cost of debt < return on investments -> then invest it, don't use it for your downpayment.

Obviously, this does not apply to credit card debt, on which you pay 10-15% interest per annum.

Sorry, should have been clearer. Basically credit cards, but any loan that's more than around 10% finance charge.

Let's say I have $1K at Fidelity. Which fund should I buy (long-term growth)?

With 1k you should hold it in cash unless you have some ability to get shares through a special program (employer, trade organization, club, etc).

With 2500 you should go FSTMX.

(Don't take investment advice, including this, from strangers on the internet)

(This comment pertains to Vanguard funds cause I don't know Fidelity). For long term growth you'd likely want either all-stock or a balanced fund, with the lowest costs possible. Unfortunately, funds like Vanguard 500 Index Admiral Shares (cost ratio of 0.05%) have a min of $10k, and 500 Index Investor Shares (cost ratio of 0.16%) has a min of $3k.

So below $10k you're not going to get the best expense ratio, and many of Vanguard's funds have a min of $3k so you can't buy the Vanguard LifeStrategy class or 500 Index fund either. You CAN however buy a Vanguard Target Retirement fund ($1k min and ~0.12-0.16 expense ratio). You don't have to use it for retirement -- you can invest in it just like any other fund, and if you choose a longer horizon the fund will be 90/10 stock/bond or 80/20 stock/bond biased.

Since you are all forum nerds, y'all might also enjoy:

* https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/wiki/commontopics ("I have $X, what do I do with it?") (and the rest of the PF wiki is a good general resource as well)

* https://www.reddit.com/r/financialindependence/ (How do I save enough to be able to stop working?)

* https://www.bogleheads.org/

Also https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets

Only in jest.

Also eupersonalfinance and leanfire

For my tea-drinking brethren we also have /r/ukpersonalfinance

I want to ask something. People always ask me why I rent and "waste money" instead of getting a mortgage etc.

I explain to them that I put most of the money I make into my company, and have a greater ROI than if I put the money into real estate. But, since I have to live somewhere, I rent.

Yet, I am not sure this argument is correct. If I had money for a down payment, perhaps the strategy of getting a mortgage would win in the long run. So, instead of getting into the details, I usually mention I also like to be able to change apartments every year or so.

What are your thoughts - those of you who have now, or have had, growing startups?

I'd look at it from a different angle - you spend a lot ton of time and energy on your company and don't want to have to deal with issues that come with home ownership - it's easier to just call the landlord with any problem that pops up.

Plus, if you decided to relocate to a different place there is a significant cost of selling, which would wipe out any modest gains in appreciation.

We all have our own preference when it comes to investing. One big factor in investing is diversification. Well, putting all your eggs in one basket is a risky business.

One argument I found compelling: you are naturally short one property, as you have to live somewhere. Thus, you go long one to be flat.

I'm on our company's 401K plan. If you know nothing about how the stock market works, then the target date retirement fund is the way to go. The worst thing you could do is not participating in your company's 401K plan, especially if the company offers you matching dollars (Read: FREE MONEY). I started with a target date retirement fund (managed by Schwab) but almost 2 years ago, I decided to re-allocate my fund into 3 mutual funds: S&P 500, US Small-Mid Cap, and International Large Cap. I'm happy that I re-allocated my fund. Ramith Seti's "I will Teach You to be Rich" book inspired me. And, another influence that made me re-allocate my fund is the "Three-Fund Portfolio" principle by Boglehead's Guide to Investing. I don't currently have access to the funds that Bogle suggested, but if I have extra money to invest, I'd open a Roth IRA account (alongside my 401K) and do the following:

VTSMX 60% VGTSX 30% VBMFX 10%

or ETF's

VTI 60% VXUS 30% BND 10%

These allocations follow the Boglehead principle of 3-Fund portfolio / Lazy portfolio

> I decided to re-allocate my fund into 3 mutual funds

Is there a particular reason you chose mutual funds rather than regular index funds? Everything I've heard in the past says that mutual funds generally have higher expenses without worthwhile increased returns.

Vanguard funds have ridiculously low costs

Yes. I surveyed blogs written about index fund. Most suggested Vanguard (inventor of Index Fund). Like you probably noticed above, my ideal 3-fund portfolio consists Index Funds/ETF's from Vanguard.

Because our company's 401K plan has limited choices. I'd go for index funds and/or ETF's if offered. BTW, my S&P 500 is an index (SWPPX).

mutual funds can be either index or actively-managed. Vanguard offers many mutual funds, many of which are index funds.

It's a good investment guide, but I disagree with Patrick's advice on Roth IRA. Roth IRA (unlike Traditional IRA) almost never makes sense. It is very unlikely that tax rate at retirement would be higher than tax rate now, because if your income at retirement is already high (meaning high-tax rate) then you are very unlikely to get money out of your retirement fund. You are much more likely to get money from your retirement fund at your low-income years, when tax rate is quite low already.

Gains in Roth IRAs are also tax free in addition to withdrawals. This means that if you have 30 or more years until retirement, you enjoy a 30 year growth at 8% compounded tax free (based on The numbers in the article). This is why if you're young and qualify for a Roth IRA it's almost always the correct choice.

That doesn't matter. Roth vs. Traditional is purely a bet on current vs. future tax rates.

    P = principal, 
    T_0 = current tax rate, 
    T_t = Tax rate at retirement (t years in the future). 
    r = rate of return between time 0 and t

    Roth IRA: (P * (1-T_0)) * (1+r)^t
    Traditional IRA: (P * (1+r)^t) * (1-T_t)

Which are identical save for the tax rates.

It's not quite that simple. There is other relevant weirdness in the tax code. Roths are not subject to required minimum distributions and don't count as income during retirement. That can be very useful because a lot of provisions of the tax code phase out as your income rises.

Of course, Congress could also fix that oversight by the time you make it to retirement ...

I think (and correct me if I'm wrong) the advantage of a Roth is that you're paying the tax on a much smaller amount at entry than you are at exit. For example:

- I deposit $4000 into my Roth IRA this year.

- This was post-tax income on $6000.

- In 40 years, It grows to $20000.

- My total tax burden is still $2000.

You have to think about it in terms of what you get out.

Let's say that you deposit $4,000. You've paid $2,000 in tax or 1/3rd of your money. That grows to $20,000 (5 * 4,000) which you can put into your pocket.

Let's say that you deposit the entire $6,000 into a traditional IRA. That grows (at the same rate) to $30,000. You take that money out and owe the government 1/3rd of that money so $10,000 goes to the government and you pocket $20,000 - the same amount.

So, with one exception, they come out the same assuming the same tax rate at both times. You're paying more tax to the government, but the amount in your pocket is the same.

The one exception is that the cap is the same for both. So, if the cap is $5,500 and you put $5,500 into both, you'll get more out of the Roth. 5,500 * 5 = 27,500 in both cases, but in the case of the traditional, you'll still owe taxes. So, in effect, the Roth has a higher real contribution cap (even though the caps are nominally the same).

Because the government didn't set the Roth contribution cap at 2/3rds of the traditional cap, you can effectively contribute more.

This is why any analysis of Roth vs Tradiational is inherently flawed.

The maximum contribution amount for both Roth and Tradional accounts is $5,500.

If you're condidering funding a Roth with $5,500, that means that you committing $8,209 of pretax income (if your marginal rate is 33%) to the cause.

If you chose to go the Tradiational route with that $8,209, you'll put $5,500 in your Tradational account and have $2,709 of pretax earnings left over. Once you pay your 33% marginal tax on that, you'll have $1,815 left over to put into a taxable account.

So the real question is Would I rather have: $5,500 in a Roth IRA or $5,500 in a traditional IRA AND $1,815 in a taxable account.

At first glace the second option seems better, but this quickly evaporates when your time horizion is many decades in the future. The $1,815 you invested in the taxable account will see a slightly lower compound growth rate (as you have to liquidate a small fraction each year to pay the dividend/capital gains taxes that year). Even if the tax drag on your growth is just 40 basis points anually, that means over a 40 year horizon identically invested funds in the taxable account will be worth 15% less than in a tax-sheltered account.

For any reasonablly long time horizon, the extra tax sheltering of the ROTH is more advantagous than the higher nominal balance in the tradional&taxable scenario.

Unless I am mistaken, your investments in either IRA grow tax free. In the case of the traditional IRA, you are taxed when you withdraw the money. In the case of the Roth IRA, you are not. It is more a question of whether the returns on your investments are going to be significantly greater than your initial contributions. I certainly hope so, if you are compounding returns over decades. In that case, with a Roth IRA, you can create a lot of investment income tax free that would eventually be taxed in a traditional IRA. That, in a nutshell, is why I would prefer a Roth IRA. As a point of fact, I am not a "US person," so it is moot for me.

Your math is wrong, even though it feels correct. The only difference is tax rate, because you're multiplying by taxes and order doesn't matter. You pay less tax initially but have lower growth. Assuming 1%/year, (Taxes * principal) * 1.01^n, or Taxes * (principal * 1.01^n)

While not wrong, you are looking at them in a vacuum, which isn't really appropriate for much of this crowd. If you have a 401k at work, contributions for IRAs start phasing out at lower income than Roth IRAs (In fact Roth IRAs have no income limits if you are willing to do a backdoor contribution). Its often not "Roth vs Traditional", but rather "Roth vs normal taxed account"

> If you have a 401k at work, contributions for IRAs start phasing out at lower income than Roth IRAs

Can you link to a source for this? I was not under the impression that IRA contribution income limits were impacted by whether or not you also have a 401k at work.

Wikipedia has the tables listed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traditional_IRA#Income_limits

Note that really its not a real contribution limitation, just a phase out of the contributions being tax deductible, which is most of the point of using an IRA

I still don't see what that has to do with additionally having a 401k, though. Where is the stipulation that having a 401k affects your phase-out for Traditional IRA deductions?

From that wikipedia article: "If a taxpayer's household is covered by one or more employer-sponsored retirement plans, then the deductibility of traditional IRA contributions are phased out as specified income levels are reached (Modified Adjusted Gross Income is between)."

There is no deduction phase out if you don't have a 401k available through work, but that is not the common case

From personal experience, before you put all your spare money in the stock market, make sure you have the basics covered. Ask yourself, "What would happen if my partner or I couldn't work for a few years?"

Money: Set up life insurance, income protection insurance, and decent medical coverage.

Accommodation: You don't need to own your own home, but have some money available to cover rent or mortgage if needed.

Social: Don't let your social life revolve exclusively around work colleagues. Invest time in family and broader groups. Find a way to have achievements outside of work.

So this happened to me. My wife and I went from a very comfortable double income to countless hospital visits and no time or energy for anything else. And this is just after we had kids.

I'll be forever grateful that my wife set up the safeguards above. I was 100% invested in work, financially and socially, so it has been a huge shock and could have been much worse.

Mind if I asked what exactly happened in your life that led to this?

We found out my wife had cancer ("of unknown primary") in May last year. We're in our early 30s so this should not be happening. Anyway, I think the same advice would still apply for more mundane situations like a recession or a failed business.

What is a Vanguard, Betterment, WealthFront equivalent for EU-residents?

Local banks usually offer a very small selection of funds and the fees are usually 2%, which has a huge impact.

Vanguard is available in Europe as well, event though with a subset of products.

In general, take a look at etf funds with low commissions.

Search on bogleheads the wiki pages for Europe (there are also few for specific countries)

Their products might be available, but not the company. You are responsible for finding a broker that has reasonable fees.

You are probably right and it's not so easy to find broker proposing them. But I've read few days ago they are growing and thinking about improving their presence in Europe so this may change. Still, if you want to build a simple portfolio a-la Bogleheads I think it's easier to use big étf funds (they may not be at the same fee level of vanguard but the competition pushed then low enough to be ok)

https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/EU_investing

Just to emphasise that (a point Noah Smith @Noahpinion has been hammering home recently): The fees look small, but are absolutely astounding.

If you put in some fixed amount regularly over, say, 35 years, and the asset manager charges 2% p.a., they easily take a third of your savings overall, or more.

It is imperative (particularly in this low yield environment) that you keep your fees down.

What would you consider reasonable? 1%?

Less. 1% they still take a quarter of your money over 30+ years. At most 50 bips = 0.5%, but aim for 10 bips or less, like good old Vanguard.

Does that assume some given rate of growth? 4%? What's the formula to calculate this?

I've put it into Excel a while ago with growth rates between 0% and 6%, the gist of it is fairly robust with respect to growth assumptions.

A way to think about it is maybe this: remove 1% pa, and to first order you're down about a third after 35+ years.

Now, in the scenario where you're saving regularly, there's much less to take away at the beginning, so the effect is somewhat ameliorated.

But it's really this relentless pounding, shaving off a "small" fraction every year, that's so devious.

As a consumer, it's hard to see. But the industry knows exactly what they're doing, which is why (for some products) they're paying these fat commissions, which is why you have all these friendly financial advisors calling.

Yes, 0.99^35 ~= 0.70

When I choose index funds I aim for ≤0.4%

I think it's hard to give general advice for all EU countries. E.g. in Sweden you'd want to avoid the big old banks and choose a ”niche bank” such as Avanza or Nordnet. Then you’d put your savings into a ”kapitalförsäkring” or ”investeringssparkonto”, which are favorably taxed. However, this option is only available for Swedish citizens. So what’s best for you in terms of fees and taxes will probably depend highly on which specific country you live in.

Sorry for hijacking your comment, I would like to know if there's Vanguard, Betterment, WealthFront equivalent for Asia as well, if anyone knows.

Investing for non-investors: whatever the question, if you have to ask, the answer is index funds.

True. Buffet said so - S&P 500 Index Funds.

I am surprised by the 90% should invest in a Roth IRA vs. Traditional if they do not have access to a 401k. I would expect the growth of pre-tax dollars would outweigh having to pay taxes when I withdrawal. Put another way, I expect my retirement income to be 1/2 or less than my current income...

It hugely depends on your tax expectations. For tech workers who typically have high salaries, the 401k is a better solution since it reduces your tax burden.

If your current tax bracket is rather low, or you expect to be earning lots of money through retirement, then Roth IRA can be a better solution.

> If your current tax bracket is rather low, or you expect to be earning lots of money through retirement, then Roth IRA can be a better solution.

I think for a typical "geek" who this article is about, rare is the scenario where you expect to be making that much more by (and throughout) retirement to justify taking the tax hit now. Maybe this works for a doctor who's doing residency and still paying for medical school, who eventually expects to be raking it in. But for tech workers our compensation tends to plateau very early and not grow a great deal throughout our careers. I know on a percentage basis, my comp grew more in my first 5 years than it has in the last 15. This scenario would appear to encourage tax-deferred investment.

I was specifically referencing this part of advice:

> No 401k Offered:

> Open a traditional IRA or a Roth IRA. The traditional IRA contributes pre-tax money, the Roth IRA post-tax money. The upshot is that if you believe your marginal rate at retirement to be higher than your present rate, you should pick a Roth IRA, otherwise, you should pick a traditional IRA. If you don’t feel like forecasting that, take my word for it that 90% of you should have Roth IRAs.

I don't see many people where Roth IRA makes more sense than Traditional yet they say 90% should go Roth.

Assume I make 100k and I put in $5500 into traditional... I would have to earn about $8000 to have $5500 to put in my Roth IRA after taxes. Having all those years to grow that "extra" money seems much superior to me even if somehow you amass so much money that you are making more in retirement than during your working life UNLESS you suspect future tax brackets will be much higher. I suspect that is a typo and 90% of folks should choose traditional...

Alternately, a lot of people around here no doubt have unique opportunities to speculate on how specific technologies will progress.

If you can spot something that's genuinely original in how it blends things together, has enough expert mindshare to be a leader in its domain for the foreseeable future, stands good odds of capturing a decent amount of the value it creates for those who support it, and offers a way for you to throw money at it: throw money at it.

It's a completely different game from trading in more mature markets where politics and statistics become major forces alongside original innovation in determining what happens next.

A lot of people around here do "invest" in this type of tech by working for companies producing that tech. For the average person, you can't throw your money at a random startup.

And generally, its not exactly a safe bet either. People who do throw their money at startups tend to also have lots of other very safe, diversified investments to balance out the risk of larger singular investments on specific bets/companies/tech/ideas.

For example, the author is advocating and claims to invest in your basic Vanguard Retirement Target fund, but he's also an accredited investor who also does just what you suggest

You made me realize I should've said time/money from the get go.

With startups specifically, I'm hoping Title III is just the beginning of making them a lot more accessible for more casual investment, like throwing $5 at whatever cool/useful thing has caught your attention lately.

> I haven’t written too much recently, which was largely because I was quite busy with Starfighter. Sadly, that wound down. On a happier note, I will now have a lot more time for writing, both personally and on behalf of Stripe, which I joined earlier this week.

As an aside, I'm sorry to read that Starfighter is closing down. Seemed like an interesting idea, and one that could have been good for both employers & employees. My best to tptacek — I know that he'd high hopes for it.

Thanks! Not done yet.

I'm getting really sick of hearing programmers tell me about the efficient market hypothesis as if it is some very hard rule, like big O notation.

The market is not efficient. Full stop. Stop telling me that I'm not going to beat the market. I beat the market all the time. In 2007 I was telling everyone I know that the housing market was about to burst. I sold all of my family investing company's stocks (except for Apple) and I moved everything into money markets / bank accounts. Bought back in during 2009, road the wave up until about last year I started feeling a bit skiddish and sold off not everything, but many things. I routinely pick individual stocks, like Apple, Telsa, Amazon, Bitcoin; that I know are better. Apple: iPhone is better. I don't care if some analyst at Goldman knew this before me 90% of the public was still talking about how Blackberry had a keyboard. Telsa: the physics made sense, plus Elon had that Silicon Valley-ness to him. Amazon I knew would win with AWS and the whole "ecommerce is a bear" thing. Bitcoin: People like drugs and buying things online, bought in at $4 a coin, have since sold almost all of it.

It is actually really easy if you are smart enough to be a programmer to beat the market. Just make sure you understand the domain you are in really well, and be cautious of overall trends in the economy. I've averaged 18% year over year returns with a diversified portfolio (yes, more than a quarter of that is bonds or and another quarter is super low risk dividend companies like consumer staples).

"Survivorship bias" I hear you say.

Maybe there should be this other word "suvivorship bias bias" where one is incapable of having their view of the efficient market hypothesis challenged because this is the only thing that comes to mind when they talk to someone about investing.

There are ways to do better than the S&P 500. Patrick is right about one thing though, you won't pick winning stocks from reading the newspaper but you might miss a 2008/2009 if you read The Economist instead of Time Magazine.

http://www.tradersnarrative.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/a...

http://img.timeinc.net/time/images/covers/pacific/2005/20050...

> "Survivorship bias" I hear you say.

I understand your sentiment, and have felt the same way. I made the same bets on Apple, Tesla and Amazon at around the same time and beat the market. I think the issue is — can you replicate that for the next 30+ years? I don't think I can.

When I was working at Best Buy in college I was employed part time and they offered 401k. My mother instructed me to contribute as much as would max out their match, explaining that it was essentially "free money". I don't remember what the match was. I eventually rolled the whopping $2,600 into an IRA that's grown pretty well the past 8 years. It's a ridiculously easy thing to do that pays off, literally.

Any tips / guides for non-USA / european citizens?

http://monevator.com/ is UK-centric.

Canada: https://i.imgur.com/YcceUqa.jpg

"Your company will probably extend a term saying “We will match your contributions up to N% of your salary.” You should always and under every circumstance invest enough money to max out your employer match. It is free money if you take it."

This is a reasonable default option but not necessarily the best for everyone.

There is a flaw in this statement - you are encouraged to save more today in order to maximize amount of money in your retirement account, with side effect of some immediate tax savings (which btw will not be in absolute figures but will be in rate - if you save more to 401k, your tax rate will be lower but amount of tax you will pay will still be higher).

If you are too far from retirement and have other goals that will come before retirement that could be very important to you, it becomes a decision just like anything else, not a no-brainer.

This is because of tax law - you are very constrained in your ability to take money from 401k before retirement if you need it.

Yes, some people cannot afford to save for retirement. As the article mentions, you shouldn't invest money that you can't live with for at least 10 years.

However, the opportunity lost for every year you defer retirement contributions is huge, especially when you factor in the employer match you could be getting.

If you assume a $200 a month contribution at about a 3% rate of return, the difference between 39 and 40 years of contributions is $7,600. Discounting the $2400 in contributions you would have made, that's still $5,200 lost just for waiting a year. And we're not even factoring in an employer match.

Again, agree that for some this may be a tough decision. But generally speaking, if you receive a salary and have the option to participate in a retirement plan, you should do it.

Participate in 401k plan - yes, 99% people would benefit from starting as early as possible. Max out your per-paycheck 401k contribution (including in order to maximize employer match) - not always. The farther you are from retirement age, the bigger your opportunity cost is going to be (your 401k money is locked-in into retirement account).

There are also certain 401k rules that may play very hard against you. For example, take a look at mandatory withdrawals ("required minimum distribution" - RMD) for some types of retirement accounts in the US at certain age + how your retirement account suffers disproportionately if market is down when you start mandatory withdrawals.

I know the math you are talking about, it does make sense conceptually and that's why it's cited in all 401k materials, real life with its rules and uncertainty is bit more complicated.

This is very US based. Does much of this advice change, say if I were a, UK citizen? (other than the obvious 401k etc)

I'm currently investing $1000/week into Vanguard funds. I've been doing this since 2007, started at $500/week, and gradually moved up. The key is to always be investing. Currently I am focused on international and energy. I feel these are "low" and will come back in 5 or 10 years. Maybe I'm a fool.

Sometimes, it is difficult to resist trying to time things, and if the market drops 2% or 3%, I'll buy more. So far, it has worked out, but holding on through massive losses can really hurt. Throwing your money into a correction can feel really strange. In February, I was down probably 40 or 50K over a month. But I stuck it out. I even bought some individual stocks (mostly SaaS companies) that are up 40% or 50% (CRM, HUBS, etc.)

what's your current gain % since 2007?

According to Vanguard, my annual rate of return is 10.7%. This is actually since 2008, sorry. I forgot when I opened the account.

It is actually a bit higher than that, since I rolled over some funds from another account and those gains are not included in the investment return calculation. Vanguard is showing the entire roll-over amount as a "purchase", despite the true cost-basis actually being lower.

You must be making crazy money to invest that much per week. That's barely my salary after tax.

Sometimes reading HN makes me feel really poor

I do okay. What helps most is I live in an area with a low cost of living, and my house is paid off.

There are lots of words in here that someone new to stocks wouldn't understand. From the gist I make vanguard is a good starting point. Is there someone you can call talk for a consultation to explain this in a layman's language?

Yep. https://investor.vanguard.com/financial-advisor/financial-ad...

You need to invest some time to understand it before you do anything, outsourcing your decision making to a financial adviser is a poor strategy.

If I don't know where the profits are coming from and for what cost, investing may not for me.

There are a few companies with good ethics, mostly in tech, that I would invest in. I don't see myself investing in a mutual fund or index fund though.

If your company doesn't do any 401k matching, how worth is is to put money into it vs. regular investing? In my case it's likely I may want access to the money before retirement age, so I'm not sure what the best option is.

> in my case it's likely I may want access to the money before retirement age

In that case always max (currently $5,500/yr) a Roth IRA first, because you can withdraw the principal before retirement.

Second, if your company 401k offers loans the typical (maybe this is a legal thing?) max I hear is 50% up to 50k total. You're making a loan to yourself that pay back into the investment. Keep in mind if you leave the employer you may have to pay off the loan...

If you really might need access to your money it's probably best to stick to Roth IRA + taxable (non-retirement) investments.

Another thing about 401ks is the fund choices can sometimes be shit. If they're all high expense rate funds I don't even bother. These days the companies I've worked at typically offer one or two halfway decent index funds, YMMV.

The primary advantage of a 401k is that contributions are deducted from your taxable income.

If you make $100,000 and put 10% of that into a 401k, your income tax will be based on a $90,000 income.

You do pay taxes on the money you put into a 401k when you start withdrawing from it during retirement, but what matters is this: if you believe your income during retirement (i.e. the money you'll be paid regularly out of your retirement accounts) will be less than your income today, then contributing to a 401k means you will end up paying a lot less in taxes overall, over the course of your life.

There are ways to take money out of your retirement accounts before retirement age, but it depends on certain scenarios[1]. If you need to access the money before retirement age outside of those scenarios, then do a regular brokerage account.

Regardless though, you should definitely open a Roth IRA if you're eligible, and contribute the maximum amount every year. Contributions to your Roth IRA are after-tax, so they won't be taxed when you take them out during retirement - since they have already been taxed. This makes them very advantageous.

[1]http://www.bankonyourself.com/401k-withdrawal-rules

If you plan on staying a us resident, that is. Several cross-national taxation agreements (Germany, Austria at least), don't have double-taxation avoidance for roth type accounts.

It depends on how you will access it before retirement. If you withdraw early, you incur a 10% penalty and you pay income tax. If you borrow it from yourself, you don't have the penalty but it may impact your ability to continue to invest (see rules for your plan). That said, there is a great benefit even w/o company matching: you don't pay income tax on your contributions until you withdraw them. This lowers your taxable income, which may put you into a lower tax bracket.

A 401k without some matching shouldn't be called a 401k in my opinion. You'll have to weigh the pre-tax advantage vs. the limited selection of funds available in the 401k offerings and 10% early-withdrawal penalty.

If I had some unique situation where I wanted money more accessible, I'd forego the 401k and get into an IRA with Vanguard, with one or more index-tracking ETFs (VTI i think?). But, I'd make sure its done every single payday automatically and directly. No stop off at the savings/checking account.

*This is not professional investment advice.

> A 401k without some matching shouldn't be called a 401k in my opinion.

I partially agree, but the big difference between a crap 401k with at least one decent index fund and a Traditional IRA is that I can dump 18k/yr into the 401k. IRAs phase out quickly and have low deposit/yr maxes.

Considering how often people change jobs these days, the 401k is a way for most people I know to shove 18k/yr into a special bucket so they can move it to Vanguard within a few years when they leave the company.

There are also a few providers that will let you do in-service rollovers to either traditional IRAs or Roth IRAs. Many also don't advertise this, but will do it if you ask(mine is one of these). It is definitely worth asking about if you have crappy funds in your 401k, as is talking to your management about getting a better 401k provider.

Another thing to keep an eye on when making this decision is fees. A lot of 401ks have terrible fees that will eat your growth. Whereas if you use a Vanguard IRA you can easily get into funds with 0.18% fees or less.

I've used a non-matching 401k mostly to save more money (and roll it into a Vanguard IRA as soon as possible) but a lot of advice I've read on the internet suggests maxing a Roth IRA before contributing to a non-matching 401k. (I don't have a Roth yet because it's always seemed crazy to me that my taxes will be higher in retirement than now. I see in this thread they have other advantages, like being able to withdraw principle.)

I am in the EU and I am investing my money in peer-to-peer lending.

You lend your money to other people through the marketplace and they pay it back with interest. The ROI is about 10% to 15% per year. I think it is low risk since you can choose the type of the loans you want to invest in (loans secured by real estate or short term loans with buy back guarantees). You can also diversify since the minimum investment is €10.

I don't think you can invest hundreds of thousands or millions of euros (the market is not so big) but the market can definitely support tens of thousands of euros.

What service do you use for this? I'm aware of Zopa in the UK.

mintos.com and twino.eu

Any 10-15% yield loan today is essentially junk grade as far as bonds are concerned. (That would be the opposite of "low risk" investment.)

Any advice for non-Americans? I'd like to get to Vanguard but...

I think Vanguard also serves non-US-citizens: https://global.vanguard.com/portal/site/home

Look for index funds with as low fee as possible (≤0.4%). Who will offer them to you depends heavily on where you live.

I think this should be opening sentece, after which a lot of people can just skip all other investment advice: "Only invest money you won’t touch for 10+ years."

Honest question: Then what do you do with the rest of your money? Say you plan on buying a home in 5-8 years, what is one expected to do with tens of thousands of dollars over that time period? Earn 1-2% on bonds?

I've written up my philosophy on beating the market, which is a little less conservative with respect to believing that markets are efficient and investing in the indices is the only prudent way to invest:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1KXfTFYfmhb9Cy5NE0uRuf8Sv...

So, I thought I'd type up a bit of more detailed explanation of my story and why I think real estate is a great investment for software developers, since my previous comment was a little lacked.

I bought my first house when I was 19.

It's a little two bedroom shack in Boise, Idaho, which I bought in 1999 for $68,000.

I still have that little shack. Today it's worth about $135,000 and the tenants I had in it essentially paid the mortgage on it and I own it free and clear.

I've actually got 26 total rental units and I generate about $10k a month of almost completely passive income off of them, net.

I made a ton of mistakes along the way, but I learned quite a bit--which I'm happy to share.

Over the years, I tried to buy one property every year.

At first I could only afford small properties and would put 10% down, so I was a bit leveraged.

But, eventually I was able to afford bigger properties and put more money down.

I always bought properties using 30 fixed loans and that ended up working out well.

I watched in horror as many of the other investors I knew--who were really speculators--went under, during the big housing crash.

I actually thrived during this time, picking up properties for cheap.

All the time I was working as a software developer, I had this goal of retiring early.

I kept saving as much as I could and investing real estate... little by little.

Like I said, I made mistakes, but learned from them and got smarter as I got more experienced.

Eventually, I had built up enough cash flow to actually "retire." This happened a few years ago.

Why is real estate such a good investment?

Well, I think there are two main factors: leverage and hedging against inflation.

Leverage is extremely powerful.

A bank will lend you a large amount of money, sometimes 90% or more, for you to invest--if you buy real estate.

This isn't the case with other investments.

So, you can buy a house for $100k, put $10k of your own money into it and if it goes up 10%, and is worth $110k, you make 100% return on your $10k.

That's insane. I don't know other investments where that is possible with such low risk--if you mitigate the risk properly.

Now, I don't depend on appreciation--and you can't count on it--but, you don't even need it.

Just the cash flow alone can get you excellent returns on your money. Again, with little risk and huge upsides.

Hedging against inflation is also a beautiful part of real estate investment.

Most other investments are hurt by inflation, real estate isn't.

In fact, if you owe money on a mortgage and inflation hits, you actually owe less.

Home values go up with inflation, as do rents.

I know it's a bit difficult to believe--I probably wouldn't if I hadn't done it myself--but, I have done it and I did escape the rat race.

Anyway, if you'd like to know more, let me know and I'll post the link to my YouTube videos and the video course (that is in beta) that I am releasing on specifically real estate investment for software developers.

Congrats! This is awesome. I would be interested in hearing more about where you got financing (traditional bank/mortgage lender or other) and what locations you purchased your properties in.

Mostly traditional bank / mortgage through conventional loans.

A few commercial loans.

And my locations are Boise, Idaho and Kansas City, Missouri.

Reason is because of cap rates.

Do you live nearby? How often do you visit the properties?

I live out of state. Never visit them myself. Best this way. I used to live near by some of them and it becomes emotional instead of business.

How would you go about doing something like this in a booming housing market like the Boston area?

I wouldn't do that at all. Instead invest in a more steady market.

A good investment is one that has good return, regardless of market conditions.

"Investing" in a boom market is speculation.

You'll pay too much.

Look for good rent vs price situations where you can cashflow.

Midwest markets are good like Kansas City.

I think I read one of your articles discussing this before I bought my home, and it helped convince me to pull the trigger. I was renting one unit in a duplex, when my landlord put the building on the market. After some months, the price he was asking came down into the range where I could make a play for it, and I did. With a software developer's income, I had no trouble getting approved for a mortgage, and was able to take advantage of FHA incentives to get a low interest, low down-payment loan that I scraped together a down payment for by tightening my belt for a few months. Best decision I ever made.

Since it is a duplex, I've been able to rent out the other unit, and the rent on a big, 2BR apartment in this market is enough that it more than pays the mortgage, leaving me to just pay the property taxes.

Awesome! Glad I could help. Well done on taking action. Most people never do. Congrats man. Really happy for you.

BTW, would love to hear more about your success. Email me at john@simpleprogrammer.com if you get a chance and I'll be happy to give you some free advice in exchange for hearing more of your story.

This sounds interesting, but does managing and keeping up 26 rental units really count as "passive income"? It sounds kind of like a nightmare to me, unless you've completely outsourced that part to a property maintenance company. I guess the question is: how much time, or alternatively, what fraction of the income, goes to running it?

Completely outsource. I answer maybe 2-3 emails a month and say "approve."

I kid you not.

So it sounds like you pay someone to manage your properties? How were you able to find a good trustworthy people? What does it do to your profits?

Also, how do you deal with major expenses, like if a furnace needs to be replaced, or roof damage? Do you maintain a rainy day fund for this? What kind of average expenses do you see for your properties over time?

Yes. Vetting a good property management company is difficult. I've fired more than a few.

But, now I have good managers in place.

Typically, you can expect 10% of rents for management fee--well worth paying.

You should factor this in when considering a property.

For major expenses, I have some reserves and I figure a 10-20% buffer again off of the rent of the property.

This covers the average expenses over time.

Have you looked into commercial real estate at all? One of the factors that scares me off from residential real estate is that one bad tenant can really screw me over, especially as I'm just getting started. It intuitively seems like if you can get a business to pay rent on a property instead you're less likely to have a disaster situation...

I have two commercial units.

Usually the biggest headache, because you can't find property management to manage it and it's much more difficult to get leased then residential.

I think some people make commercial work, but it's a different ballgame and less reliable, IMO.

Investing in REIT's gets round some of the problems TR Property has done me very well I brought at the bottom of the last property crisis

For those of you serious about this and have questions. I offer some officehours: officehours.io/people/jsonmez

Glad to help if I can--for free.

Counterpoints:

a) leverage cuts you both ways. Great when the market goes up, terrible when it goes down (particularly with a Loan-to-Value ratio of 90%).

a') futures or broker margin trading give you leverage in other markets, too. Doesn't mean it's prudent.

b) much harder to diversify, because of the big chunks (you can buy shares for 5k, but not a house. You can sprinkle 100k into different equity/debt markets in different countries, but not into many houses in different countries).

c) massive transaction costs. Round trip can be 10% or more.

d) much less liquidity. If shit hits the fan, you can sell shares and have cash at hand in a few days. Try that with a house.

f) again, regarding diversification: you could get bad tenants that trash the place and/or don't pay rent. If you own a large number of properties, it's a quantity you can average over and deal with. If not, it's a gamble.

g) rates are pretty much as low as they can go (though, to be fair, everyone's been saying that for some 7+ years now...) but seriously, they'll have to come up. That would put pressure on real estate prices. (Of course, you can avoid liquidity issues with fixed rate mortgages, that's prudent, as long as rents hold up).

h) inflation has not really been an issue for several decades. It is prudent to keep it in mind, though, but clearly real estate is not the only real asset.

i) Lastly, there might be something of "picking up pennies in front of a steamroller" to it. I have no doubt that what you are saying is accurate - but you might have been lucky, and avoided a massive downside. And clearly, it is not a feasible strategy for everyone to own 26 properties and rent them out (because someone actually has to live in them and pay rent...)

a) leverage cuts you both ways. Great when the market goes up, terrible when it goes down (particularly with a Loan-to-Value ratio of 90%).

Not exactly. Only if you sell. My strategy is to buy and hold--pretty much forever.

I get to get the leverage benefit and flip something if there is an opportunity and if not it's still a great cash flow deal to hold onto.

I also get to have depreciation which I never pay back.

I get what you are saying, but when you invest in real estate properly--not speculate--it's about cashflow, not appreciation.

Appreciation is a bonus you sometimes get but don't rely on.

Over a long period of time--say 20-30 years--you'll get appreciation in almost all cases, but never count on it for the short term.

a') futures or broker margin trading give you leverage in other markets, too. Doesn't mean it's prudent.

Yes. Different kind of leverage though.

Risk in real estate is essentially capped. It's like having a hedge in options or futures trading.

BTW, I've done both. I've traded all kinds of complex spreads. Real estate is much better--trust me.

Yes, but also less critical if you are talking about cash flow and in it for the long haul.

I am diversified over 26 rental property units in two spots in the country.

Yes, really bad things could happen, but it's very unlikely.

There will always be some risk.

c) massive transaction costs. Round trip can be 10% or more.

Yes. Definitely.

That is why buy and hold. Flippers get stuck holding the bag.

Really good point though. People need to understand this when investing in real estate.

d) much less liquidity. If shit hits the fan, you can sell shares and have cash at hand in a few days. Try that with a house.

Yes, another great point.

You need to have cash reserves if you invest in real estate. Don't lose all your liquidity and get in a squeeze.

I keep plenty of cash on hand or in a more liquid investment for emergencies.

Great point.

True again, but this can be highly mitigated with skill and volume.

I've been holding properties for about 18 years. I have not had more than $4k of damage done at once. And there are remedies.

Mostly this is a non-issue.

Don't buy expensive interiors. Buy middle-end and mitigate possible damage.

Another really good point though.

Yes and no. Could actually go lower. I don't think it will.

Most likely they will go up.

Never in history been a better time to buy in my opinion.

Don't know if we'll see rates this low ever again.

Again, I don't care about prices. I care about cashflow.

h) inflation has not really been an issue for several decades. It is prudent to keep it in mind, though, but clearly real estate is not the only real asset.

True, but when rates go up. It will be.

And when it does if you get caught with your pants down, it hurts really, really bad.

i) Lastly, there might be something of "picking up pennies in front of a steamroller" to it. I have no doubt that what you are saying is accurate - but you might have been lucky, and avoided a massive downside. And clearly, it is not a feasible strategy for everyone to own 26 properties and rent them out (because someone actually has to live in them and pay rent...)

Not everyone can do it, not everyone will.

But there is a huge opportunity here.

I've survived the good and bad. Solid strategy will give good results with minimal risk.

Most real estate investors don't have solid strategy.

Thanks for bringing these things up.

Sensible answers, thanks. With those caveats in place, what you say makes a lot of sense. Particularly like the focus on buy-and-hold and investment, as opposed to flipping and speculation.

A few more things come to mind:

1) cash reserves - need enough to cover emergencies and periods where you don't receive rent, for one reason or the other, particularly of you happen to be underwater.

2) demographic changes can still screw things up. As an extreme example, take villages in eastern Germany or Spain - both prices and rents have been falling.

3) however, if approached carefully, this sounds good - maybe too good. There is no free lunch! So, what's the catch? Normally, if you have this good an opportunity, you have either hidden risks or restricted access. Do most people not get the initial money (or cojones) together to pull the trigger?

Great question. I like how you think.

The catch in, IMO, is that you need the right knowledge to pull it off. It's not as easy as it looks and it does take some cojones--like you said.

Most people say, "sounds like a good idea" and never do anything.

There are very few people who will teach you how to do it without ripping you off and selling you some scam.

Honestly, that is why I put my course together.

Yes, it's $500. But if you actually follow the advice, it's dirt cheap and I'm not selling you a bunch of get rich quick BS, like most real estate "scammy" stuff.

Here is the link if you are interested: https://simpleprogrammer.com/products/simple-real-estate/

You also need to be able to afford a down payment and still have a reasonable cash reserve. That there pretty much puts the majority of the population out of play.

Yes, it puts a large number of people out of play--but not software developers.

That's why I recommend it to them.

You can find deals for $100k where you put down $10-$20k. Which is a lot of money, yes, but I know it's possible, because I saved that much in a year as a SW dev.

And then you can have cash reserves of $5k or so (which could be 401k or something else.)

Even a Heloc could be a cash reserve if needed.

There are ways to make it work.

Perhaps you could invest some time in learning how paragraphs work now.

Good points. I'll point out that a 10 year window is too short.

Look at this post to get an idea of 5 yr vs 10 yr vs 20 yr vs 30 yr windows:

http://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2015/Dec/pay-down-mortgage-or-in...

10 years has enough volatility that you shouldn't use it to compare between funds.

One issue with the Roth IRA. You're contribution limit goes to zero after you make more than around 180K (depending on how you file).

You can contribute to a non-deductible IRA and then after a (short) period convert it to a Roth IRA. If you don't have other traditional IRA funds (the basis is pro-rated across all traditional IRA accounts).

Google "backdoor Roth" for more thorough description and discussion.

It's very, very rare that I say to myself, "Self, I'm glad I read that sign-up email this morning." Thanks, Patrick.

Any similar articles specific to a UK resident?

The UK personal finance subreddit has a lot of good content

https://www.reddit.com/r/ukpersonalfinance/wiki/lumpsuminves...

https://www.reddit.com/r/UKPersonalFinance/wiki/isa

Can someone explain why he says that 90% of people should expect to have a higher marginal rate of tax at retirement and so are better saving to a Roth pension with post tax money now?

I'm UK based but the principles seem the same, and I'm fairly sure I'm paying more tax now than I will be after I retire.

Does anyone have suggested reading on what the estimates of 8% (or 7% or 5% or whatever gets used) are based on? Is there any data to support that the next 30 years will see those types of returns from the total market on average?

Data by definition can't be from the future, so unless you by data mean "extrapolations", then that can't be the case.

Whoa, startfighter.io is winding down? That is the first I've heard of that.

For an audience that might be interested in being a bit more self-directed, take a look at the approach of the guys at http://tastytrade.com.

Good point - on Should I Invest In Crowdfunding?

"Crowdfunding has a bit of an adverse selection problem, where only companies which are insufficiently attractive to more professional angels .... go"

There's a 3rd option which is to not eat robo advisor fees (0.6%-1%) and instead do the purchases yourself through a brokerage. Option #1 doesn't really dominate this.

Another idea that has worked very well historically: buy spin-offs. As a category, they consistently outperform for a variety of structural reasons (forced selling, lack of awareness/coverage, perverse management incentives at the time of the spin that often lead to a low share price, better management from increased focus,etc.) This free site has a list of upcoming spins: http://www.stockspinoffs.com/upcoming-spinoffs/

Not a bad investment plan. I do real estate. Earn around market medium and will have initalt investment to pull out or give to children at my will.

A great post on the whole, but out of curiosity does anyone know how he arrived at $40k off of $1m with present-day examples?

The S&P 500 averages something like 7-8% over a 20 year timeline. Index funds tracking it will return similar performance. I would imagine Patrick is providing a conservative estimate, because regardless of the market average you can't count on seeing $80k on $1M each year.

Safe withdrawal rates are a whole chapter in itself.

If you want to be 100% sure that your money lasts to the end, i.e. your death (in real terms), you cannot erode your principal, in real terms.

Thus, if you have, say, a 5% total return nominally, but 2% inflation, you can withdraw 3% p.a.

(Taxes complicate things, particularly insofar as you pay taxes on the nominal returns.)

However, with this strategy you bequeath your original principal at the time of death (in real terms, i.e. grown by inflation), which might be too much.

Thus, people generally argue for taking out a bit more, which might give you, say, 4% withdrawal with 5% nominal returns and 2% inflation (taking out about 1% or your principal p.a., halving it over the course of 70 years).

When you erode principal like that, you run a small chance that you run out of money if your

a) returns are lower than expected or

b) you live longer than expected.

A solution to a) is, as the name suggests, fixed income (i.e. bonds), which have no equity risk and (when you hold a bond with fixed rates to maturity) no interest risk. You are stuck, however, with credit risk (bond issuer goes bust) and inflation risk (except with inflation adjusted bonds).

A solution to b) are annuities, that is an insurance product that pays you a fixed amount until you are dead, pooling the early/late mortality risk. The market for these is very different for different jurisdictions, one reason being, as usual, tax issues.

4% also sounds like a reference to the Trinity Study: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinity_study

Very useful resource. Thank you.

I agree with some of the points but a note of caution. Stock markets today are significantly different than those of the past and the kind of low interest rate, low growth environment, we've been in over the last decade or so has no precedent.

"In the 10 year period from 2006 to 2015, the average return was a little lower than 8%"

From the peak of the '99 bubble till around today we have about 2% yearly return on the S&P 500 (excluding dividends). You would actually do much better if you were in bonds. Between '99 and '09 you would actually lose money. Two takeaways from these, one is that you can't just pick some period and build a theory over that, the second is that when you're invested in stocks there is a non-negligble probability of losing money over a 10 year horizon. The only reason stocks are so high these days is that their prices are supported by zero interest rates. That doesn't mean they can't go higher for various reasons but you need to be cautious. Everyone talks about buying stocks right about when things get frothy, not too many people post this sort of financial advice at the doom and gloom bottoms. Over long periods, dollar cost averaging, you'll do OK. Don't rush in at a top and obviously don't sell at a bottom, something a lot of people end up doing.

Privately held tech companies, especially startups, can actually have a better return vs. public companies. The problem is not the return, the problem is getting a strong, diversified portfolio. Unless you are a VC you can't really do that. In general small caps tend to outperform large caps and startups tend to outperform small caps, in aggregate, over long durations. It's really not about out-picking stocks, it's about being able to diversify.

There are a few factors affecting diversification. Different markets and asset classes tend not to be perfectly correlated. This means that some may be overvalued at the same time that some our undervalued. While it's not always easy to tell (sometimes it is easy, when no one wants to buy) I would think one should offset their weighting to areas they consider to have better value. As long as those areas are themselves well diversified (e.g. Europe or Emerging Markets) the long term risk you are taking is low. The other factor is that having multiple assets allows you to construct a better portfolio. This is known as the "Efficient Frontier". Assuming you have some information about how the different assets correlate with each other (which is a big assumption but still) you can combine those assets to create a higher returning portfolio with less risks.

Personally I'm invested in a mix of stocks (worldwide), fixed income, real estate (through funds) and bonds. I keep adding to this. I make some macro bets (e.g. I've been heavier Brazil, Greece, emerging markets, junk bonds ATM) through long term weighting of my portfolio and I keep an eye on those. Out of my current bets Greece hasn't worked out (yet) but the others have. YMMV. These are not the kind of bets where I can suffer heavy losses over extended periods (IMO) but there's certainly increased risk. I don't expect US stocks to have great returns over the next decade or so but I'm still in there with some portion of my investment. My horizon is 10-20 years and I very rarely sell anything (except the stock I get from work :). I try to buy when people are panicking but it's hard to find good panic these days ;)

Interesting. What sort of returns have you had over the whole period (and how long)? What sort of scale of investments are we talking about - 10k-100k? 100k-1M?

My return over the last 12 months is 8%. This is less than the S&P but I'm only about 60% in stocks so I'll take that. Scale of about 400k. I used to own more individual stocks and had less % of my total money in the stock market and have been trying to shift to a more hands-off, diversified, portfolio over the last 3 years or so. I've been learning about investing and managing my money for the last 15 years. I don't have accurate numbers for that entire period, need better software.

I wouldn't sleep well if I was 100% in stocks so I realize I'm giving something up in very long term returns.

Ask me again in 10 years.

> Between '99 and '09 you would actually lose money

You would have made a profit (albeit a small one) if you invested every year from 99 to 09, using the yearly figures on wikipedia.

> From the peak of the '99 bubble till around today we have about 2% yearly return on the S&P 500 (excluding dividends)

Using March 99 as the peak, it's 2.5% ignoring dividends and ~4.5% if you include them.

Source: https://dqydj.com/sp-500-return-calculator/

> Over long periods, dollar cost averaging, you'll do OK. Don't rush in at a top and obviously don't sell at a bottom, something a lot of people end up doing.

This is a very important point (though lump sum investing tends to outperform DCA), there's a big difference between how you might feel now while stuff is going up quickly and how you might feel when everything is falling apart. Selling low is a historically bad move. Far worse than buying high (http://awealthofcommonsense.com/2014/02/worlds-worst-market-...).

Great post. Love Vanguard

If you are self-employed and incorporated, and are really crushing it, you can open both a 401k and a Roth 401k to maximize the amount you can stuff away.

You can only contribute $18k as employee and $35k as employer (under 50 years old, anyway). Those totals are across both traditional and Roth 401(k) accounts. If you have 401(k)s at multiple, unrelated employers, you can get employer contributions from both to a total over $35k. But if both are Individual 401(k)s, I don't think that applies.

Yes. If you use both, you can work it so you hit the maximum 53k per year, or 59k per year if you are 50+, and have a big chunk in the Roth side so you won't have to pay taxes on the money later (You pay now, of course).

https://www.nerdwallet.com/blog/investing/roth-ira-roth-401k...

Why would you do that instead of just putting away 53k pre-tax, as a self-employed with Solo 401(k)?

In theory, having a chunk in the Roth is a better deal. You pay taxes on that money now, but down the road, you don't have to pay when you withdraw. Assuming it has grown multiple times, you pay much less in taxes by doing it now. And, you are not forced to take mandatory withdrawals when you are older.

I understand the penalty for early withdraw, should you need to do that at some point, is more forgiving with a Roth as well.

It is more paperwork and more math to setup both.

related topic but how important is having a financial advisor?

Just to play devil's advocate, what if Peter Schiff is right again? :-)

right about what?

Maybe you already know, but he is this perma-bear investor who became a YouTube meme in early 2009.[1]

He was the guy who was constantly warning about the potential for a 2008 style crash starting around 2006. The longer the bubble was going up, naturally, the more and more he was mocked. Until it all came tumbling down.

The point is, he is basically saying what we are seeing now in 2016 looks like the run up to the crash in 2008. Although his critics would rightly point out that he has been saying the same thing for effectively most of the last 10+ years.

If you think 2008 could and should have been avoided, you might not agree with his views. If you think it was a long overdue correction, you would be more likely to agree.

Finally, how this relates to the article mentioned here: while timing the market is definitely difficult, I suppose there are times when you are better off not entering the market at all lest your investing psychology gets permanently burnt. The next year or so might be one of those periods. (In other words, my personal view is - just hold on to your cash for a while and do nothing with it).

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0YTY5TWtmU

> Crowdfunding has a bit of an adverse selection problem, where only companies which are insufficiently attractive to more professional angels

They mean every idea that doesn't have a 10 billion market to disrupt and gain 1% of

Its crowded at the bottom, enjoy the liquidity preference!

Forex, Binary Options and Cryptocurrency can return in months what traditional investing takes decades to do.

I know which I prefer.

So can blackjack.

Back when online poker was booming, I knew some guys that paid off their college tuition grinding on FullTilt

Because they could spot and enter many small markets with "fish".

In finance and investment there is (to a first approximation) only one big market, and you are the "fish".

Those guys wouldn't have made their tuition walking into the Bellagio and entering the Big Game.

One of the guys actually did go pro and made a pretty good living at it for a while, besides writing some books and video series on texas hold 'em

http://www.businessinsider.com/how-andrew-seidman-started-pl...

Go for it. Let us know when you buy that yacht.

Agreed. They can also lose it in the same manner as a "flash crash"

You are confusing speculating with investing for retirement.

Why don't geeks read Mark Hulbert? Every time I see people discussing investing, it's usually about index funds. Stock picking is supposedly fool's gold, so you should buy the whole market, or so goes common wisdom.

But the market can be brutal. It can have decades-long stretches of terrible returns. If you had all your money in index funds, and retired in 1929, you would have made no money for 25 years. If you retired in 1967, 15 years. If 2000, 10 years. Do you have 10 years of living expenses saved up?

There are good stock pickers out there, people who focus on fundamentals. And you don't have to take their word for it. Mark Hulbert has been subscribing to many stock pickers' newsletters, trying out their picks, and reporting objectively on the results since 1980. Some libraries subscribe to his monthly report, but since investing is a very long-term process, the same handful of newsletters keep showing up in the report: you only need to look at a few recent Hulbert reports to find good stock pickers.

I somewhat agree, but I wonder if times are changing.

Some background, I bought Hilbert's newsletter in 2003, and then bought and followed The Prudent Spectular, based off of its recommendation. I did so religiously, and even though I'm glad for it's advice which helped me ride through the collapse of 2008 without selling, the returns haven't been spectacular.

I wonder now, though, if the game has changed. Has there been so much ongoing disruption due to the advancement of tech, that what worked before won't work anymore.

Which is to say, the problem with stock pickers is that it takes a long time to measure their performance, and what worked in the last 20 years may not work in the next.

Btw, I don't know why you are getting downvoted. What you say is interesting and certainly has merit.

I don't know if you'll read this, but here is some info for you. I subscribed to Hulbert until mid 2014, and had a look at the yearly tables where he summarizes the performance of all the newsletters he tracks, with 1, 5, 10, and 15 year averages. With a bit of algebra, you can use those yearly 1, 5, 10, and 15 year averages to estimate the performance of the Prudent Speculator for single years, going back to 1992. Here's the numbers I got (percent/year):

2013 5.3

2012 17.8

2011 -2.3

2010 21.8

2009 38.4

2008 -43.0

2007 1.0

2006 14.6

2005 16.0

2004 27.1

2003 102.6

2002 -35.0

2001 11.2

2000 2.2

1999 19.1

1998 -0.1

1997 -15.5

1996 44.8

1995 56.4

1994 77.9

1993 -13.7

1992 35.6

You started in 2003, and dropped it sometime after 2008. The average for 2010 through 2013 is 10.6% per year, which is OK, but I think is in line with the broad market index.

One of the recent Hulberts has a recent semilog plot of the newsletter's returns, and by I eyeballing it can see that, while it outpaced the market from 2000 to 2007, it has pretty much tracked the market since 2008. So it hasn't beaten the index lately.

Hulbert also reports that the newsletter's author prior to 2002 (when he died) used margin to augment the returns. Since 2002 another person is picking the stocks, and they're not using margin, so that might account for the recent pedestrian returns. 10% is nice, but I agree it's not spectacular.

Looking at recent behavior dissuaded me from following it. I wanted a bit more money from my investments. But I can see how, in 2003, the previous decade made the plan look really good to you. I would have done the same thing as you.

Actually I never dropped it. I'm still thinking of jumping but not sure what to jump to. Part of me is hoping value oriented investing (which is The Prudent Speculators' main principle of investing) will make a comeback, but I'm not sure how likely that is.

They say that value oriented investing wins out over growth at the end, but here is a graph comparing the two that tells a different story over the last 10 years, IWO is a growth fund and IWN is a value fund (unrelated to The Prudent Speculator, but same strategy):

https://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&...

I was thinking of Louis Navellier, he seems to pay a little closer attention to the winds of the market, where as The Prudent Speculator just ignores them for the most part, and follows their basic strategy, but his newsletter is kind of pricey.

I don't want to invest in mutual funds, because I have the USA Citizenship curse that means I am taxed on profits. So, I try to shuffle around my losers every year and keep my winners alone. This way, I save money on taxes (aka Tax harvesting)

If you don't mind sharing, did you decide to follow a newsletter based on Hulbert's? If so, what is it?

Well, I would rather not say, but a couple of plans stand out, which I might look into:

The Forbes Special Situation Survey. They're value oriented, and have been around for a long time. They hold about a dozen stocks at a time.

Investment Quality Trends. These guys have been around since the 60s. They pick high-dividend stocks. Their notion of 'high-dividend' uses some chart tea-leaf reading: they assume that a stock's dividend yield will tend to range between a historical min and max, and they recommend a stock if it has a high dividend, relative to its own historical range. Lots of boring stocks like KO and IBM, but the newsletter does pretty well historically, and has low volatility.

Another method I've thought about about is the 'Permanent Portfolio'. It's not a newsletter. Simply put 25% each in an index fund ETF, stock ETF, gold ETF, and cash. Rebalance once per year. It's popular with end-of-the-world preppers, and underperforms the market, but it has VERY low volatility. Good for sleeping at night.

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