AttorneyMother, I wish I had better responses. 
I dislike these rates.
At least the nominal rates in the US aren’t negative like they are in Europe.
@shawbridge, I have no idea. I don’t recall ever saying anything about self-directed ira’s. I know nothing about them. I have an impression NJresident is on top of this matter. Glad you found what you needed.
Firstly, if anything, I’m flattered you dug up my post and was worth commenting on. I tend to agree with your interpretation as $ versus % allocation model.
As to my further thoughts, courtesy “words of wisdom” from DS who’s now in Wall St I’ve chickened out from my equities obsession, and have moved over 20% into short term bond ETFs and mutual funds in our tax deferred accounts (The little grey cells that I overrode to do this cheerily say “I told you so” every time the S&P hits a new high).
Till last year our situation was even more extreme than having 5-6 years worth of “living money” in less risky investments and everything else in equities. Between DW’s and my jobs, I was confident even in bad times we’d hang on to least one job that would be enough cashflow to keep us going. So I was fully in equity outside of college funds and some cash in our bank. I can relate to Ixnay’s comments on the Japanese market - in the eighties when I was based out of Hong Kong and bought individual stocks, everything I had was in my company stock and in Nikkei stocks, both competing on which could be worse, but till last year, I was in the “that can’t happen here mode”. If anything, when I looked back at the market when the S&P went below 800 around 2008 and I lost more money than I could have imagined, it gave me confidence with the wait it out for 5-6 years strategy.
But now I’ve more traditionally minded. Most everything I have is in Vanguard. I like the concept of target retirement date funds, but don’t like their exposures to longer term bonds, so it’s broad domestic and overseas equity and short term debt. I do about an active trade a year to try to enhance my stature at the next party or in that gambling thread here (whatever happened to it?), and some day I may actually do something other than buy DBO the day before the OPEC meeting when oil prices collapsed, as I did this year.
@Dadof3
Thank you for commenting. I loved Hong Kong. I actually spent 3 years there in the 1970s when my father had a short-term assignment. We lived in Happy Valley and I attended St. Paul’s Secondary School. Oddly enough, I haven’t been back since 1989, just before June 4, 1989 when my H (then my pre-H) finished up his month rotation in Beijing and we took a trip thru China and finished up in HK. He was in Beijing when the student protests started in early May in Tiananmen Square. I flew over to join him after his rotation was done. By the time we left Beijing-Shanghai, the news was getting hairy. We got home just before June 4, which was the day he graduated from medical school. It was an incredible experience.
I completely agree about being more seasoned about 2008. Even before that I was pretty much in Vanguard index funds for equities with the exception of a few small holdings in early mutual fund investments which I’m cleaning out now. So, I don’t even have the war stories to tell at cocktail parties. I do have the Fisker story, but that would probably not be kind to my H. I briefly considered Asian exposure in the early 1990s, then decided to follow the “do what you know” strategy and I’m sure I missed on some gains. But currency risk on top of interest rate risk on top of market risk is just too many for me to keep track of.
I also agree that individual risk factors will loom more prominently as H and I near retirement. I don’t think that target date funds are for me because I need a purer bond investment.
About the oil collapse. I worked on a transaction my first year in practice when the head partner shouted: “we can’t negotiate collateral ratio when the oil prices are $25/barrel and falling!” then threw the loan agreement across the table. True story. Just keep chanting that it’s all cyclical.
Reminds me of a joke:
Q: What do lawyers use for birth control?
A: Their personalities.
Just teasing of course…
Been working on my taxes. This year I have to deal with both the dreaded 6251 (Alternative Minimum Tax) and the even more dreaded 8801 (Credit for Prior Year Minimum Tax) which are putting up numbers that make no sense. For the first time ever I am going to file an extension. Ugh.
Plus the IRS threw out decades’ worth of rules and precedents with regard to rental properties and repair and depreciation deductions. I may have to get professional help this year, which is another reason for filing an extension. Form 3115 (Application for Change in Accounting Method) anyone? Double ugh.
I need to pay more attention to my asset balance. I haven’t been investing rollovers for a while because of fears the market is overinflated, so I just left it sitting in cash. I am probably 40% cash and the rest equities at this point.
I asked a professional to do our tax return in the past couple of years because of our rental property. We have not learned how to do this part of tax return yet. But no one else can help us to do the financial aid part.
Just curious, how many of you have passed all of your financial details to your adult child who is still a student so that he or she can file his/her financial aid application all by him/herself? There are just too many details that we ourselves do not know in details. It will then take too much efforts for us to summarize and explain this kind of financial information to our child clearly especially when we do not know it clearly ourselves. The end result is that we still do the bulk of our child’s FA application because it is just not practical for us to discuss it over the phone call. Fortunately, we can almost see the end of tunnel.
Don’t laugh at it: We occasionally would find money somewhere in our not so large apartment and it was a pleasant surprise. However, we could not remember when we put the money there and for what purpose. It was not a large amount but it was not a very small chunk of money either. (could be a hundred.)
Hmm…now we have leased our house to a tenant. Hopefully they will not find some of our money somewhere in our house. If they find it and do not honestly tell us, we will not know. You can say we are definitely not very organized about money matters.
Our S has been doing his tax returns since he graduated from college in 2010. He has not asked for our help. We still file our return for D; she makes no money and is still a dependent, though she has also graduated from college. Hopefully once we are able to help her get her chronic condition under better control she will have more internship and employment options. H has had a CPA do his returns for many decades. I insisted on doing them about 3 times during our marriage, but all the other returns are done by the CPA. When you have real estate rentals and a partnership, it adds complexity. We have things we rather do with our time and prefer to turn it over to the expert.
Agree that having a real estate rental adds complexity. It seems there is a some schedule called schedule E (or C, which I heard does not apply to our case.)
In my “prime” years, I had some additional income due to stock options. I do not get much (but still a small amount) from my new/current company. Since our CPA has been doing this for us, I do not pay any attention to it. Even though I think I know how to do that part by ourselves, I can not go to a CPA and ask him/her to do the real estate rental part of the tax return only.
DS has not had income in general. (So there is no tax return requirement.) All he has had is/was either from the student loans or from us. Sooner or later, we will pass this task that belongs to him back to him. At one time, I located some small “personal finance for college students” book for him, but I do not think he has read it. I would rather hand him a small book rather than teach him about this. Hopefully, he will know more about this than me.
I did all my tax returns until I got married, including moving expenses, income averaging, and itemizing deductions. I enjoyed doing it and seeing if I would get any refunds. By deducting moving expenses and income averaging when I started working, I saved a significant amount in taxes and learned more about how to complete income taxes. I helped others do it as well. This was in the old days, pre-Turbo Tax. I used Turbo Tax for a year or two as well.
^ My grandmother used to hide money around the house and then forget about it. We found several hundred dollars when cleaning out the house after she died.
No way would I have expected my kids to fill out a FAFSA on their own. Plus I didn’t care to share so many personal financial details. They were happy to let me do it for them.
DS has done his own the last few years, although he doesn’t have anything more complicated than W2 income and some interest income. I still do DD’s, although she is still in school.
Sure you can. I’ve done this before when I had some specific things I didn’t know how to do. There was no reason to pay for them to transfer the numbers off of my mostly completed return into their software.
In our case, I think it would be a similar price for them to do the tough part of our return as to do the entire thing, so we just have them do everything.
This actually points to another question: Do you like to share the financial details with your offsprings who have grown up? When they have BF/GF or SO later on, do you think your adult children will share this info with him/her and if yes, are you comfortable with this before you know him or her better? Or, if you do not want him or her (who did not grow up with you after all so you naturally know less about him or her at least before you know him/her long enough) to know too much, is it better not to burden your offsprings to keep the “secret” from him/her? What is the difference between S/D and SIL/DIL when they are only 20s or early 30s who know each other for only a few years and you know SIL/DIL even less (if your DIL/SIL gives you the chance to know her/him well at all.)
At this point in time, I see no reason that my kids need to know our financial details and NO, I don’t share such info with them, other than assuring them that they will NOT need to support us. My parents did not share financial information with us and we saw no reason to ask them for such information unless they wanted to share it. Once my parents share any information with any of us kids, they likely suspect it will be shared with spouses, since we have all been married to our respective spouses for up to several decades.
At this point, my kids aren’t in any significant relationships that we are aware of. I would not expect to share financial information with anyone our kids date. If our finances become an issue, for example if we plan to help our kids financially (for reasons we decide), we would determine at that point what information and finances we care to share. We will tell both our kids the names and contact info for our CPA and estate attorney. In case of emergency, they can get information and help from them.
Did you sign the information release form with the CPA?
With regard to finding money around the house:
When my parents were downsizing, my mom called and asked me to guess how much money she found in her usual hiding places. I guessed a couple of thousand. She giggled and said, ‘No, eleven thousand!’ My dad found two thousand more in the condo after she died.
@HImom - Income averaging, oh, those were the days.
I always thought that my oldest BIL had the scoop on FILs finances, will, etc. Nope, not a word, and no sign that word will be coming. It will be a fun scavenger hunt some day. We have named that BIL as executor of our wills if we both go, and he is also to handle our trusts if we get hit by a bus before oldest kid is 30. I am now in the process of compiling all our account data (account type, institution and number, not balances) along with copies of our wills and trusts to hand to him. Don’t expect him to need it, but want him to have it just in case.
We need to live a long time after retirement. There is probably enough now to keep us going for life, but way too much to leave for the kids. It would be nice to spend the last dollar on the cab ride home from the last vacation, but we are not the kind of risk-takers that can cut it that close.
That’s another reason I’m a fan of Quicken. Ours is backed up locally and in the cloud. The master password to our password keeper is in the safe deposit box, which will get whoever needs it into Quicken and all of our accounts. The passwords are almost impossible for a human to remember, except that I can remember the master (but it is pretty random). We also use 2-factor authentication whenever it is offered.
My kids do not know our details, although we did give our 19-year old a high-level overview when he was being excessively frugal, to the point of it being inconvenient and penny wise / pound foolish (eg, having a few extra pairs of pants is preferable to doing emergency laundry before a date). He’s still basically frugal, but reasonable. No such problem with the younger one
We were full pay, so the kids never had reason to see FAFSA.
oops… sorry for my post a few pages back which has certainly been forgotten by now; somehow my brain processed “tIRA” as shorthand for Roth IRA, but clearly it stands for " traditional IRA " so I was confused. Thanks for straightening me out.
We lived in HK 86 - 89, S2 born at Matilda hospital. 
I don’t see why parents would teach filling out FAFSA to their kids. Unlike tax returns, they don’t have to fill out FAFSA once they graduate from college. In my lazy way of thinking, they’d be too young to be bothered with it in freshman/sophomore years. If they are juniors and seniors, they are almost done unless they are going to medical/law school.
My kid gets a little introduction on our finances. We plan to make her executor in a few years. I would think she would share with her BF if it comes up but not volunteer the info.
That’s a good point. Will send an email to CPA and attorney, asking for a form authorizing them to speak to our kids as needed. We have all our tax returns in our house, as well as financial statements.