NY Times just came out announcing what had been already said about Kashoggi’s fate. Will see how it pans out.
In the mean time, the stock market will respond, but IMHO if lots of things are going well with economy and the interest rates and other economic factors settle down, the stock market will get healthier again. At least the drop wiped out only about half the gains from the first of the year, I guess depending on how one was invested.
I am more concerned with the potential postal wars and the proposed gutting of Medicare and Social Security.
Interest rates have been kept at artificial lows for about ten years now in order to help the economy recover from the Great Recession. Now that the economy is in a sustained expansion it seems highly unlikely that interest rates have anywhere to go but up.
Rising interest rates are bad for stocks, bonds, and real estate. Arguably now is a good time to sit on cash.
Unexpectedly, I didn’t win the billion dollar mega millions lottery. I just won $2. So now I have to seriously think about retirement. 
The retirement planner that I talked to last week had some interesting suggestions to consider. We are thinking about retiring around age 60. She said that if we retire near the end of the year, our vacation payout will be paid in the year of retirement (which is substantial enough to pay for most of our expenses for the next year). Then we could delay our pension payments for a year, which increases our pension payments an additional 12K/year each. Since our income the year after retirement would be zero (except for whatever we get for rental properties), we could then backdoor Roth some of our 401K funds, in order to pay lower taxes on them. I can definitely see the potential for that, because if you add up pension payments, social security income and RMD’s, it puts us into a high tax bracket. But if you start with a very low income that year, you can pay substantially less tax to convert to a Roth. Never thought of that, because I didn’t realize we could control our pension payments like that.
@busdriver11, this is where Excel really comes in handy 
There probably are some sample spreadsheets over at the Bogleheads wiki.
People find it useful to use up their lower tax brackets for Roth conversions during the time between getting paychecks and starting to take RMDs. If you go over by a bit, it’s not a disaster, as the tax rates are still marginal.
Btw, not to be picky, it’s not a “backdoor” Roth, but it’s great regardless of what you call it. Technically, it’s just a Roth conversion.
^True, meaning you don’t have to go through traditional IRA. You can convert directly into Roth.
Ah, I probably confused it as she was also talking about a backdoor Roth. It makes sense that it’s just a conversion. I’m guessing it is probably best to convert when the market is down (that is, as much as one can figure that one out), in order to pay less in taxes. If that makes any sense.
I have never used Excel or spreadsheets, but my husband, being a numbers guy, would probably enjoy them. I just didn’t realize that we could lower our tax bracket, as I’d never heard of anyone at my company delaying their pension payout. Bummer if you die in that year before you even get your first payment!
Probably many people can’t afford to retire (especially if pre-SS) without the pension. But if you can, it certainly makes sense to model the various scenarios. The nice thing with pensions and retirement annuity options is you don’t need to know your “end date”.
Interesting:
[Housing Has The Recession At Least 3 Years Off](Housing Has The Recession At Least 3 Years Off)
Interesting discussion on ‘what really spooked markets’ Bloomberg Businessweek Oct 22 issue.
Since mega lottery still available, I may cross over to TN to buy some tickets (live pretty close to TN border; lottery still not available in AL although that may change in the future…talking more and more about it…). Someone has to win. Doesn’t pay if you don’t play.
Ouch. #-o
This year’s October “surprise.” Sigh.
We have not yet closed on our old house (next month), so a lot of our money is out of the market. I am not a market timer, and I was a bit miffed to be long houses rather than equities, but on the other hand . . .
I’m curious…
who here uses financial planners, and who doesn’t, and what do you see as pros and cons?
I know Bogleheads see financial planners as the root of all evil, but as I get older I’m starting to think about the value.
It’s sort of like mowing our yard - we could do it, but we don’t want to worry about it, so we pay someone. At this point I am finally going to take advantage of some of the services my financial advisor offers, including figuring out all the different things we will need, how much we will have a month if we take a certain % of our assets each year, etc.
I have a financial planner. (I feel very privileged to say this!) When I was married, my husband was in charge of investments for us and he chose a particular company to administer most of the investment assets. I have stayed with this company and financial planner since the divorce. Initially, I was concerned that this would be awkward, for me, the planner, or both of us, but it hasn’t been. He’s very professional and did as good a job as possible of efficiently dividing the investments, some of which my ex and I held jointly. I say “as possible” because my ex is very disorganized and it took him months to sign a few forms and return them to the planner. The planner even offered to drop off the forms in person at my ex’s current residence, in a city 150 miles away.
@1214mom We have used one for the last 20 years.
Pro’s of a good financial planner:
-Looks at various asset classes and isn’t heavy in just one. When we started we had about 75% in tech stocks. Boy, was I glad in 2008, we barely lost a cent. -
-Considers many companies we would not have time to research/investigate.
-Works with our tax accountant and lawyer. This was a huge asset when spouse sold the company and boy were there complications.
-Invests in a company, let’s call it A, once A makes money, the FP takes the initial investment out and invests it in something else, so the only money we now have invested in A is total profit.
-Doesn’t fall prey to trends. Doesn’t try to buy stocks which are popular.
-Respects my hatred of mutual funds which have never made us money.
-Meets with us on a regular basis. Checks in with what we have made and also what else is going on-long terms and short term.
-Doesn’t try to sell us on their mutual funds, annuities and other things for which they receive commission.
-Understands market trends and doesn’t get excited by daily news. We were never day traders anyway.
-Fills out all of the pesky forms that need to be filled out.
-Buys and sells without asking but never big amounts and usually does so right before our meeting every other month.
( My advice would be to pick a certified financial planner that is roughly the same age you are ( this is important as they will understand what you are dealing with). Also pick someone who is organized and smart. I like to work with small boutiques never a big firm ( we had one of those once it was ugly).
Cons of a good financial planner:
-You have to pay them a % of your $. It didn’t seem so bad when we only had a little. Now we have more so even though the % is much less it’s still a lot ( though much less than others I have spoken to).
-We end up with a much less risky investment portfolio, which is good. But there are some crazy stocks I used to buy and do very well in. Now we don’t have many of those.
-Not always that accurate in his predictions. I met with him the day before election day 2016, he said, Yep there’s not way Trump will win and things are going to go along just as they have been. Nope.
-Can’t always figure out good tax planning strategies ( our last planner was also a tax lawyer so that was nice).
-He doesn’t really like/support the idea of us buying real estate as investment ( think of it, he’ll get less $$) so getting advice there isn’t helpful.
Personally, I think it is money well spent. Our returns have been higher than the market by a lot year over year. Also, I feel as though the portfolio has little risk due to various types of investments.
We started using a financial planner when H needed to rollover his 401k years ago when the startup he was with at the time went under. Our planner is someone I grew up with and have known for more than 40 years. He works hard for us and our money has grown well under his guidance.
We are fortunate to have bought a house in a DC suburb before development took off. On top of that, the house will be paid for not long after a new rail station opens a block from our house. Finally, my pension will kick in in about 6 1\2 years. With all that, plus annunities, we may be able to move to an area with a relatively low cost of living and do ok. Maybe I could work part time to pay for insurance until Medicare kicks in.
I have spoken with a financial planner who was paid by the hour as a benefit of one of my former employers. It was useful to have them look things over and tell us what they thought and advised. We also have both Schwab and Vanguard do a free lookover of our assets and both have agreed that we should be fine, even if we have to leave enough to support our D for the rest of her life (due to hear chronic health condition that we are all unsure as to how well it can be managed).
We have a significant amount of our assets in real estate (our house, a small rental apartment building that we co-own with a family member, and the house that H was raised in that is rented out; great property manager takes care of maintenance). We also have significant pension (with 55% survivor benefit) that pays more than our expenses every year.
Thus far, we have not really been tempted to hire a financial planner and have done well enough with simple, low expense broad index funds as well a very few stocks. We do have an estate planner (attorney) and a CPA who answers any tax questions we have, plus does our taxes.
We used to have one of H’s old buddies as our investment broker from Dean Witter–he had us in a lot of high load funds that actually under-performed the bull market by a lot. We finally broke away from him and switched to bogleheads.org and have been much happier.
DH has done most of our financial planning, with a few checks over the years (freebie work benefit). Also we’ve done a few retirement planning classes, with free consults. That helped us get paperwork more organized. But now we are considering a fee financial planner (we don’t want the kind that makes money on transactions). Per DH’s research, we are only considering “fiduciary” planners.