You seem constantly hyper focused on your SIL’s supposed “issues”. Even if you don’t speak to him about it I’m sure the message comes through in your interactions with him and your daughter. Maybe its time to let the established married couple, that have kids already, take care of their own business. It doesn’t seem like there’s any real strife between them. I know I wouldn’t want my in-laws all in my marriage/life business and if my parents were alive I wouldn’t want them “meddling” either.
I’m sure you and your husband? worked hard to get to where you are in retirement. That money is yours. Obviously you can do with it as you please. I doubt anyone expects you to “pick up the slack”. Hopefully you have enough retirement income to live the lifestyle you desire.
That’s my retirement goal, enough money for my and my wife’s desired lifestyle. I also actually look forward to having the time and other resources to help out my kids and their, hopefully, eventual families. Life’s to short to not enjoy it. Come on retirement!!
Anyone in/near retirement that uses a separate low cost trading account to trade stocks? Not as a mainstay but to keep trading costs low? We love our financial planner but I have been buying and selling a lot lately and their fees aren’t worth it. We have an E-trade and fidelity brokerage account that has nominal value but I’m thinking of keeping some cash there to use to trade and then send stocks to other brokerage. I know this could be lots of paperwork. Any tips? Seems like it should be easy these days.
My husband uses one of his IRAs as a trading account. So far, he has done well. No capital gains taxes, no wash sales, no schedules D… bliss. He follows Warren Buffett’s ideology: buy what you know well, don’t jump into speculation. So my tip is: if you can do it in an IRA, it will save you a lot of headaches.
It’s great that your daughters know they can depend on you to help if a catastrophe happens. If you can afford it without jeopardizing your own retirement that’s great. Your daughter chose her spouse and has made the decision to have multiple children with him. It is not your responsibility to make sure they have everything they need. One thought might be to do what you can to help your grandchildren have the best future possible. That could be by setting up a trust or 529 plans or by paying for education. Taking the children as they grow on trips to expose them to the arts, travel etc.
I want to add that I help my kids. I have been blessed with a good life and have benefited from what my in-laws have done for my husband. My kids and spouses and significant others are all hardworking but getting ahead in the economy in our state is difficult. If we can help them with down payments on a home or with education for grandchildren we will.
Hmm. I guess the issue might be that our holding company’s fees are too high. My issue is I can trade in our 401K, but I want discount fees not to pay full brokerage. Maybe I’m asking too much.
We have helped our kids, and plan to continue doing so, by choice. But we feel like our “obligation” (and great gift) to them was to get them through undergrad debt free and give them a starter car so they could get to work safely. Once we accoplished that, we started focusing more on “us” (nice vacations w/o them, for example) and less on them. We do take them along sometimes, and who pays for what is a work in progress, but by now we feel like it’s always our choice.
If the financial planner is tied to a more expensive brokerage, then wouldn’t the higher costs be part of your payment for the financial planning services?
If the financial planner is paid directly by you on a fee-only basis, couldn’t you just move all of the accounts to a less expensive brokerage?
Sadly, no. The financial planner is paid by %. The trading fees are a brokerage expense.
Most Fplanners are tied to a specific firm so you cannot use whatever brokerage you chose. Our financial planner is excellent. So I wouldn’t switch just for the fees. But I think it’s dumb to pay more than a basic fee for an electronic transaction these days.
Think I’ll raise the issue with the planner next week.
Back to retirement issues for a moment, and apologies that I am not the financial guru in this family so might screw this up a bit, but DH is moving $ out of a mutual fund b/c we got socked with capital gains this tax year even though he didn’t sell anything in that fund (I didn’t know that was possible! But again, what do I know). So we are (he is) moving $ around money not only to pay the additional tax hit (and yes we already pay quarterly taxes) but to reshift funds and plan ahead. I will have to start taking out RMD soon (not this year and was reminded that the age changed!) so we are looking ahead. Any thoughts? Suggestions? DH will also eventually take his very small pension from his previous employer, but not sure when.
As for helping the kids, we have recently started gifting them a yearly holiday $ (our choice) because, as others have said, we’d rather see them enjoy some while we are alive than leave it to them in an estate. They also live in a very high COL area. We gift to each son and also to their spouses so everyone feels included. That is important to us. And its a gift that’s easy to wrap We are fortunate that they are able to live on their incomes and don’t expect us to fund their lifestyles. That said, the son/wife who just had their first child is weighing the cost of the wife/ new mom continuing to work as the cost of childcare eats up a very huge chunk of her income. Right now they are hoping to be able to use childcare and have her continue to work. I will await their decision but will keep my mouth shut. They will make it work either way, and we will support (emotionally, not financially) the choice they make. Be nice to your kids and their spouses. They may be taking care of you down the road.
It means that the fund sold appreciated securities and realized capital gains (net of capital losses) on them. It then issues “capital gain distributions” to shareholders to pass through the capital gain tax liability to shareholders.
I got hit with huge capital gain distributions in some of my mutual funds. Apparently people were moving money out of these funds in the last year into another kind of investment, and the mutual fund had to sell off holdings to pay out that money. So there were a lot of gains recorded and passed on to shareholders (in terms of reinvestment, I gather).
I think you’d have had to be a pretty sophisticated investor to not get caught in this, such as everyone who sold the funds. Which I am not. In any event, I had inherited the funds from my parents so if I had sold, would have had huge regular capital gains. Lose-lose situation.
I could have looked at my end of year statements and seen it so as not to be caught by surprise with my 1099-DIV. But we still would have had the income to report. I had planned estimated taxes to cover the actual amount paid the prior year so we had a big tax bill but no penalty.
One needs to be careful on what funds you hold in a taxable account (as opposed to a tax-deferred account like IRA/401k), as those funds may kick out a taxable dividend by end of year. Typically, one can get the track record of the mutual fund by looking at past year’s distributions. Of course, there could always be a surprise distribution this year.
Another thing to consider is to setup such a fund as to NOT reinvest dividends/cap gains, so the distribution gets paid out in cash to your Clearing account (leaving you with cash to pay any additional taxes). You can always reinvest what’s left after paying taxes, or just move that cash to your emergency cash fund.
You most likely could have sold the funds immediately after inheritance with stepped-up basis, i.e., little/no cap gains.
I could have, and did sell a few and got a lot of cash with little or no tax ramifications. But these particular funds were solid safe long term investments - didn’t need the cash and figure someday son will get them. By the time we got everything out of trusts and into our own control (took about a year), they had already appreciated. And the capital gain distribution issue is only in the last year or two so not something I would have anticipated.
He follows Warren Buffett’s ideology: buy what you know well, don’t jump into speculation. So my tip is: if you can do it in an IRA, it will save you a lot of headaches. 
We are fortunate that they are able to live on their incomes and don’t expect us to fund their lifestyles. That said, the son/wife who just had their first child is weighing the cost of the wife/ new mom continuing to work as the cost of childcare eats up a very huge chunk of her income. Right now they are hoping to be able to use childcare and have her continue to work. I will await their decision but will keep my mouth shut. They will make it work either way, and we will support (emotionally, not financially) the choice they make. Be nice to your kids and their spouses. They may be taking care of you down the road.