Personal Economics and Financial Decisions

Just gonna keep buying vtsax and vfifx like a chump

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That’s like 90% of what I do. 10% in other stuff I probably will long term lose to the market on but it makes me feel good.

Think of what a discount you can get it at tomorrow!

I only buy on a couple specific days every month that I can’t remember now for extra chumpiness.

GDP up - market down! Peak efficiency.

Looks like my wife’s 401k has an S&P 500 Index Fund with a .01% expense ratio. You love to see it! The others I’d consider aren’t bad either, the target date funds are .06%, the International Equity Index is .02%, and the long-term treasuries are .02%.

We’ll probably just max it out in the S&P for now and mess with taking some risk out of play later in life, she’s young enough to have plenty of time and my risk tolerance is relatively high on this.

Going to do some Googling and read some fine print to make sure it’s legit and they’re not fucking everyone, but at least this makes it worth considering even though we may not vest the employee match.

Yes. The fund expense ratios sound great but there could easily be other massive fees that you’ll only find out about by digging deep into the fine print. In fact those ERs are so good I’d bet there’s certainly some percentage based fees assessed somewhere else. Still worth investing but you’ll probably want to reprioritize funding an IRA after you max the match and be sure to rollover when the employer changes.

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They’re not evil, just cheap.

That’s what I do.

My 457(b) has an S&P fund with a .08 expense ratio and the only fee is a flat $10 administrative fee they charge twice per year. These things do exist.

Yeah I haven’t looked into it deeply but feel like at least in non profit/government/quasi government/academic settings I’ve had what appear to be really good options from expense standpoint, I assume there a fair amount of competition to land these entities as clients

Scratch that, I just looked at the fact sheet, I was off by an entire decimal place, the expense ratio is listed as 0.006%. To be fair, it’s a government plan.

Edit Again: Ok, it’s also listed as $.06 per $1,000, so I guess not off by a decimal place, it’s just how they write it.

You have to read the plan documents if you want to uncover the actual fees. The expense ratio of the fund doesn’t tell the whole story.

It’s really not worth worrying about though. If you’re already maxing out your own IRA, just pile in as much as you can.

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I use FSKAX on Fidelity for 401k. In the prospectus it lists 0.014% for a management fee and 0.001% for other expenses. Then there is a separate section further down that lists a 0.015% advisory fee. If i understand it right it’s 0.03% in total annually which is still miniscule.

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I didn’t dig too deep, since I’m maxing it out no matter what, but it looks like my nationwide plan has a flat 0.44% fee on everything.

Yeah that’s 8x cw’s rate. Vanguard’s SP500 fund charges 0.04. If you can get 0.01 with no other percentage based fees you should be packing every penny you can get into that.

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Well, I’ve got to double check this but I’m pretty sure the match vests 20% per year and the max is 3% of income. So if she stays there a year, the match is 0.6% of income. So this should be +EV up against just about any non-ridiculous expense ratio, but if they have flat rate fees and withdrawal fees that add up to 0.6% of her income, then we might as well put it into an IRA instead. Some of the replies clued me in on what I’m looking for here, which is what I was hoping might happen.

Now, she could end up staying longer so there’s a built-in freeroll there as more of the match would vest, but we’d need to hit a parlay (she likes it there, they make her a competitive offer, they offer her the unit she wants or close to it).

I’m lucky that I have a 7% match and 4% vests immediately because of safe harbor rules.

100% she should be putting money into her own IRA (or Roth) after the match. Depending on your household income, her IRA contributions might be non-deductible anyway.

I think you already posted about it, but make sure you’re maximizing your contributions too. I don’t know how you’ve structured your poker income. It could be worth paying a one time consulting fee to a CPA to set up the best plan so that you can contribute beyond the IRA limits.

I am able to contribute to a SEP-IRA, so my limits are pretty high. I’m probably not going to max them out, but I try to put at least the traditional max in there each year. If I do that every year until I’m 60, and the returns are 10% annually, I get to $2.2M. So I think I’m getting close to the point where I have to start asking questions about when I want to spend the money, whether I want to be taking out same-sized withdrawals each year to retire early and tap into the IRA money without penalties, etc.

Right now, the broad strokes of our financial plan are that we’re going to max her employee-matched stuff, put away the $7K or so each for retirement, then prioritize saving for a down payment for a house - likely putting that into a relatively conservative mixture of S&P and bonds. Then we kind of play it by ear based on what the housing market, interest rates, and stock market do and try to make the best decision. For example, if we’re able to buy a house we like in a year or two, and we’re paying like 6.6% in interest, we’re probably going to prioritize paying the mortgage down over non-tax advantaged investing or trying to max the SEP-IRA. Yeah, 6.6% isn’t the 8-10% the market returns, and there’s a tax writeoff for that interest, but it’s still going to be pretty close to the best available risk free rate after factoring that in and the sooner we get to the peace of mind of a paid off home, the better. If rates came down enough, those priorities would probably shift.

Vanguard and Fidelity both have some minuscule fees on many funds, especially the index ones.

0.01% is $1 on $10,000 or $100 on $1M.

Smaller company plans get stuck with the John Hancock funds that have 50-100x and the indexes underperform what they track somehow.