blah blah finances blah blah

[rmd]

so, i've been pondering my finances lately.

as usual, i'm thinking that i should be saving more money. then again, i suspect that if i could retire this moment i'd still be thinking "man, i should be saving more money. what if..."

i'm thinking about talking to some kind of financial planning type, but haven't done anything about it yet.


[Poll #743154]

if you're local to me and have a financial planner you like, feel free to share the name. i have an irrational aversion to most "hey, talk to our financial planners" offers from amex et al since i pessimistically assume they're going to act in a way that maximizes their happiness in terms of "meeting boiler room quotas" and less to maximize my happiness in terms of "making me a lot of money".



thanks!

Comments

[liralen.livejournal.com]

We've done the 401k thing. Also had a financial advisor in the mid 1990's that fucked us over with too much short term stock shit. So I got pissed off and studied up and managed my own stocks, did a good 20% over market for a while (yes, the bubble was good to me), and was unemotional (The Unemotional Investor is a book I loved) and sold every time the growth was "good enough" for me, plus what was essentially a CD disguised as an life insurance policy that intrigued me.

That got us up to a certain point.

We got bought. The options from that brought us along a lot further, but what really, really got us to make progress was when work offered the J Fellow a pre-tax salary deferral plan. It hurt, it was PAINFUL to have our salary basically cut by 60%, but we downsized the house, then paid for it with options and ESPP results when the market was high (You fools! Selling while the market is THIS GOOD, think of the money you'll looooose!! NOW I can say Nanny nanny boo boo.)

But we've basically been putting away the guy's salary for five years now, AND it's in what are basically mutual funds while the market was down and the growth in the last year or two has been kind of mind boggling.

We finally went looking for an advisor again, just to get a handle on what we had, what we wanted, and what it would take to get us to retirement and what were basically decent numbers with which to do a worst-case analysis. We were wary after the first fiasco so we asked a lot of questions in the initial interviews and were very clear on what we wanted and what we had no tolarence for. As usual, when finding a service person, we interviewed three different people together and pooled impressions and then decided.

We had more questions and details to our analysis than the guy had, but he was a good sanity check for us. Our subsequent option sales haven't been that much, but enough to get another good, insured mutual fund buy in (ask about value locking and other very interesting options on funds), and from the numbers of those plus our 401ks we're pretty much set after 63, but for the years until then we weren't sure.

With the independent analysis we found out there's pretty much a 50:50 chance we'll make it to 63 if we quit at the beginning of this year on an inflation adjusted amount of income that's about half again as big as what we're spending regularly today. So I'm definitely still "I need to just save a bit more..." but the J Fellow has jumped of the hamster wheel and is retiring at the end of the month, six extra months of income, which is to the better, but still... :-)

Personally, I've been less than happy with Vanguard, even over a decade of time. We're stuck with them for our 401k and with the spousal unit's deferred income thing, so we're making the best of it, but my S&P index fund with them has done better than the other funds I've had from them. I really, really liked my financial advisor's information about how well various funds have worked for him and which managers he trusts, not so much with the stock picking as with the amount of turn over, cost management, and capital gains tax management, which still makes a difference. After getting his advise on WHICH Vanguard funds to use, we've done a lot better with the 401ks than we ever did before.

[rmd.livejournal.com]

that's pretty cool, right there.