Hedgehog, I am not an ETF expert but I will try to answer your question. I just googled the Vanguard S&P 500 fund VOO. They make dividend payments four time each year. This is done quarterly (fairly standard for these funds) and the payout dates are roughly 3/20, 6/20, 9/20 & 12/20. The curr...

Dualstow, Looks like everything is cheaper today. Either that or I just got poorer. Gonna have to read the fine print on this PP thing.

OK, so here is what I inevitably find when I do a Backdoor Roth search: Who should consider the Backdoor Roth? If your income is “too high”? for contributing to a Roth IRA, you should consider the Backdoor Roth. For 2014, the modified AGI phaseout starts at $114,000 for single, $181,000 for married ...

TripleB, I am hoping if I give you some percentages, you can help me work this out... I have a low income and will for the remainder of my working years (another 3-6 years full time and then maybe some part-time work). About 88% of my IRA investments are in Regular or SEP IRAs. The rest is in a regu...

What i would be interested to hear about would be, how would we know whether these assets are no longer effective for their designated purposes - when or how would we know this? Observer, Yeah, that is what people are wondering for the most part when they start threads like "Is the PP Broken?&...

Tyler and TripleB, you guys have Max Roth-Fu. So no need for me to go through the back door and I can keep my simple little withdrawal plan the way it is. It's weird thinking about this stuff in a way. I mean, I would be silly not to have a plan but the only way to really know if it's a good one is ...

No idea what The Brothers Gibb (Thank you, Dualstow!) would do, but as a PPer you would have a lot of cash handy to pick up stocks at a discount. A crash is only inevitable in the long term, of course. If we had a correction of, say, 20%, your PP would only be down 5% and stock valuations would be b...

TripleB, Can you please suggest a good resource (book or online) that will help me really understand the Roth IRA conversion? I am deficient in that area of investing knowhow. Seems that whenever I look into it a bit, I find that it doesn't make sense in my situation. But I hear of so many people do...

MangoMan, Aren't you self-employed? Not sure why I thought that might be the case, but as such you would be eligible for an Individual 401(k) Roth contribution, I believe. I only found out about those last year. They are sometimes called something different but it's an account that allows self-emplo...

He may be right about TIPS but they have only been around since 1997 so we don't really know. I bought some around 2001, held them to maturity and did well with them. Seems like they are only designed to give limited inflation protection, plus they are USG instruments so they can change the rules an...

TripleB, My first thought (apart from my two questions above) is that you have a large percentage (roughly 62.5%) of your PP in Roth accounts which is great. I was a little late in really understanding the overall value of Roth IRAs for retirement planning. For example, there were years when I made ...

Dualstow, that Swedish word is Allemansrätten. Ah, the power of Google. There is also the German word Jedermannsdurchgangerlaubnis, but I just made that one up. My new strategy for finding what is going on in the world is to just Google your tag lines. I now have an extremely eclectic but rather lim...

TripleB, Thanks for sharing this. I'd love to see more "case studies" on here. I am happy to write up my allocations up, but first a couple of quick questions... About how long do you have before you start drawing from these accounts? Also, have you decided in what order you will draw them...

From the article:

...Vinod Khosla, a green energy billionaire with ties to President Obama, is fighting surfers over access to a beach south of San Francisco.

Now that is a strange juxtaposition of words. I guess he wants to save the planet but only so that he can use it?

Murphy, Are you pulling our legs? The USG fixed the price of gold in the 1930s (and well before that). First it confiscated gold from US citizens when the price was set at $20, and then they raised the price to $35. Major a-hole move on their part. What I wonder about is gold's reaction to inflation...

Here is the Japan data I was referring to (along with PPs for Iceland, The Eurozone and The UK): http://europeanpermanentportfolio.blogspot.com/p/permanent-portfolio.html The real inflation/deflation numbers in the right hand column when cross referenced with how gold performed doesn't seem to suppo...

The short answer is no, they are not the same. We have had negative real interest rates here in the US for a while because: Real Interest Rate = Nominal Interest Rate - Inflation Real rates are incredibly low while there is still some inflation so, using the above formula, you get a negative number....

Buddtho,

Just checked and I could do likewise with 1.25% of my total PP. Do you really dislike LTTs at this level, love gold at its current price, or just feel like tweaking a bit? Damn, now it's Labor Day Weekend and I can't make any moves until Tuesday!

Thanks for the recommendation, Benko. Very much worth reading.

Bud, I have rebalancing envy. Just sitting here with this damn PP that doesn't need any tinkering at the moment.

My bad. I didn't realize how much VWINX had been discussed elsewhere on this forum. Carry on!

FarmerD, You didn't mention the construction workers who sit outside having beers with their breakfast.

Not trying to derail the thread but I was just looking at this:

https://finance.yahoo.com/q/hl?s=VWINX+Holdings

Are the fund managers just really good at buying high-quality, low-rated bonds along with dividend stocks? Some of those bonds look sketchy if you are just looking at the ratings, no?

TennPaGa,

Thanks for posting those VWINX yield numbers. How is that the yield is going up in 2012 and 2013? I guess my question is what bonds are they holding? Or is that the wrong question?

I have to say that I am very impressed

I wasn't clear on that, Ozzy. Here is what I am looking at: http://www.google.com/#q=VWINX Looks like it bottomed out in March of 2009, most likely along with everything else. My point was that it held up better than a lot of funds and was therefore less traumatic to hold. Total drop was from $22 so...