With tax-exempt bonds, the interest rate is pushed down by the market because hi-net worth individuals are buying them, and those people are in the 39% tax bracket. In other words, for someone in the 39% tax bracket, a 1% taxable dividend = about the same as a 0.61% tax-free dividend because the 1% ...

How would you invest in China or Russia? Is there an ETF specific to those countries? VWO is the only EM fund I've used and it splits across many emerging markets.

=Index(importxml("http://wsj.com/mdc/public/page/2_3020-treasury.html","//tr[td='"&D6&"']"),1,4) Where D6 is my cell with the maturity in it. I can't even remember where I got that formula from. Probably fnord. This works, thank you. It only updates at 3pm EST ...

Since I'm in the accumulating phase, I rebalance by buying lagging assets with new money. There's only two real strategies that make any sense for new money: 1) Put it all in cash until cash hits a 35% rebalancing band, then do a rebalance on all assets 2) Buy lagging assets with new money to mainta...

As I learn and read more about the various Gold ETFs/ETNs/Funds, arguments arise over the inability for an investor to redeem shares for underlying gold. And some people then counter-argue that you can't take your S&P 500 shares and redeem them for the correct underlying stocks. So then I starte...

I found an old thread on here where one member found a way to pull the bond value from Fidelity but that method doesn't work anymore. I think Fidelity locked it off. Now I'm updating my spreadsheets by hand. Any better way to do it? I'm not locked into google spreadsheets.

This isn't directly answering your question, but are you sure that it is a good idea to put almost everything in tax-deferred accounts? Have you done any forecasting to see where this will leave you tax-wise when you start to withdraw from those accounts? I've run the numbers and it's a huge benefi...

I have a "problem" in that most of my assets are within the umbrella of IRAs or 401ks. Almost none of my money is in regular taxable accounts. Without going into too many details of my life and business, let's keep it simple and say that going forward, I expect to not have much "cash&...

At $100 per year for $40k insurance why not split your gold coins into different safe deposit boxes, geographically diversified, for $20/year each box, or whatever the cost is to you? You don't need to visit your boxes often if they are "full" with your max holdings per box, so spreading t...

I'm running a full PP for my main money savings. Most of my savings are in various tax-deferred and sheltered entities like 403B, 401k, Tax Sheltered Annuities, Roth IRA, Traditional IRA. I'm self-employed so I put a large chunk of money into a Solo 401k each year. I max out all of my options for ta...

Anyway all you need in the way of silver is one bag of pre-1965 junk silver for SHTF purposes. When I look online recently, it appears that the spread of pre-1965 junk silver is still about $3 per ounce above spot. Perhaps historically, the spread has been lower but because silver has dropped so mu...

I realize HB didn't use Silver in the PP for a while, but the original PP did include silver, and there's people who argue for a little bit of silver in the VP for diversification purposes. When I look at the spreads of silver, it looks like I'm paying $3 to $4 per silver coin above spot and selling...