The average American family spends $550 annually on lottery tickets.

I prefer 75-25 US-Intl equity split, I inherited that idea from the Schwab Moderate allocation model I had for years, and don't want to step out farther than that. My ex-employer's 2025 target fund was 70-30 FWIW. So for me, 65-35 a bit much.

Hmm, I think there's been a miscommunication. I do have a child, and I graduated college a few years ago, so my experience there is both fresh in my mind and something I think about for the future a lot. My point was more or less that I think it's acceptable to make your children pay for their own ...

"Room and board" is just housing and food costs, right? Wouldn't a non-student still have those expenses? Don't we all have those costs? I don't see why they're relevant to education. And you can live-off-campus to lower these costs to pretty low levels, too. Outside of somewhere like NYC...

Pointedstick wrote: I just checked and UNM (University of New Mexico) is about $6.5k a year in-state.

You're talking tuition. I'm talking tuition, room, and board. Two different things. Yes, if the student can live at home until college graduation, he / she can realize tremendous savings, no doubt.

It's not about skipping the ivies, it's about finding a good deal. If UoT is $25k a year that doesn't seem like a great deal, but it also in the range where a student can offset a significant fraction of the cost (if not all of it) by working. I think those days are gone, except for part-time stude...

Ivy League schools are not worth it; my wife and I both went to Brown; but even in-state schools in Texas are easily $25,000 a year. My entire college education at Brown a generation ago was $39,000. Taking account of inflation $95,000. University of Texas is as expensive now, in real terms, as Brow...

Don't have a college fund. Every dollar you put in there is a dollar that the colleges will simply take. The less you have saved, the more financial aid and scholarships your daughters will get, and in any event IMHO any college that's so expensive that you have to save up to afford it is a bad dea...

May 24, 2011

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- Half of Americans say they aren't prepared for a minor financial emergency.

http://money.cnn.com/2011/05/24/news/ec ... /index.htm

Well said.  It is all a personal decision and comfort level.  It is unfortunate, for me, that it took nearly 25 years to figure it out!  The only saving grace from all this is my wife and I are fiscally conservative.  All the other pieces were in place -- house paid off, girl's college funds in gre...

ochotona:  one of the reasons I moved to the PP was the simple act of sitting down with a calculator to figure out the return on my retirement investments over time.  These were mostly target retirement funds which were 90% stocks.  Since the late 1990s, my investment return was PITIFUL, in fact I'...

You need different time horizons and portfolios because PP won't grow enough for a young person's purposes, except it's a better place to keep assets that may have to be spent sooner than at retirement. Then in your 50s 60s you drift more towards PP. What balance of assets will grow enough going fo...

Ochotona, Yes, please tell me what balance of assets will grow!  And you should start your own fund if you know the answer... In 2008, in my 40s, two girls at home, I seriously thought it was the end and bailed on everything, near the lows.  Of course that was stupid, but I would imagine it was rel...

MG, I am not sure how to respond. The Schwab ETFs are not overpriced... just to cite two, SCHB ~ VTI, and SCHO ~ SHY, the expense ratios are 0.04% and 0.08% respectively, those numbers are from Morningside's site, not Schwab's. The portfolio ETFs trade commission free. The accounts have no annual ma...

You need different time horizons and portfolios because PP won't grow enough for a young person's purposes, except it's a better place to keep assets that may have to be spent sooner than at retirement. Then in your 50s 60s you drift more towards PP.

Schwab has a free robot advisory service . It asks you basic questions about your preferences, and hands you back a portfolio, and you can go back and change your responses to tweak it. Honestly, the portfolio comes out "hot", but that's typical Schwab. Balanced against my HBPP, our famil...

I just think there won't be one fixed gold allocation number which is going to work for all time periods; the periodicity of gold is too long. Yes, for the data we have at our disposal now, 20% gold maybe looks better in hindsight; but who know what the future holds? While I absolutely don't advocat...

I got a quote from Hugh Wood Inc. to cover $50,000 in gold coins, premium was $156 / year, 0.31%. Proposed storage location was a bank safe deposit box in Texas USA.

401(k) lemonade. Employer 401(k), Self-Directed 401(k) window, independent brokerage accounts... arghhhh. I cannot wait until it's all in one place.

Gary Savage at http://blog.smartmoneytrackerpremium.com thinks the S&P500 could go down 30% by 2016. That's a cheery thought.  ::) The red dotted lines he draws actually look kind of realistic and plausible when you consider market history since 1999 to the present. http://i779.photobucket.com/a...

I have never applied for jobs on LI, I only use it for building my network

Another idea along the SP500 to VTI idea, go from a gold ETF to a mixed metals ETF, just for 31 days.

i think it depends a lot on the level of job you are looking for, for low end entry level jobs my gut says knocking on doors is still the winner, even if they just send you home to fill an online app it gets you face to face with a manager or HR person.. for mid level and gov jobs i would put my mo...

The tax wash harvesting rules apply between spouses, to any corporations you control, and you can't sell at a loss in a taxable account and buy within 30 days before or after the sale in a retirement account. IRS Publication 550.

Solo 401k, awesome.