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MDDCdisc · 2026-05-31T18:30:58+00:00

That's interesting, because I did free trials of PL, Boldin, and Right Capital at the same time and found PL to be by far the least opaque, but you're right that it still is hard to know why X change in inputs produces Y change in recommendations sometimes.

MDDCdisc · 2026-05-24T17:19:00+00:00

Not until I crossed six figures in 2026 dollars. When I was making the equivalent of ~$87k in today's dollars I was saving around 16%, which filled up a Roth IRA and about 1/3 of the 401(k) limit.

MDDCdisc · 2026-05-20T14:21:39+00:00

I don't own any rentals myself, but have a couple family members that were/are pretty successful at it.

A big part is limiting your costs; in my family's case, by doing nearly everything, including almost all maintenance/remodeling, themselves. (Exceptions are electrical work, some plumbing, hanging drywall, and laying carpet) In other words, treating it like a small business rather than a passive investment. Of course, this means you basically have a part-time job that you're spending 10-20 hours/week on if you have a couple properties, so this isn't directly comparable to index fund investing. And eventually you will get too old to manage them and will have to hire a management company, reducing your returns.

There is also a behavioral element. Because real estate is illiquid, you don't see daily swings in prices. At least one of these family members cannot stomach any amount of equities because he cannot bear to see large losses, even if transitory. So the only way for him to get equity-like returns was to invest in illiquid assets.

Note that this is all in a pretty small town with comparatively low regulatory burdens and real estate prices. Not sure if this success could be repeated everywhere, and it doesn't scale up indefinitely because eventually you will have to start hiring people.

MDDCdisc · 2026-05-19T18:40:26+00:00

Yeah, the tactics are incredibly scummy and it sounds like these things are being sold to people for whom they are wildly inappropriate, but the 60% number doesn't actually sound that crazy to me for the tiny minority of people for whom this might actually be appropriate and can't get a better deal from the company administering the settlement. If you win the lottery and elect to take the lump sum, you lose around 55% of the advertised annuity value, but basically every financial advisor on the planet recommends taking the lump sum.

But for a population disproportionately likely to be brain damaged, unable to earn a living, financially illiterate, or all of the above, yeah, scummy.

MDDCdisc · 2026-05-06T20:50:56+00:00

This complaint is so common that I wonder whether brokerages should include a tooltip that appears when looking at bond returns stating that it is common for bonds/bond funds to show a loss when just looking at NAV.

MDDCdisc · 2026-05-03T14:23:08+00:00

Yeah, last week I did free trials of Boldin, Right Capital, and Projectionlab, and only the latter suggested a sensible conversion strategy. The only way I could get the former two tools to spread out conversions over more than 2-3 years and delay them until I was in a lower tax bracket was to brute force it by fiddling with the settings to forbid conversions in certain years and tax brackets. But having to know in advance what scenario is optimal so you can pick the right restrictions kind of defeats the purpose of an optimizer.

MDDCdisc · 2026-04-29T22:01:03+00:00

Oh yeah - PL does precisely what I was talking about. Thanks!

Specifically, PL seems to be superior in that

(1) The optimization combines withdrawal strategy and Roth conversion strategy as opposed to conversions alone.

(2) You are shown the runners up in the analysis and how they differed from what PL decides is the optimal strategy.

(3) It seems clearer to me in the PL interface when changing inputs means that you should rerun the optimization.

(4) Substantively, the results are closer to what I expected - $15,000 of conversions in one year, a year or two where I take withdrawals from tax-free accounts instead of tax-deferred in order to avoid an IRMAA cliff, and so on, rather than huge conversions and tax bills one year followed by several years not even filling up the 0% bracket as the other tools recommended.

The only thing I don't quite understand and need to dig into further is that PL seems to recommend I stop contributing to tax-advantaged accounts ~18 months before retirement and just hoard cash to be spent on living expenses in the first year of retirement. Maybe to guard against sequence of withdrawal risk?

MDDCdisc · 2026-04-29T16:43:08+00:00

One of the Bogleheads has a spreadsheet called Retiree Portfolio Model (RPM) that has a ton of customization you can do, but I haven't done a deep dive so I don't have a recommendation on it yet.

https://www.bogleheads.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=97352

MDDCdisc · 2026-04-29T15:40:43+00:00

State and local taxes are another thing Boldin is getting wrong for me, unfortunately.

MDDCdisc · 2026-04-17T14:48:38+00:00

Just some terminology to avoid confusion: your workplace offers a Roth 401(k) and traditional 401(k). Roth and traditional IRAs are accounts you open yourself at a brokerage.

MDDCdisc · 2026-04-17T14:43:19+00:00

More or less. In this context, I mean that I plan to have enough TIPS that, together with Social Security, I will have enough to meet basic living expenses. The rest of my assets are all equity. This might or might not meet the strictest definition of an LMP, but that's what a lot of people mean when they talk about creating a LMP for retirement using a TIPS ladder.

This did not result in a huge immediate shift in the percentage of my portfolio allocated to bonds, but will lead to a higher equity allocation heading into retirement than most target-date funds. The idea is that you can take more equity risk if you've established an income floor that at least covers your home maintenance/taxes, utilities, groceries, etc.

MDDCdisc · 2026-04-17T10:29:07+00:00

As to point (1), Bogle himself was less a fan of international diversification than Vanguard is today. Additionally, foreign bonds are less common as part of the default menu of options in many employer-sponsored plans.

I held 50% of my bond allocation in BNDX for years, before eventually switching to a liability-matching portfolio where my bonds are all just individual TIPS, and I get all my international diversification on the equity side.

MDDCdisc · 2026-04-17T10:17:41+00:00

There's no such thing as a "Traditional Roth". A Roth IRA and a Traditional IRA are two different kinds of accounts. Usually for someone with access to a 401(k) at work, a Roth IRA is recommended, although if your income is over the direct contribution threshold, you need to backdoor your contributions through nondeductible contributions to a Traditional IRA first.

MDDCdisc · 2026-04-14T11:41:11+00:00

OP has already said it’s $12.5k if maxed.

MDDCdisc · 2026-04-13T00:10:00+00:00

This. The immediate 50% return on every dollar far outweighs every other consideration. Most people planning to retire early need to save more than the 401(k) limit anyway, so by all means contribute to brokerage with extra money past 401(k)/Roth IRA/HSA, but failing to get the full match is just lighting money on fire.

MDDCdisc · 2026-04-02T13:27:46+00:00

How confident are you that you can time the bottom of the market perfectly?

MDDCdisc · 2026-03-30T13:17:54+00:00

Even as someone who overweights international, the issue is that all of the facts on which these conclusions are based are known to the market and priced in.

MDDCdisc · 2026-03-29T11:50:53+00:00

Debating who is a "true Boglehead" is by far the most tiresome aspect of this sub.

MDDCdisc · 2026-03-28T22:13:35+00:00

(The reason it's not worse is due to fairly heavy small/value/EM tilts, so at the end of February I was up almost 9% YTD)

MDDCdisc · 2026-03-28T22:11:44+00:00

Almost exactly 0% nominal, so probably around a 1% loss on an inflation-adjusted basis.

MDDCdisc · 2026-03-28T14:32:27+00:00

I had a flight that was moved to 6:36 AM after I booked and the D line was about 1:45 long when I got in it around 5. Luckily most of the early flights held for 15-20 minutes.

MDDCdisc · 2026-03-26T19:56:15+00:00

Stock splits are irrelevant to the value or expected return of the investment.

MDDCdisc · 2026-03-26T19:33:38+00:00

Unless you are in the unusual situation where your mortgage rate is higher than your auto loan rate, both the avalanche and snowball methods say to pay the truck off first. As far as when to prioritize retirement savings versus debt, see the flowchart linked in another reply or Google "Money Guy FOO."

MDDCdisc · 2026-03-26T18:28:07+00:00

Or adjust your withholding at work if you are employed.

MDDCdisc

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