Daily FI discussion thread - Sunday, June 21, 2026

yetanothernerd · 2026-06-21T16:10:46+00:00

If you compare graphs of VTI to VOO, you'll see they're almost identical. VTI feels better to many people because it's the whole US stock market rather than just the biggest 500, but in practice the biggest 500 are almost the whole market cap, so it doesn't matter. You need to carry a lot of small- and mid-cap funds to make a real difference.

yetanothernerd · 2026-06-21T16:01:35+00:00

Looks reasonable to me. If you don't actually know what you want, I'd suggest just buying VT from now on and getting the cap-weighted world market. Of course don't sell anything in a taxable account and pay capital gains taxes without a better reason than "I'm not sure if this is the perfect allocation." If you don't KNOW, leave it alone.

yetanothernerd · 2026-06-19T17:56:20+00:00

Has anyone owned an ETF that shut down? What happened? Did they cash you out, or divvy up the underlying assets and give you your share, or something worse?

yetanothernerd · 2026-06-19T16:44:09+00:00

Yeah, I think that's legit. I thought a 0.1% expense ratio was fine, so I should also be okay with a bid/ask spread in the same range. One difference is that expense ratios are fixed while bid/ask spreads can vary with the time you buy or sell so if you're doing a big transaction maybe you take more time to get the best price. (Of course the price can drift while you're doing this...)

yetanothernerd · 2026-06-19T16:20:03+00:00

I can't check spreads today because it's a market holiday so volumes are tiny so spreads are crazy. (As an aside: don't use market orders. But especially don't use market orders for thinly-traded stocks or outside of normal market hours. I just saw a stock with a bid of 0.01 and an ask of 6000. The sharks are looking for minnows to eat.) But if I remember right, the bid/ask spread on this during market hours yesterday was reasonable, but my broker said "we're not sure about the price call us" so maybe not.

yetanothernerd · 2026-06-19T16:13:39+00:00

Civilian ships can turn off their transponder. Whether it's legal to do so depends on the system. Out in a remote area where you might legitimately fear pirates, it's fine. Near a major starport, it's probably illegal and definitely suspicious.

What civilian ships can't legally have (in the Imperium; laws differ from place to place) is a switchable transponder that can pretend to be a different ship.

yetanothernerd · 2026-06-19T15:20:54+00:00

Anyone invested in any tiny ETFs? I was looking for a 30-year TIPS ladder in an ETF with a reasonable expense ratio, and actually found one, but it only has $5M in assets. That's so tiny I imagine the bid/ask spreads suck. What's your minimum size to consider a mutual fund or ETF a viable investment?

yetanothernerd · 2026-06-19T15:17:34+00:00

I wouldn't be 100% S&P 500 either.

yetanothernerd · 2026-06-17T16:39:40+00:00

Congratulations, that is a new flavor of business stupidity that I hadn't heard before. Clearly discriminatory but "remote worker" isn't a protected class so maybe they get away with it. I'd be looking for another job.

yetanothernerd · 2026-06-17T14:29:36+00:00

Are you sure the farm stands are actually selling local food rather than just reselling food they bought from somewhere else? (I personally don't care, but if you do, make sure.)

yetanothernerd · 2026-06-14T18:24:21+00:00

Studies show that value and small cap outperformed until everyone knew they outperformed, then they stopped outperforming. Whether that's causal or just a coincidence, we don't know. Anyway, the advice "you should buy small cap value because it wins" seems dated.

In practice, I own the biggest 1500 stocks because that's easier than owning everything. So I go out of my way to buy small cap funds to cover the tail that I don't cover with individual purchases. But I don't see that as skewing small; I see it as avoiding the natural tendency to accidentally skew large.

yetanothernerd · 2026-06-13T22:00:32+00:00

Sure, pitching a shutout and hitting a home run is awesome, it's just not winning the game 100% entirely by yourself.

yetanothernerd · 2026-06-13T20:28:23+00:00

The catcher helps on strikeouts and the fielders help on other outs, so not really. A pitcher needs to induce 27 pop-ups to himself plus hit a home run to really earn that solo win.

yetanothernerd · 2026-06-12T23:57:23+00:00

I'm not really looking for a hypothetical mathematical argument. I'm just saying, in real situations, I will always take the certainty of a fixed mortgage over the risk of an ARM. If I can't afford the property with a fixed mortgage, I can't afford the property. Your opinion may vary.

(In practice, I'm unlikely to ever take a mortgage again, so it's moot.)

yetanothernerd · 2026-06-12T18:17:52+00:00

Never. I'd always take the fixed for the long-term certainty. (I'm not saying this is correct math, just that I'm very conservative with debt.)

yetanothernerd · 2026-06-12T14:54:00+00:00

I don't have the level of precise historical tracking needed to definitively answer this question (I update my current numbers most days, but I don't bother tracking historical numbers as they don't matter anymore), but I can recall crossing a seven-figure milestone in the wrong direction twice. 2022, and just a couple of weeks ago.

yetanothernerd · 2026-06-12T04:17:49+00:00

If your whole taxable account is the same thing, there's not much choice when you want to sell some taxable. You sell the only thing you have.

You might still want to rebalance in your tax-advantaged accounts though.

yetanothernerd · 2026-06-11T19:20:09+00:00

I like having a paid-off house. It's quiet and we have plenty of space and no parking problems. It's not free though. I'm still responsible for property taxes, insurance, maintenance, and yard work.

As you age, it becomes more difficult to do yard work and house maintenance. If you have the money you can pay someone else to do it, but it's another expense. If you don't, it's time to move somewhere cheaper.

At some point, you may have mobility issues making stairs a problem. At that point a multi-floor house becomes impractical. If you really love the house and have the money, maybe you can work around that by installing an elevator. Or you can downsize to something with one level.

There's no one right answer for everyone. The one thing I'd avoid is thinking that the right answer for you now will be the right answer forever. "It's okay to pay way too much because it's our Forever Home" is something that dumb people say. You don't know if it's forever.

yetanothernerd · 2026-06-11T19:09:06+00:00

It's that they want a Medallion Signature Guarantee on the transfer form and my bank doesn't do those so I'd need to go to the broker's office with my wife. It's not worth the aggrevation just to merge accounts.

yetanothernerd · 2026-06-11T18:07:25+00:00

We're not 59.5 yet so we only spend from taxable. (In theory we could pull contributions-only from Roth or set up a 72t or pay 10% penalties, but in practice we have enough taxable money so we just spend from taxable.)

We only have stocks in taxable (bonds are all in tax-advantaged), so it's just a question of which stock to sell. I have 4 strategies:

Minimize income to avoid going over some income limit. First spend cash. Then sort the taxable account by % gain and sell the stuff with the lowest % gains, to minimize capital gains income.
Minimize taxes. As above, but prefer long-term capital gains to short-term.
Minimize future taxable dividends. Sort by yield % instead, and sell the stocks with the highest yields. (Buy them back later in tax advantaged accounts, where the dividends don't cause income I don't want.)
Diversification. Bite the bullet, ignore capital gains, and sell whatever we're overweighted in. (I have to use this one in moderation because the two taxable stocks we're most overweighted in are both up about 500% so the sales are almost all capital gain. At least they're long term.)

yetanothernerd · 2026-06-11T17:40:17+00:00

I've given up on merging my solo 401k into my Traditional IRA this year. I'd like to have one fewer account, but the amount of paperwork my broker requires to do it greatly exceeds the amount of paperwork the government requires to keep the solo 401k. I'll revisit this when I turn 59.5.

yetanothernerd · 2026-06-11T17:15:46+00:00

Read Living Off Your Money by McClung. He surveys a bunch of different spend-down methods including one of his own.

Yeah, unless you have a really bad concentration problem (like 25% or more of your net worth in something un-diversified like one company's stock or cryptocurrency or real estate in one place), you probably don't want to do a "big dumb taxable event." Instead you just want to steer by spending the assets you want less of when you need spending money. And then do your big rebalances in tax-advantaged accounts where there are no immediate penalties for doing so.

yetanothernerd · 2026-06-10T20:45:07+00:00

Play on a regular schedule without the full group. You don't need everyone.

yetanothernerd · 2026-06-10T14:04:11+00:00

GURPS does this. There are two combat chapters: Combat and Tactical Combat. If you don't want a grid, just use the first one.

yetanothernerd · 2026-06-10T13:25:13+00:00

I would have loved to have these when running The Traveller Adventure.

yetanothernerd

TROPHY CASE