Recent content by GOJAGATORS

I have about 90% of my IRA in dividend paying stocks. I've been investing this way since I opened my IRA in the early 80's, so I've experienced crashes, the roaring 9o's, the tech wreck... etc. I've always concentrated on dividend paying stocks, although not neccesarily the highest yielding...

1... The importance of figuring out what we are actually spending and not the usual percentage of pre-retirement income guideline that I had always heard about. 2.... Annuities appear to be worse investments than what I already suspected. 3.... 1% adds up to a whole lot more than I ever...

I agree with all the suggestions so far and want to add one more to the list... THE INFORMED INVESTOR by Frank Armstrong.

I own OSM as well as ISM and the Feb interest payment on OSM was also exactly the same as the Jan payment. Looks like both issues were overpaid by my calculation.

Here's how I approached a very similar situation many moons ago when I was your age (ie mortgage, 2 car payments, student loan) I paid the required payments on everything monthly and let all the excess build up in a money market account. When the balence of the money market got to 2X the...

You may want to take a look at some of the Buisiness development companies as a low cost way to gain at least some exposure to private equity/mezzanine debt type investments. They trade on the regular exchanges like as a stock. You can find a list of all publicly traded BDCs on...

Warthog, I'm in a similar situation and I use munis for a lot of my after tax investing since DW and I have the equity exposure we want in our pre-tax accounts. I buy individual bonds and not funds and buy a lot of zero coupon munis targeted at the first few years we will be FIREd. You can...

Agree with you there, thry are only appropriate for a specific time period and then only if you can ignore the fluctuations along the way. And boy will they fluctuate, especially longer term ones! However, for time frames of 10 years or so, I've found them to work well if you can ignore the...

If you have a specific dollar amount targeted at a specific time in the future, and you want to remove any uncertainty of meeting that amount, you may want to consider using zero coupon bonds. I funded my kids college money this way. I used individual issues so there was no uncertainty of what a...

Scout, I'm a 50 yo Dentist. I have a private practice which doesn't allow me the flexibility that you have, but I'll take a crack at answering some of your questions based on my experiences. I started practicing at 25 and quickly decided that vacations and family time (I have 2 kids) were more...

Welcome Scout, I'm a Dentist and very solidly in the 33% bracket. We keep our emergency cash in a tax free money market. Tax free money market accounts are available from any mutual fund family or brokerage. It took me a while but eventually I learned that it is the AFTER tax return that is...

Hey Tom, You are 4 years older than me and are about exactly where my wife and I hope to be when we are 54 and also aiming for ER around 58ish. You are also asking the exact same questions I have been asking myself, such as how much do I really need, what about healthcare until medicare sets...

I'll definitely be looking at bring someone in down the road and mentoring them to take care of the patients. I really fear that I will have a terribly difficult time turning control of my patients care over to someone else until I'm sure that person has their best interests at heart. We'll see...

Sorry about the divorce, been there, done that too. When I got divorced the accountant told me that whatever the divorce papers said had the most weight with the IRS concerning claiming dependents and being allowed to claim HOH. The actual time spent with each parent was not the factor that the...

Didn't answer the poll because I'm only 50, but my net worth is close to the 1 M mark and I'm not FIRE yet. Got divorced at 40, got cleaned out financially and started over with $5000, a six year old pick-up truck, but the big thing was that I got my business free and clear of the ex's reaches...