Recent content by JohnT

My investments are now down about 8% from the peak earlier this year. I was down 15% - so nice little recovery in August. Let's see if it continues into the Fall. I sold a bit last week to build up my cash position, otherwise am in good shape.

We own 2 rental properties, which we have owned and operated as rentals for over 30 years, so no mortgage and fully depreciated. They represent 20% of our portfolio. We also have our primary residence, but that's not considered part of our portfolio for the purposes of this topic. I've always...

21%

This is also a timely topic for me, as I have been thinking about this lately. I've been using spreadsheets that track all my financial assets. For estate planning, I have a Living Trust document, which include the usual Pour over Will, Power of Atty, etc. I like the idea of using online site...

Retirement accounts now over $2.7M. I won't touch them for at least 10 years, so have been analyzing Roth conversions. Not convinced it will help me much given my current tax bracket, but it's a good problem to have I suppose.

The first signal really was maybe 20 years ago, after an unpleasant run in with my boss, which left me thinking, "Hey, I can easily see a time when I won't want to put up with this anymore." I remember that left an uncomfortable feeling that stayed with me. Looking back, it seems like it largely...

34% of net worth is in tax deferred investments. My (and DW) IRAs, 401ks make up 60% of total investable assets. I have no Roth yet, but plan to begin converting some $$ this year. I have a small HSA.

My cash position is 3.3% of my investable assets, and 1.8% of my total assets. I am looking to increase my cash percentage by selling some investments, since the market is up. Ideally I could get to 5% in cash (of IA), but need to manage cap gains.

Regarding WFB and PC, this was an issue that made headlines late in 2015. J.P. Morgan and Wells Fargo Attack Aggregators Like Mint.com Wells, BofA, Chase and several other banks were not supporting the "aggregators" such as PC and Mint. According to a WSJ article at the time, competition with...

It's one of the Advisor Tools, and it's properly called 401K Fee Analyzer. It ranks all of your retirement accounts by expense ratio or by fees/yr, which takes into account your balance in that account.

The elegant interface, variety of graphs, and useful data analysis was what attracted me to Personal Capital. They have a really nice mobile app as well. I really like the retirement account expense analysis, and have used it (in part) to manage down my annual expenses in my IRA/401Ks...

Online tools that track your net worth (notably Personal Capital) use market values from Zillow for real estate assets in the net worth calculation. With 2 rental properties and a primary residence, this serves as a quick easy and consistent reference for these amounts, when calculating my net...

I live in the Bay Area, am in a suburb of Silicon Valley. Good news (for home owners): home values are way way up. Bad news: traffic is unbearable - there is no longer a rush hour, it's all day every day.

The wife and I spent 8 days in Japan last November, on a tour. She and I had been to Japan several times, on business. This was our first time as tourist, and our first tour. We spent a few days in Tokyo, took bullet train to Osaka, and spent time seeing Kyoto, Kobe, and flew back to West Coast...

My view of mutual fund cap gain distributions: Since they are taxable, and I can choose where to invest (that is, I do not have to reinvest), I consider them as increase in my cash - to be allocated according to my needs. Some may be reinvested. As for me, I am trying to increase my cash to...