I think bobman is a tax lawyer, so he knows more I’m sure, but you would puke if you knew the details of some common estate tax avoidance strategies. The acronyms are endless: GRAT, IDGT, ILIT, QSST, GST, NINGT, the more I learn the more I know how much I don’t know. What I’m absolutely sure of is that super rich people have an endless amount of legal avenues to minimize or eliminate the estate tax, which is really the only meaningful avenue currently on the books to address income inequality.
Yeah we’ll be smashing new ATHs when the inevitable ‘efficacy’ of vaccines is confirmed. So many cyclicals are still pretty depressed from pre-covid levels and market exuberance knows no bounds - price discovery is all about finding the next chump to buy from you.
I think a lot of people would instinctively think that’s too much equity for retirement but it depends on a lot of factors. If you’ve been contributing to SS all you working life then that benefit is probably a reasonably big “off balance sheet” item that is basically fixed income.
I’m now less than a year to retirement at age 56, and I’m hunkered down. One of the biggest risks right around the late working and early retirement years is sequence of returns risk. If you have enough cash and income from other sources, like SS, spouse working, pensions, rental income, then you can weather a 50% hit to the stock portion of your 60/40 portfolio, but the more you are relying on that portfolio for retirement income, the higher your bond allocation should be* in these vulnerable years. After the initial shock to the portfolio of switching from accumulation to drawdown passes without disaster, returning to a higher stock allocation (60/40ish or maybe slightly higher) over several years makes sense, as you will need that growth to avoid running out of money.
Yup. Can’t even imagine having a kid, especially now.
Maybe if we lived in a first world country with things like parental leave and universal health care we would have considered it, but hell fucking no in USA #61.
Even in Glorious Socialist Canada raising a kid is basically a vow of poverty in old age. You’re basically forced to choose between providing more for your kids or building up a personal nest egg for your own retirement. People are not wired to make a balanced judgment call on that.
Oil stonks might be turning the corner. I’m tempted to pull out some of my FXE and put it into oil cos (in addition to the 1/4 I already have in them). But my plan has always been to mitigate a big drop and lock in the gains. I still feel like back to school/college + winter could be a disaster enough to even affect stonks.
In shocking developments banks don’t give a fuck about scams, terrorism, human trafficking, drugs and money laundering. Speaking to a friend in finance about it he was glib in saying governments won’t do anything and that bank shares were fantastic value now. May be right.
