ok so i’m hearing completely different things from different people and now i’m confused. I thought the rule was that you can take out the money you personally contributed to a Roth IRA whenever you want without taxes or the 10% penalty, and that it’s only the investment earnings that have restrictions.

Like if I put in $7,000 and it grows to $8,500, could I take out just the original $7,000 with no penalty?

My friends keep telling me that’s wrong and that if you’re under 59½ you get penalized for taking anything out of a Roth IRA.

Am I missing something?

I’m 26, make six figures, and currently save about $2,000 a month. Right now, that money is mostly sitting in a bank account earning very little interest, and I’d like to start putting it to work.

I’m not looking for random investment suggestions or to spread my money across a bunch of things without understanding them. I want to make informed, long-term decisions, so I’m looking for topics and investment strategies that are worth researching.

What are some areas you think I should learn about? For example, S&P 500, index funds, ETFs, real estate, retirement accounts, dividend investing, etc. I’d really appreciate any recommendations on what to research and why. Thanks!

Basically, title. I am not bothered by the losses (well, bothered maybe, but it doesn't scare me). If it helps, I am 44 and this is my only retirement account. Next thing to research is a retirement account for self-employed folks. Thank you!

Screenshot of Portfolio

Hi all! I've recently moved to the US, and likely won't be here for the long run (maybe a few years). I've been a big fan of invest in the whole market, with a bias towards tech, and set and forget. My options where I lived before were much simpler and easier to manage, but that's not so much the case here. I'm hoping to have some people look at my portfolio and let me know if I'm doing anything extremely wrong. I guess % allocation is somewhat up to the individual, so I understand that biases will exist, but if I've chosen the wrong asset completely for example, please let me know lol.

Fidelity - $225k

• 401k: $37k (100% Vanguard Target 2055)
• HSA: $5k (100% FZROX)
• Individual: $183k (77% FZROX, 18% FXAIX, 5% FZILX)

Schwabb - $60k

• 100% company RSU (FAANG)

Notes

• I will sell the RSU and re-invest into Fidelity, I'm just outside of a trading window right now.
• I know I have zero bonds, but since I might have to liquidate at some point in the next 5 years I believe these aren't a good idea?
• 33M, TC ~$800k (new salary, hence my accounts don't reflect this)

Hi, I have started a new job about a year and a half ago. I was able to opt for the Employee Stock Purchase Plan at the beginning of this year at a 15% discount which I did. In July the stock options paid out.

The stock currently sits in my Fidelity TOD account and it's only a few thousand dollars. I wanted to move it to my Roth IRA account and re-invest in ETFs which out perform my company stock.

If I was to sell those stocks and move that cash to other accounts for reinvesting, what would be the tax hit?

I live in the state on Connecticut if that matters.

Thank you for your time.

I work for the sate of CA. So I have a few options... Currently I am investing into a 457 with a roth option as well. I was thinking about separating the roth portion into a roth 401k. I am pretty sure I am able to do that? Mainly I just wanted to see if that makes sense? Currently in the 457 all money is combined between the pre tax and the roth. I have to dig in to see the individual amounts between the two. I mainly want to just make it easier to see everything by separating them. And lastly is there a huge difference between a roth 457 or roth 401k roth, just to make sure I am not missing out on anything if I where to try to separate everything?

TRJLX. 2050 retirement fund. 40 yo. Mid 6 figures in the accounts, but growing decently between a 403b with match and a 457, both maxed every year. It's got a fairly long glide path and it's almost 100% equities at the moment. The only complicating factor is that I don't have access to Vanguard ETFs in this account. That being said, I see no reason to pay them a few thousand dollars a year to just do nothing. I still hold student debt (~60k) at 6% and I won't buy bonds until that is paid off.

I think the obvious answer is to just sell it all and try to approximate something close to VT, but I don't really know the right tickers for Fidelity funds.

Is there any reason why I shouldn't just do this myself?

My wife and I are both 56, have approx. $1.65MM combined with half in workplace retierment vehicles, and the other with a paid brokerage with a 1-1.5% AUM fee. I don't like that fee! We would like to retire at 60. Am I too late to the Boglehead way to really gain any useful traction on growing that half of our money? I venture a guess that saving the fee's alone would warrent a soft no to that question. The main reason we chose an active managed brokerage was so that we wouldn't have to worry about manually moving money around trying to capture the highs and soften the lows. But... I just can't get comfortable with the fees at this point of nearly $9500 a year.

Talk to me, comfort me, tell me what to do, give me a hug! = )

Seriously, am I too late to make a meaning full switch to a Boglehead approach?

edit: Thank you everyone! I’m going to spend several days looking up your recommendations to make the best changes for myself and my family. I value your responses very much.
The “research “ I could have done on my own, without your guidance, would have been corrupted with advertising and would have wasted a lot of my time (and that would be the best case scenario.)

Hi there! I’m new here. I am currently invested with Ameriprise for retirement. They helped me back when I owned a business and had retirement funds for all of the employees, but I am coming to the conclusion that my relationship with them makes a less sense now.
Due to friend and family dramatics, I’m not going to close that account immediately. However, I am starting to read Bogle’s The Little Book of Common Sense Investing, and I’ve been lurking on this subreddit for months. I have some cash doing nothing in a checking account, more than what I need for an emergency fund. What website do you recommend that I use to invest? Vanguard? Robin hood? One of the many others?

I am 70 and retired. My priorities in investing are cash flow, safety, and preserving my principal. Growth is secondary.

About one-third of our income comes from my wife's and my Social Security benefits. (I waited until age 70 to begin collecting Social Security, so my benefit is larger than average.) Another one-third comes from rental property income and the sale of a small business. The final one-third comes from interest earned on a mix of short-term Treasury bills, CDs, municipal bonds, and a few agency bonds.

By God's grace, our income exceeds our expenses, and I am very thankful for that.

Regarding the last one-third of our income, I feel comfortable making reinvestment decisions as those investments mature. Again, by God's grace, I believe I have a good understanding of how to reinvest the proceeds, and I genuinely enjoy doing it—at least for now.

However, statistically, there is a good chance my wife will outlive me. She has absolutely no interest in monitoring our accounts each week or making decisions about where to reinvest funds as investments mature.

So here's my question:

Rather than hiring a financial advisor, if you were thinking long term, how would you simplify this portfolio so it wouldn't require regular monitoring or ongoing reinvestment decisions? Safety and reliable income are my highest priorities. As my current investments mature, where would you recommend putting that money to make the portfolio as simple and hands-off as possible while still preserving those goals?

My husband and I are looking for some advice on what to do with our monthly surplus.

We’re in our early 30s with one baby. We max out all of our retirement accounts, and after expenses and retirement contributions we still have about $5,000/month left to save or invest.

We currently have about $100k in a high-yield savings account earning around 3.5%. No debt and paid off vehicles. We live in a very high cost of living area where renting is still significantly cheaper than buying a comparable home.

We go back and forth on whether we should buy eventually. Having a baby makes the idea of owning more appealing for stability, but financially renting still seems to make more sense. We also don’t have a specific timeline for buying.

One other factor is that we expect to eventually inherit family property that we’d ideally like to build a home on, but realistically that may be 10+ years away, so we don’t want to base our current financial decisions on something that isn’t imminent.

Our question is whether we should continue putting our extra $5k/month into the HYSA to build a larger down payment, or start investing that money in a low-cost total market index fund instead.

My concern is that if we keep everything in cash, we’re missing out on years of market growth. On the other hand, if we invest it and decide we want to buy in a few years, we could be forced to sell during a downturn.
How would you approach this? Is there a point where an uncertain home purchase is far enough in the future that investing becomes the better choice? I’d especially love to hear from people in HCOL areas who continued renting or delayed buying while investing instead.

Edit to add: the 100k includes our emergency fund.
We currently pay $3,100 rent, and a house would cost us $700k+ but is complicated by living on the CA/NV border with differences in property taxes and housing costs.

Hey everyone,

Pretty much the title. I started working post grad and am currently receiving a 100k salary. I am stuck between choosing a traditional 401k or a Roth 401k. I currently have it set up as a Roth 401k as I heard that we are able to take out contributions from it.

Let’s say I already have an emergency fund, I am maxing out my Roth IRA, and cannot invest in HSA yet (on parents insurance still). Would it be better to keep it as a Roth 401k for the potential flexibility and no future tax or save on taxes now with a traditional and potentially invest a larger percentage since I am saving?

TL;DR: Recently opened Roth IRAs for both myself and husband at Fidelity, all money currently still in cash. Then husband started new job with 401K at Vanguard. Trying to figure out if it’s worth it to switch the IRAs to Vanguard, for ease of rebalancing long term.

More detail:
I discovered Bogleheads last summer and read Bogleheads Guide to Investing. Since then, I have been working at getting my personal finances in order. We increased how much we are saving, increasing my husband’s 401K contribution, maxing out HSAs, and saving to contribute to IRAs for the first time since buying our house. I have a Roth IRA at Merrill edge (Guided Investing which I imagine is fee heavy) but wanted to go with Vanguard or Fidelity. I picked Fidelity because we already have a 529 there and I figured it would be easier. So we each opened Roth IRAs at tax time and make 7000 contributions for last tax year before filing our taxes. However in March my husband left his job and was unemployed for a few months before thankfully getting a job in a different field that he is very happy with. We found out in May when he started that his 401K is at… Vanguard. The thing is the money is all still in cash (I know, its bad as it’s been 3 months it could have been in the market but I was holding it as an emergency fund while he was unemployed and then frozen by decision fatigue about whether to switch brokerages before investing), so while it would be a pain I could still move it without any financial implications of having to sell/rebuy investments.

So my question is, how much more convenient is it to have most of the retirement accounts in one place? I know it’s definitely do-able even with them separate I just don’t know if I’d gain benefits like in terms of cross account assets allocation analysis that would help with rebalancing that would make it worth it.

Also- I want to move my Merrill money as well as again I’m probably paying stupid fees but intimidated by understanding the implications of moving money that’s invested. Any advice on either front is welcome.

I will probably open a 403b and/or 457 in the future and I think I have both Fidelity or Vanguard options for at least the 403b. But it is “managed” by a company called TSA Consulting so maybe what I’m seeing are just fund options? I’m not totally sure.

In my Roth I did a lump sum into a TDF to start the account, and now I added about 3 shares of VTI to the account! The TDF already has 50% invested into the US total stock market so was that a weird move?

Which fund should I add next to my ROTH? 😎

Hi all,

I notice that some brokerages offer to match 3% or so when you transfer IRAs from somewhere else. Is there any reason not to just contribute up to the 7.5k max to a vanguard roth every year (I do it backdoor because I have a $0 Roth contribution limit) and then at the end of each year transfer the 7,500 to another brokerage for the matching? Any downside Im missing?

Hi there,

A while back, I started getting interested in investing (way too late, at mid-30s). Someone recommended The Litle Book of Common Sense Investing. After finishing, I quickly realized that passive investing is the way to go for a risk-averse person like myself.

I started doing research and made myself an investment plan. I want to follow Bogle's approach as close as possible, though I gave myself some flexibility due to personal circumstances. Most notably:

• I'm based in Taiwan, so I can't directly invest in the types of index funds that Bogle promotes.
• I've got varying monthly expenses and a kid, so I'm not able to consistently set aside a fixed amount of money.

Trying to keep true to the principles of time in the market, diversify, and minimizing cost, I came up with the following structure:

Some clarification about this setup:

• For tax purposes, all funds are based in Taiwan, including the one that tracks the S&P500
• I have 2-3 dividend-generation ETFs to generate income that I reinvest in my two auto-compounding funds. This is to offset the inability to set aside a set amount each month.
• I may re-evaluate (or cut out entirely) those ETFs in the future if I have more money available to dedicate to investing

Overall, how effective would this approach be according to Boglenomics?

My brother-in-law keeps telling me that his financial advisor has some kind of insurance that guarantees he sees at least a 6% return no matter what the market does. He feels like his portfolio is bulletproof because of this. I tried telling him that there is no such thing as bulletproof in the investing world. I asked him for info on the insurance he claims to have. He always says he will find out what it is, then he never follows through. Is there actually something like this out there?

Bloomberg article

I think I'm probably what the kids call "Coast FIRE" - I have substantial savings for retirement from previous higher-paying work and a reasonably non-stressful job that pays my expenses. I'm in my late 40s. My paycheck income is around $70k/year pretax but a bit lower this year because I took some time off in between old career and new job. I file single and itemize my deductions but it's only a little bit over the standard deduction most years.

Over the past several years I've mostly been maxing out my work SIMPLE IRA and contributing to a brokerage account (high income + existing traditional IRA = no Trad/Roth contributions). My current breakdown by account type is approximately this:

48% Tax deferred (SIMPLE/Traditional IRA/a little bit of 403(b))
45% Taxable brokerage (almost all LT and held at a gain)
7% Roth IRA

I'm not sure whether it's worth it to try and shenanigan-ize more money out of taxable and/or into the Roth, especially given that I'm only 10-15 years away from being able to access all of it without penalty. I'm not really planning to actively save much more for retirement (which feels VERY WEIRD), and I'm planning to work at least a little bit (certainly enough to be able to contribute to IRAs) until at least age 65. I'm wondering if it makes sense to move things around some. Stuff like:

• use the dividends from the brokerage account to fund Roth IRA contributions (seems like a no-brainer)
• contribute to my employer's 401(k) to lower my taxable income and sell some of the brokerage investments at 0% LTCG to live off of? (this feels complicated, also I'll pay state taxes on LTCG)
• Roth conversion? But maybe wait for even lower-income years?

Any thoughts?

(Just saw this post from a few days ago and realize it asks some similar questions! https://www.reddit.com/r/Bogleheads/comments/1ux1il6/strategy_during_periods_of_being_in_low_tax/)

As stock pickers face greater challenges, passive investors (including us Bogleheads) will be exposed to more risk as asset prices become less efficient.

I'm not sure what Jack Bogle would say about this. Perhaps that the lesson is not to abandon indexing, but to understand it more clearly: as more capital moves into passive funds, the market’s own plumbing can create a drag on the most distinctive active portfolios, making it harder to separate skill from structural headwinds. The answer, as ever, would still be low costs, broad diversification, and a long-term discipline—but with a sharper warning that rising passive dominance can change the game for active managers, so investors should judge them with that in mind.

A more radical move might be to allocate a small percentage of the portfolio to active funds, if and when active managers finally outperform indexes.

Full paper can be found here.

The more often I check my portfolio, the more tempted I am to change something.

Market goes up- Should I invest more?
Market goes down- Should I do something?
Someone posts a huge gain- Am I doing this wrong?

Meanwhile, my actual plan is still the same.

I’m starting to think the best thing I can do for my portfolio is simply check it less.

Not because I don't care about my money.

Probably because I care about it enough to overthink every small movement.

How often do yall actually check your portfolio?

Warren Buffet mentioned that the current market is resembling a casino where most are gambling (to paraphrase what he said) AND Berkshire is sitting on a ton of cash. Do Bogleheads still recommend staying the course (“VT & chill”)?

Patrick Boyle has an awesome YouTube channel and his latest video is practically an advertisement for being a Boglehead. He looks at the situation in South Korea where it is simultaneously the best performing market in the world and at the same time retail investors are getting wiped out. The reason? Instead of just buying an index and letting it grow, the "Ants" (think Wall Street Bets Apes) are addicted to leverage and trying to time the market.

The most important part starts at the 23:41 mark. He describes an experiment where students were given $25 to bet on a coin flipping game where they were told the coin would come up heads 60% of the time. Lots of math but there should be no way to lose in that situation yet 28% lost all their money and only 20% hit the maximum.

He talks about the lesson about leverage - "Leverage doesnt improve the thing you own...all it does is shorten the time you are allowed to be wrong."

We are all going to get something wrong in our investing. It is absolutely inevitable. What Bogle does is reduce the number of things that you can get wrong to the bare minimum - time and volume. Putting more in earlier is ALWAYS going to be something you wished you had done. Bogle cant eliminate that because time travel isnt possible. But it can eliminate things like "I wish I had not (bought/sold) (stock/asset) (day/time)." Buy the market, get market returns. Over a long enough time frame, you will come out ahead. Get cute and gamble and the house will always win.

Hi, longtime Bogleheader. So did the indexes end up having to buy SpaceX at the higher post IPO price? Or did it come back to earth (see what I did there) before they (we all) bought?

So I just turned 25 a few days ago and I need some advice and ideas on what to do with my money. Here is what I have so far.

CD —> 64k —> APY 4.10% —> Maturity 1.7 yrs
CD —> 45k —> APY 4.00% —> Maturity 9 mos
401k —> 18.2k
ROTH IRA —> 7.6k
SAVINGS —> about 10k

As you can see I have a ton of money in my CD’s. This is because I didn’t know much about investing when I was younger so my dad advised me to start with those years ago since they’re safe and simple. I’ve been thinking about opening a brokerage but I feel like maxing out my 401k should be my priority. What do you guys think? I currently have 12% contributions and I want to bump that up to 70% and I already maxed my Roth IRA for the year. Fortunately, I have the luxury to live at home for all this time so I can afford to minimize my take home pay without stress. Any advice much appreciated