I haven’t talked about safe withdrawal rates (SWR) in a while. For earlier discussions on what the SWR is on how to use it in retirement see the series of posts here. The SWR basically determines what is the maximum a retiree can withdraw from their portfolio every year and Read more…
That dreaded time of year is fast approaching. Yep, tax time. As we barrel to that dreaded time I’d thought I’d touch on an often overlooked tool for investors, tax loss harvesting. Used appropriately, it can reduce the burden of capital gain taxes in retirement and also be a great Read more…
In my last post I described the commutative property for dividends, i.e. that a 3% div stock with a 2% growth rate is exactly the same as a 2% div stock with a 3% div growth rate. I showed that the commutative property only holds for investments in non-taxable accounts Read more…
Sometimes it is good to get back to basics. After a recent conversation with a family member, an elementary school teacher, about the school’s decision to rename improper fractions into something else (no, I’m not joking) I ended up thinking about some dividend basics. One of the basic properties in Read more…
In my Time to buy munis? post the other day I think I left out a couple of key elements in my desire to keep the post from becoming too long. As I said in my last paragraph, an even slightly aggressive income investor may want to look at muni Read more…
I’ve been looking at municipal bonds recently. Whenever I see a large sell off in any asset class accompanied with a lot of media hype the contrarian hairs in the back of my neck tend to perk up. All markets tend to over react more often than not. These over Read more…
In my 2011 outlook post earlier this month I mentioned that I had raised the cash portion of my portfolio to 40%. I did this by selling out of my commodity positions. A recent post I read at Pragmatic Capitalism reminded of me of this and that I should explicitly Read more…
Happy New Year everyone! I hope you had a great 2010 and wish you all the best in 2011. For my first post of the year I wanted to review my 2010 results and highlight a few real successes and of course some bad trades as well. Lets get right Read more…
I am purposely trying to be as dramatic as possible with the title of this post without distorting its meaning. This post is another in my series of dividend posts trying to emphasize just how important dividends are to investor stock returns. To that end I recently ran across a Read more…
In an earlier post I introduced a method to time the market, based on the 200-day moving average, that produced higher investment returns, lower volatility, and lower drawdowns than a buy and hold portfolio. As I’ve stated here many times lower drawdowns (max principal loss in any period) is critical Read more…
The holidays are here and its made posting a bit tougher. Its hard to work on a post with family members all around, left over turkey and pumpkin pie all over the place. Not that I am complaining. For today, I found a couple of interesting charts on inflation. Its Read more…