Author - Mark Hume

STOP

Have you already filed your 2020 taxes?

Is your Adjusted Gross Income (AGI) in the neighborhood or $150k - $200k?  What?.....you don’t know this number off the top of your head???   j/k

If you have not filed your 2020 taxes and you think your AGI is in this vicinity you need to….

• Nick Saban
• Dabo Sweeney

These are the only active football coaches who have won multiple national championships.  When Alabama hired Nick Saban, there were only two active college football coaches with multiple national championships:  Bobby Bowden and Pete Carroll.  Bowden was two years away from retirement and Carroll was becoming mired in sca

Our final installment of Know What You Own is a perfect illustration that you cannot make assumptions based on the title of a fund.

You can’t find a less expense or more simplistic equity fund than an S&P 500 index fund.  The two tickers above, SPY & VOO do just that:  Mimic the S&P 500 index.

That same newsletter from Part 1 just published another article.  This one was on the real estate market. 

And while it was not as misleading as the Nasdaq vs tech fund issue, it did completely gloss over the largest sectors of this asset class.

We recently received a free trial for a Substack newsletter on finance.  I was browsing a recent post and a headline caught my eye: “How do I find a lower cost alternative to Nasdaq ETF QQQ?”

The proposal:  Deposit a dollar into your 16yo child’s Roth IRA for every dollar they earn at their first job up to $6,000.  Do this through the year they graduate college.

A question: How much tax-free money does this provide them at age 70 assuming 8% annualized returns?

The answer:  $2.3M

Helping our clients implement “tax-smart” strategies is where I believe we provide a substantial amount of value. Anyone who is a DIY investor can open a Vanguard account and fund an S&P 500 Index Fund on a regular basis. Many of those that do this think they have just equaled the work of a financial advisor and saved themselves a lot of money in fees.

Most of the rhetoric that you hear in financial media is typically melodramatic. So, when there is an economic crisis caused by a health crisis you can expect it to be even worse. And it is.

After 10 years of underperformance, gold is back near its all-time high achieved in 2011. Gold is a unique asset in the public investing world. In the past, it was tied to currency. Some investors still consider it a store of value and a place to put their money during times of uncertainty.

The SECURE Act has taken away the ability to stretch an inherited IRA out over someone’s lifetime. What happens when you lose your flexibility?

In the case of inheriting a Traditional IRA, you are required to concentrate your tax liability. The new law requires you to distribute all assets from the inherited account within 10 years.