Rollover IRA to Solo 401k
It looks like the Roth IRA conversion rule changes will stick, at least for 2010. There are only three months until the end of 2009. Congress is busy with something else. I don't think they will repeal the current law before the end of the year.
In preparation for converting my non-deductible IRA contributions to Roth IRA in 2010, I'm rolling over the pre-tax portion of my traditional IRA to my solo 401k. I set up the solo 401k last year primarily for this purpose — to provide a harbor for my pre-tax IRA money so I won't get taxed proportionally on my Roth conversion. After the rollover, I should have only one small IRA, consisting of my non-deductible contributions plus or minus market fluctuations from now until I convert in January 2010.
I have my solo 401k with Fidelity. When I called them about the rollover procedures, to my surprise, the rep actually discouraged me from doing so. To his credit, he made valid points. He knew what he was talking about. Fidelity trained them well.
Sold PIMCO Foreign Bond Fund
I sold my entire position in PIMCO Foreign Bond Fund (Unhedged) Institutional (PFUIX). According to its prospectus, this fund invests in
"… Fixed Income Instruments that are economically tied to foreign (non-U.S.) countries, … which may be represented by forwards or derivatives such as options, future contracts or swap agreements."
I bought this fund in late 2004. At the time, there were a lot of talks about the "twin deficits" of United States (budget deficit and trade deficit) and how they would weaken the U.S. dollar. A foreign bond fund protects against a weakening dollar.
Chase Blueprint: Suggested Payment Calculator
By way of a post on the Payments Views blog, The Era of Responsible Credit Card Borrowing Begins Today, I heard that Chase recently launched a new Blueprint service for their credit cards.
In a nutshell, Blueprint is a fancy suggested payment calculator. For customers who carry a balance, Blueprint lets them set up some rules and helps them calculate how much they should pay based on those rules.
In an ideal world, nobody carries a balance on their credit cards and everybody always pays in full. Because we are not in an ideal world, Blueprint has its place.
Financial Times Business Book of the Year 2009 Shortlists
Every year, Financial Times newspaper gives out a Business Book of the Year award. It's officially known as the Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of Year Award. Last year's winner was When Markets Collide by Mohamed El-Erian of PIMCO.
The shortlist of candidates for the 2009 award includes:
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Animal Spirits by George Akerlof and Robert Shiller, economics professors at Berkeley and Yale, about how human psychology affects macroeconomics. |
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Good Value by Stephen Green, CEO of HSBC, about money and morality. |
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Imagining India by Nandan Nilekani, co-chairman of InfoSys, a large IT outsourcing company in India, about India and globalization. |
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In Fed We Trust by David Wessel about the recent financial crisis. |
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Lords of Finance by Liaquat Ahamed, an investment manager, about the Great Depression. |
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The Match King by Frank Partnoy about a fraud in 1920s. |
Investing Is Simple
I haven't written much about investing lately, because investing is simple and I think I pretty much covered everything already. You come up with an asset allocation, open some accounts, pick a few index funds, and you are done. Once in a while you see if anything is out of whack and you redirect your new money to wherever is lagging. It's not complicated at all.
Fellow blogger Mike Piper apparently agrees. He wrote a small book called Investing Made Simple. He's making the PDF available as a free download until October 1. [Free PDF download is no longer available.]
Table of Contents » Read more …
The Right Lessons and The Wrong Lessons
It's the one year anniversary of the fall of Lehman Brothers. The media marked that event as the start date of the financial crisis. Several financial podcasts I listen to all ran features on "lessons from the financial crisis." I'm more interested in the lessons at a personal level, not so much at the macroeconomic level because there's nothing I can do about macroeconomics.
After the dot com debacle, people learned it's bad to speculate in stocks, but they also learned they can't lose money in real estate. We all know how that lesson worked out. Today, after another crisis, people are learning more lessons. Will all of them be the right lessons?
Sell at the first sign of trouble. An acquaintance told me she moved all her stock funds into money market in early 2008 because she got nervous from the news of mortgage writedowns. That move was brilliant. It saved her tens of thousands of dollars. She dodged the proverbial freight train. I'm sure she will take that to heart — "when you see trouble, sell." Is it the right lesson? I'm not so sure.
Feel-Good Retirement Savings Initiatives
Over the Labor Day weekend, the Obama administration announced some new retirement savings initiatives that are supposed to help Americans save money for their retirement. Although they are all well intentioned, I doubt they will have a material impact on the overall picture of retirement savings in America. I call them feel-good measures because the new initiatives merely clarify existing laws and regulations. Let's look at them one by one.
1. Sample language for 401k plan auto-enrollment. The IRS gave employers some sample language for adding auto-enrollment to their 401k or SIMPLE IRA plans. The IRS also made it clear it's legal to automatically increase the employees' contribution percentages.
Half of the workforce does not have a retirement savings plan at work. Auto-enrollment can't help if you don't have a plan to begin with. For the other half, the employers will still have to take the trouble to add auto-enrollment. After that, auto-enrollment usually only covers new employees. Employers very rarely re-auto-enroll existing employees if they are not already enrolled. So we are only talking about a low single digit percent of the workforce here.
Mortgage Rates Back to April Lows
Back in April, I refinanced my mortgage. The timing was good. I caught a low point. The rates went up subsequently. I just noticed the rates have dropped back to the same levels again.
If you missed the April lows, now you have another chance to start calling for refinance rates. The benchmark rate for 30-year fixed should be 5.0%, no point. For 15-year fixed, it should be 4.5%, no point. Those are the rates I see at the lender I used last time. If your current mortgage rate is higher than the rates for a no-cost refi, refinancing will save you money from day one.
I will start watching the rates. If the rate drops another quarter percent, I will refinance again.
Super-Easy DIY Car Maintenance
The title says it all. Some car maintenance jobs are very easy. If you do them yourself, you can save hundreds of dollars. I'm not a handy person at all. I have never operated a drill (don't laugh). If I'm able to do some simple maintenance for my car, I'm sure you can too.
Windshield Wiper Blades. These are the easiest. Press a clip, slide off, and slide on the replacement. Time: 5 minutes. Cost: about $10 each.
Battery. The dealership does a vehicle inspection for me whenever they do an oil change. They told me my battery's cranking power was low and they would charge me $150 to replace it. I went to Wal-Mart. They install the battery for free if you buy it there. I waited nearly two hours and it still wasn't my turn yet. I got fed up and just bought the battery.
Download Price Quotes to Microsoft Money After Microsoft Pulls the Plug
There is a small piece of unfinished business in my series for replacing Microsoft Money. After giving my requirements and looking at Quicken, GnuCash, and Moneydance, I came upon two OFX scripts for downloading transactions directly from the financial institutions, outside of Microsoft Money.
Those scripts will take care of the transactions. They will also update the prices for the securities held in the investment accounts that provide transaction download. However, if you have holdings in accounts that do not provide transaction download, the prices for those holdings are still not updated.
With the help of a book from the library, Learning Python, and a lot of Googling, I came up with a new script that gets the quotes from Yahoo! and writes a dummy OFX file for importing into Microsoft Money. Being a Python newbie, I'm sure the script can be made much more elegant, but what I have now works.
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