I know Mitt Romney is part of the two-party system, but he also stood up against his party by voting for Trump's impeachment and not once endorsing Trump for President.

This is his closing speech since he's retiring, and I think the message is worth listening to, especially since it seems to be an end of a moderate era for the GOP.

Anyway, perhaps this can open a discussion about the value of centrist politicians. Or whatever other thoughts you may have.

I thought this was an interesting video and I think it does a good job explaining at least part of why Trump won. Here's the original paper if you're interested.

I think the economy was a major factor in deciding this election, but obviously there are a lot of other factors to consider, such as the DNC not having a primary, Biden having a poor approval rating, and concerns around China and Russia, among a host of others. However, this seems to do a fantastic job explaining the results as well.

What do you think? Do you think public perception of the economy and political party influence on the economy was a significant factor in this election? Do you think that indicates a decent likelihood of either an economic correction or at least reduced returns at some point in Trump's presidency?

With Thanksgiving in the US right around the corner, I found this article about gratitude from a FI perspective. This is from a few years ago, but the message is evergreen.

Link is to the Bogleheads forum post where someone posted a link back in August. Before now, you had to call in to request the change, and it could take a few days, but now it's online and allegedly is done the next day.

I don't know when they added this, but I think it was sometime this year because I remember considering it last EOY (that's when I usually rebalance).

Here is a direct link, or you can get there on the website: Transact > Buy & Sell > Convert Vanguard mutual funds to ETFs. You can select either a number of shares or a percent of the total position.

As to why you may want to do this, here are a few reasons:

• converting shares classes isn't a taxable event (but you can't go ETF -> mutual fund)
• ETFs have a slighly lower ER (0.01-0.02% in most cases, so not huge)
• easier if you want to ACATS transfer shares to a different brokerage
• if you have a mix of ETFs and mutual funds, rebalancing between ETFs is easier, so moving a portion of your mutual funds to ETFs may be worthwhile

Have you taken advantage of Vanguard's mutual fund -> ETF conversion? Do you think you'll use this new online tool?

Link is to an older podcast episode, and The Money Guy YouTube channel occasionally talks about FINE instead of FIRE.

Here's the definitions of each:

• FINE - Financial Independence Next Endeavor
• FIRE - Financial Independence Retire Early

Basically, FINE focuses on what you plan to do after achieving financial independence, whereas FIRE tends to focus on cessation of working. I always called it FI (leave off the retirement part), but I suppose FINE works.

Anyway, just wondering what everyone else is planning to do once they hit Financial Independence, whether that's retirement or starting something new. I'll leave mine in the comments.

This is a link to a spreadsheet to help determine which funds to place into taxable vs tax-advantaged space.

Here is a link to the Bogleheads wiki about tax-efficient fund placement:

If all else is equal, international funds have a small tax advantage over US funds, because they are eligible for the foreign tax credit.

TL;DR:

• put international funds in taxable and file for the foreign tax credit each year
• the total difference is like 0.1-0.2%, so optimizing fees may be more impactful than going through this exercise

This wasn't good enough for me, especially as I'm looking into applying a small-cap tilt to my portfolio and really like optimizing things, so I went digging for more information.

Foreign Tax Credit

When you own stocks or otherwise make money in another country, that other country may charge taxes, and the IRS will also charge taxes on any dividends you receive, regardless of source. This ends up in double taxation, because you're being taxed on your dividends by both the US and the foreign country.

To eliminate the double taxation, you can file form 1116 to recoup the foreign taxes by getting a credit (or deduction, but that's rarely better). This Bogleheads wiki doc has more information if you want it.

For many funds (e.g. VXUS), the FTC ends up being something like 0.25%, so if it's in a tax-advantaged account, you'd end up with a 0.25% tax drag on your investments due to foreign taxes you can't recoup.

Tax-efficiency

When deciding where to place funds, you generally want fewer dividends and capital gains in your taxable brokerage accounts and to put the higher dividend-yielding assets in your tax-advantaged accounts. And if you have to have capital gains, you want to make sure your taxable account has mostly qualified capital gains so they're taxed at the long-term capital gains rate instead of the (in most cases) higher income tax rate.

However, the foreign tax credit changes things, since you can only get it if your investments are in a taxable brokerage account. There are cases where you'd prefer a higher total dividend in your taxable account provided the tax credit more than makes up for the difference in total taxes.

Worked example w/ VTI and VXUS

For example, let's say you have equivalent amounts of VXUS and VTI. VXUS has 3.34% total dividend yield whereas VTI has 1.66% (both as-of 2021). So you'd want VXUS in tax advantaged and VTI in taxable, right? Wrong. The total taxes for both are:

• VXUS - 0.56%, of which 0.26% is recoverable foreign taxes, for a net of 0.30%
• VTI - 0.32%

Here are two scenarios (assuming you have no state income tax, are in the 22% bracket w/ 15% LTCG):

• VTI in taxable - VXUS pays 0.26% in foreign taxes, for a total tax bill of 0.26% (0.26% + 0.26) / 2
• VXUS in taxable - 0.30% net taxes (0.56% - 0.26%), for a total tax bill of 0.15% (0.30% / 2)

So in this case, holding VXUS in taxable saves about 0.11% in total taxes paid.

Added notes

I added some Avantis funds (known for value funds) on here that are interesting:

• AVUV - US small-cap value fund
• AVDV - developed markets small-cap value fund
• AVES - emerging markets value fund

So please, make a copy and mess around with your own figures. You can add some funds as well if you like, just fill in the bolded sections in the "funds" tab and it should work for you.

I'd appreciate a second pair of eyes as well if you feel so inclined.

Anyway, do you bother with adjust fund placement?

I generally don't like to make political posts, but this one has an interesting correlation to some of the culture around FI, which is things we can and can't control (i.e. this older post about circle of control, which echoes The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People).

So even if you're not in the US or just aren't interested anymore in the election (i.e. I already voted last week), there's still some interesting points about what the head of government can and can't do, as well as what the rest of government has and doesn't have control over.

Stocks are all over the place right now, and there's a lot of concern about what might happen after the results are announced. I hope this article can bring a little peace since a lot of what the market and news orgs are worried about aren't really things the President has direct control over, and the rest of government will have a delayed impact.

It's certainly an important decision and there will be significant impacts, but sometimes it helps to take a step back and look past the excitement in the news cycle.

I found the graph at 10:55 to be especially interesting because it shows how someone with around the median income ($65k) can make it to the lower upper class by retirement through some discipline (10% saved per year).

As a quick TL;DW, here are the median incomes, net worth, and percent of population for each class:

• lower - $34k income, $3.4k net worth (many are negative) - 25%
• middle
  • lower - $44k income, $71k net worth - 20%
  • middle - $81k income, $159k net worth - 20%
  • upper - $117k income, $307k net worth - 20%
• upper
  • lower - $189k income, $747k net worth - 10%
  • upper - $378k income, $2.5M net worth - 5%

Some questions to spark discussion:

• Do you agree with his breakdown of the economic classes? Why or why not?
• What strategies do you think someone in each category should take to improve their situation?
• If you don't mind sharing, what class do you think you're in, and does the breakdown match your experience?

I watched this video a couple weeks ago, and while it has nothing to do with FI, I thought it was quite interesting how he divides the economic classes. TL;DW:

• lower class ($34k income, $3400 net worth) - ~25% of population - truly struggle with emergencies and flirt w/ the federal poverty line; net worth is pretty much nothing (often negative!) due to student debt
• middle class - three categories (lower, middle, upper)
  • lower ($44k income, $71k net worth) - ~20% population - identify more with middle-middle class and tend to get into more debt than necessary by trying to keep up with the Joneses, but could be financially stable w/ some discipline
  • middle ($81k income, $159k net worth) - ~20% - financially stable, most of assets are in home
  • upper ($117k income, $307k net worth) - ~20% - passive income and compound interest supplement income; some live paycheck-to-paycheck due to lifestyle inflation (i.e. keep up w/ next group), but some can do really well with investments
• upper class - two categories (lower and upper)
  • lower ($189k income, $747k net worth) - ~10% - specialized professions; most people can get into the lower upper class with discipline (10% savings rate on $65k salary => $787k investments by age 50); little pressure from everyday expenses
  • upper ($378k income, $2.5M net worth) - ~5% - some college grads working as employees, but a lot of these are business owners

At each level, I see two types of people:

• savers - have enough cash to weather emergencies, tend to have upward mobility
• everyone else - tend to stay in that economic class, and may regress in retirement; routinely keep up with the Joneses and stay in debt

I personally have been in the middle to upper middle class for most of my career (started in lower middle class, but that quickly changed), and I'm shooting for lower-upper class to upper-upper class in early retirement. I didn't get any inheritance and don't expect any, and I haven't been particularly lucky with my investments (for every major win, I can show an equal major mistake), I've just been very frugal. Some details:

• car(s) - single car for most of my married life; currently have two at 16 and 17 years old; I do most of my own maintenance
• house - bought in mid-late 20s and haven't moved
• savings rate - was 45%, but it's now 35-40%
• current income - upper-middle class range, might get to lower-upper class if I stick with my career; about half my career was middle-middle class
• FI target - something like $50-60k spending/year, or $1.5-2M; I plan to be FI around mid-40s, and I intend to keep earning income after FI, but the nature of my work will change

Anyway, I really enjoyed this video, and I think it's interesting to compare myself to the various breakdowns, as well as forward to people who argue that the main thing keeping them down is income (despite being middle-middle class or above).

What do you think? Do you agree with the breakdown? What do you think the "minimum" income range is for someone who'd like to pursue FI?

I've been reading Yahoo Finance a bit recently due to all of the shifts in the market, and they have a PF section where they cycle through a variety of PF topics. One of them linked to a retirement calculator, which I had a lot of trouble with as someone looking to retire way earlier than typical, so I decided to go look at a few more and compare them.

Warning: these are pretty US-centric.

Smart Asset retirement calculator

• maxes out at 40% savings rate
• minimum retirement age is based on birth year (i.e. can't retire before today)
• default annual rate of return is 4%? This is worded oddly, because it's called "savings" and is right under "cash savings and investments"
• no option for HSA, but you can lump it in with IRA
• seems to estimate Social Security income, which is cool
• has on option to add a spouse, which was cool

This was was pretty awful, but with some fiddling, I got it to spit out some halfway decent numbers. It seems to be a simple flat return tool, so no backtesting or randomness at all, but it does try to account for taxes and whatnot. That said, it got my tax rate completely wrong for some reason.

I guess this is acceptable for someone to get a rough idea of what retirement looks like, but it was also really fiddly and buggy (i.e. Social Security age kept resetting to 66 for whatever reason).

My 401k provider (Empower)

• minimum retirement age is 50?!
• automatically pulled in elective deferrals and employer match, but it was way off (surprising because it's literally the custodian for my 401k...)
• can link accounts, but can't add any accounts w/o linking (weird, because my old 401k provider that they bought allowed me to)
• assumes 60/30/10 stock/bond/cash split, with no way to adjust it (I'm going 100% stocks)
• links with a budgeting app they have internally? Why would I use my 401k as a budgeting app??
• option to simulate what automatically increasing retirement contributions does (not useful for me, but could help others)
• option to add kids and estimate college expenses, which was cool

This one was absolutely terrible. Not only was it a pain to figure out how to input my numbers, it also didn't really give useful output. Even if I was a typical retiree, I'd still find it largely useless, unless my 401k was literally my only retirement account (which I admit is probably pretty common).

Fidelity brokerage

• retirement age must be greater than current age (can't retire immediately
• lots of estimates for retirement expenses (i.e. no stupid % of income metric)
• can set asset allocation for retirement accounts (domestic, international, bonds, etc)
• can link accounts, or just enter their values
• can add Social Security, and it'll estimate for you if you want
• seems to do some kind of back-testing because portfolio growth isn't a smooth line

All in all, I found Fidelity to be pretty good! It's easy to add all of the accounts and provide as much detail as I'd like, and I feel like the result is pretty realistic.

FiCalc

Primarily for backtesting withdrawal strategies, and it provides a bunch of tools, such as:

• withdrawal strategy - constant dollar, percent of assets, etc
• constant withdrawals (e.g. putting a kid through school, pay off house, etc)
• extra income - i.e. barista FI or whatever
• adjust range of historical data

It won't tell you when you can expect to retire, but it'll tell you your retirement plan's chance of success, which is way more important IMO.

Fire Calc

Primarily backtesting, but there are some knobs you can mess with as well if you click through the tabs:

• pensions/additional income
• future retirement date (plus how much you'll contribute until then)
• withdrawal strategies
• portfolio makeup
• additional portfolio additions (house sale, inheritance) and subtractions (one-time expenses at a certain point in retirement)

This is the first one I used, so it holds a special place in my heart.

What I personally use

I like mucking about with the above, but at the end of the day, I mostly just use my spreadsheet to estimate things. Some specific calculations I find a lot of value in:

• FI Date - EDATE(TODAY(), NPER(...))
• progress toward FI - 1-(NPER(with current assets)/NPER(assuming starting from zero))
• Social Security calculator - this one exists, but it assumes zero inflation going forward; so I wrote my own in my spreadsheet that uses average inflation from my working career going forward, and actual inflation numbers going backward; not used in any calculators, but it's nice as a backup plan
• withdrawal simulator - how much I'd need to withdraw from tax-deferred accounts before RMDs, by SS max age, and SS min age (helps w/ tax planning)

But at the end of the day, the first is the only one that matters. I update my total spending about once/year, my investment accounts when I remember, and my savings rate comes from my budget. I periodically check my FI number against back-tested portfolios, but I've settled on a SWR of 3.5% and assume a 7% real market return.

Conclusion

These aren't the only retirement calculators I've played with, but the easier ones to access (i.e. search results or though 401k) tend to be pretty awful, while the good ones are a bit more hidden away.

I think with a bit of searching, you can find some decent tools without having to DIY. Then again, I prefer to DIY.

Do you have any retirement calculators you like? Do you DIY?