I have been engaged for some years in an effort to reexamine Jeremy Siegel’s dual thesis: that over any long interval stocks will beat bonds, and likewise, that over long intervals stocks can be expected to deliver a real return on the order of 6.6%, doubling wealth every eleven years.…
I’ve written a paper titled, “When and for Whom Are Roth Conversions Most Beneficial?” It can be downloaded from ssrn.com here. [update 10/5/2021: I have started to revise this paper. A new spreadsheet is available for download here ] An example of the spreadsheets I used to explore conversion outcomes in…
I thought I’d plunged a stake into the heart of the Roth beast with my Journal of Financial Planning article in 2008. But no. Even my favorite and most highly esteemed financial columnist, Jason Zweig of the Wall Street Journal, has succumbed to the siren song of Roth. Once more…
The paper describing the data collection for the new database can be downloaded at SSRN, Working Paper # 3011486. This post serves mostly to provide a link to the spreadsheet that contains the data (link at bottom of post). The new database is intended for scholarly use. I don’t know…
I’ve been investing in and following the stock market for almost 35 years now. By the mid-1990s, twenty years ago, I was married, with a family portfolio worth over $100,000, and a well-established daily routine of reading about each day’s stock market action in the morning newspaper. I read stock…
In tax slang, a donut hole occurs when a subsidy or tax rate goes down, and then back up again. The term entered the lexicon when the Medicare D prescription program was introduced. Participants had their drug purchases covered for the first $2000 or so, and then had to bear all…
Your marginal rate is the tax you pay on the next dollar of income, expressed as a percentage. This rate may be your single most powerful financial planning tool. It tells you how much of your next pay raise can be spent, versus how much will go to the government.…
How many times have you read that Roth accounts will be “tax free forever?” Alas, forever is a very long time, and also not a word much used by adults, outside of church. So consider this post a kind of apostasy. It may cost you your faith in Roth. The present income…
Ever since Roth conversions were liberalized in 2006, a steady stream of accounts have appeared in various media outlets, purporting to show that you ought to do a Roth conversion. Most accounts wave the bloody shirt of Required Minimum Distributions (RMD), and the dread tax burden you will someday suffer,…