Category: 401k and 403b

Mailbag–how to get started?

Stocky Leave a comment

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Here’s a question that I received from a reader the other day:

Stocky—my 26-year-old son has saved about $20,000.  Right now it’s just sitting in his checking account.  What should he do with it?

–AK

The first thing is to ask if he “needs” that money for anything in the short-term.  Does he need to buy a car, or is he going to buy a house and use that as a down-payment, or something? 

If the answer to that is “yes”, then he can open an account with Vanguard or Fidelity, and invest the money in a broad bond fund like VBLTX or BND.  That will provide a decent return (about 3-4%).  Of course, there’s a chance that he could lose money, but based on historical data the chances of that are pretty low, and if he did lose money it wouldn’t be a huge percentage of his investment.  This isn’t like stocks.

Investing for the long-term

Now let’s get to the more interesting stuff.  Let’s assume that the $20k is just hard-earned savings that can be invested for the long-term.

401k—The very first place I would start is with his 401k if he has one at work.  Hopefully, he is already contributing to that at some level, and this $20k is on top of that.  The max you can contribute to your 401k in 2019 is $19,000.

With a 401k you can’t really take the $20k he has saved and put it directly into the account, so we have to do it in a bit of a two-step process.

Let’s say in his normal budget he is able to contribute $200 per paycheck into his 401k (that comes to $5200 per year).  That means that he could contribute $13,800 more. 

Crank the percentage up as high as it will go (usually something like 50%), and that will accelerate his contributions until it hits $19k for the year.  Then the law forces the contributions to stop.

That will greatly reduce his paycheck, but then that’s where the $20k he saved comes in.  He can use the $20k he saved to replace the big chunk of his paycheck that went to his 401k.  Actually, since 401k contributions are pre-tax he’ll actually only need to take $11k or so to replace the extra $13,800 he is adding to his 401k.

If he has $20k in the bank he could do this for about 2 years.  Just remember that when his $20k runs out to set the 401k contribution percentage back to a normal level.

As far as investments go, a 401k is meant to be a long-term investment so I would make sure he is invested in some type of broad stock index fund.

IRA—If he doesn’t have a 401k or even if he does, he should open an IRA.  He can do this at any brokerage, but I would suggest Vanguard or Fidelity. 

Here he can contribute directly to an IRA (instead of the two-step process for a 401k).  Once his IRA is open he can contribute up to a limit of $6000.  Just like with the 401k, this money is meant for the long-term, so I would invest it in a stock index fund. 

As he opens his IRA account he’ll also need to decide if he wants to do so with a Roth IRA or a traditional IRA.  I have written extensively on this, and generally his choice should be a traditional IRA (unless his income this year is very low—let’s say below $30k). 

After he’s made his $6k contribution ,that will mean that he’ll have a lot left over.  That takes us to a normal brokerage account.

Brokerage—These are similar to IRAs but without the special tax treatment or contribution limits.  You can open these up at the same place as you do your IRA.  So if you open your IRA up at Vanguard, I would keep it all in the family and open your brokerage account at Vanguard as well.

Once you have contributed to your 401k and IRA for the year, you can put the rest in that same stock index fund.  Next year, especially if he’s going the IRA path, he can just transfer the money from the brokerage mutual fund to the IRA mutual fund and it’s all easy.  Of course, there may be tax implications for this, but that’s one of the reasons why you want to get the money tucked away in a 401k or IRA as fast as you can.

I hope this helps.  Congrats to your son for having suck a strong head start.  Now that he’ll have that money invested, it will be turbo-charged.

Why you should probably have more stocks and less bonds

Stocky Leave a comment
buried-money

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When I wrote my three ingredients post, a few of you commented that I was crazy to have so much of our portfolio in stocks and so little in bonds (less than 1% in bonds).  Did I have a death wish or something?  What if I told you that I think a ton of people are leaving  gobs of money on the table because they are investing too conservatively?  Tell me more, you say.

We know that you need to balance risk and return in our investments.  This is most clearly done when we choose our mix of stocks (more risky, higher average returns) and bonds (less risky, lower average returns).  As an investor gets older they want to shift their asset allocation towards less risky investments because their time horizon is shortening.  We all agree with this.  So where is this hidden pot of gold I’m talking about?

Let’s look at the example of Mr and Mrs Grizzly.  They are both 65 years old and entering retirement.  They worked hard over the years and socked away $1 million that will see them through their golden years.  They do some internet research and learn that a sensible asset allocation in retirement is 40% stocks and 60% bonds, so they invest $400k in stocks and $600k in bonds.  Knowing the long term average returns are 8% for stocks and 4% for bonds, they expect their $1 million nest egg to generate about $56,000 per year ($400k * 8% + $600k *4%) , knowing that some years it will be more and some years it will be less.   So far so good, right?

1 m

THEY ARE LEAVING MAYBE $20,000 PER YEAR ON THE TABLE.  That’s a ton of money.  How can this be?  They seem to be doing everything right.  The answer is they are being way too conservative with their asset allocation.  They shouldn’t be investing $600k in bonds and $400 in stocks; stocks should be a much higher percentage.

Waaaaiiiiiiiittttttttt!!!  But didn’t we agree that about 60% of their portfolio should be in less risky investments?  Yes, we did.  Are you confused yet?

Hidden cash

Here’s what I didn’t tell you.  Mr and Mrs Grizzly have other investments that act a lot like bonds that aren’t included in that $1 million.  Both Mr Grizzly and Mrs Grizzly are eligible for Social Security with their monthly payments being $2000 each.  If Mr Grizzly (age 65) went to a company like Fidelity and bought an annuity that paid him $2000 each month until he died (doesn’t that sound a lot like Social Security), that would cost about $450k.  So in a way, Mr Grizzly’s Social Security payments are acting like a $450k government bond (theoretically it would be more than $450k since the US government has a better credit rating than Fidelity).  And remember that Mrs Grizzly is getting similar payments, so as a couple they have about $900k worth of “bond-ish” investments.

Also, Mr and Mrs Grizzly own their home that they could probably sell for $300k.  They don’t plan on selling but if they ever needed to they could tap the equity in their home either by selling it or doing a reverse mortgage.  So in a way, their house is another savings account for $300k.

If you add that up, all the sudden the picture looks really different.  They have about $950k of Social Security benefits that have the safety of a government bond.  Plus they have that $300k equity in their house.  That’s $1.25 million right there.

Investing your portfolio

So now let’s bring this bad boy full circle.  Remember their $1 million nest egg they were looking to invest?  Look at that in the context of their Social Security and house.  Now their total “assets” are about $2.25 million.  If you believe that the Social Security and house kind of feel like a bond, just those by themselves account for 55% of their portfolio.  If on top of that if you invest 60% of their $1 million nest egg in bonds, they have over 80% of their money in bonds, and that seems way too high.

2 25 m a

On the other hand, let’s say they only put $100k of their nest egg into bonds and the rest into stocks, after you include their social security and home, they’d be at about 60% bonds and 40% stocks.  Isn’t that what they were aiming for the whole time?

2 25 m b

Wow.  It took a long time to get there, Stocky.  The punchline better be worth it.  Remember that with $600k in bonds and $400k in stocks, they had an expected return of about $56,000 per year.  However, if they have $100k in bonds and $900k in stocks, because stocks are more volatile but have a higher expected return, they can expect about $76,000 ($800k * 8% + $100k *4%).  THAT’S $20,000!!! 

But aren’t they taking on a lot more risk to get that extra $20k?  Remember, there’s no such thing as a free lunch.  For sure, but if you look at it in the context of their Social Security benefits and their home, they have a fair amount of cushion from “safe investments” to see them through any rough patches in the stock market.

I wrote this post to show that people really need to take account all the financial resources they have.  In the Grizzly’s case, it was their Social Security benefits and their home.  Others of you may be getting a pension (Medtronic is generous enough to offer the Fox family one) or a second home or a dozen other things like that.

When you take those cash flows into account, all the sudden it seems a lot more reasonable to invest the rest of your money a little more heavily in stocks which you know over the long haul will give you a better return.

Championship—Asset allocation v. Tax optimization

Stocky Leave a comment

Basketball hoop

This is what we’ve all been waiting for.  After two weeks of amazing investing tournament challenge action (just indulge me, will you?), in this post we will crown the champion of investing strategies.  Here we have Asset allocation taking on Tax optimization.  In the Final Four, Asset allocation pounded Index mutual funds with higher returns early on and limiting risk as you approach retirement.  Tax optimization made it two thrillers in a row, beating Savings rate on the strength of major tax savings with a little bit of work and education, but not a lot of monetary sacrifice.  As always, see the disclaimer.

bracket-game 6

Obviously both these strategies have tremendous upside, otherwise they wouldn’t be here.  So how do you pick between them?  It’s no easy task, but for you, my loyal readers, I’m ready to take it on.  Let’s see who cuts down the nets.

 

Reasons for picking Asset allocation:

In some ways Asset allocation seems really easy, since all you’re doing is figuring out what percentage of your portfolio goes into stocks, bonds, and cash.  90% Stocks, 10% bonds, and 0% cash; there, I’m done.  That didn’t seem so hard.  Obviously it’s more complicated than that.  We already know that Asset allocation is critically important throughout your investing time horizon.  When you’re younger you probably want to be mostly in stocks (even now the Fox family is 99% in stocks).  As you approach and ultimately enter retirement you want to be more in bonds, but stocks still probably need to be a significant part of your portfolio.

About 10 or so years ago, the mutual fund companies came out with a really cool innovation called target-date funds.  The basic idea is that these handle your Asset allocation for you.  Imagine today you’re 35 and you want to retire when you’re 60, in 2040.  You could invest in a fund like Vanguard’s Target Retirement 2040, and it will automatically shift your Asset allocation from mostly stocks today (currently it’s about 90% stocks, 10% bonds) to gradually less stocks and more bonds as you get closer to retirement.  It’s been a wonderful innovation that has proven extremely popular among investors.

So there you go.  Problem solved, right?  Well, not so fast.  I actually don’t think these really solve the Asset allocation problem because they figure everyone retiring in 2040 is in the same situation, but that’s definitely not the case.  Let’s say you and your twin retire in 2040, but you will get $1000 from Social Security while she’ll get $3000.  What if she had her house paid off completely while you have always rented?  What if you worked for a company with a 401k and she worked for a company with a pension?

All those scenarios are very real for investors, and require more individualization than knowing you want to retire in 2040 can give.  For all those, conventional wisdom would say that your twin should take on more risk (French for “invest in more stocks”) than you because she has other “assets” that are generating more cash.  Reasonable people can debate that last point, but clearly the idea is that Asset allocation is much more complex than just picking a year and being done with it.

So where does that leave us?  I am a firm believer in investing DIY, and Asset allocation is no different.  But I think this is one of the areas where the degree of difficulty is much higher just because you’re balancing a couple opposing forces and there’s never a clearly “right answer”.  You want to be in stocks but not too much in stocks, and then that changes over time.  Oh yeah, and the stakes are super-high.  Getting it “right” whatever that means could give you an extra few percentage points in return and it could also save your nestegg from catastrophic failure if another 2008 rolls around.  When I work on the Fox’s nestegg, this is probably where I spend the most time.

 

Reasons for picking Tax optimization:

As we’ve said ad nauseam, Tax optimization is important and can lead to enormous savings.  What makes taxes so difficult is that the tax code is constantly changing and the stakes are super-duper high (the stakes for Asset allocation were only “super high”).

Every year there are hundreds of changes to the tax code which keeps accountants employed and programs like Turbo Tax (the Fox family uses Turbo Tax) flying off the shelves.  With the new tax reform bill that just passed, there were major changes to your taxes like the deductibility of mortgage interest and local taxes.  Those changes have massive implications on choices of where to live–both at the level of which state to live in but also whether to buy or rent.  These were huge and made the news.  What about the others that do hit the media’s radar and you never hear about?

There’s always talk about more changes, perhaps profound ones like a wealth tax.  You have to keep up.  Also, it can get really confusing.  I think I’m fairly knowledgeable on these matters but I am still befuddled by the Alternative Minimum Tax, and I know I screw up the foreign interest paid on my international mutual funds.  This stuff definitely isn’t easy.

Also, look at the stakes.  If you screw up on your taxes, theoretically you could go to prison.  If it’s an honest mistake I don’t think the Internal Revenue Service will push it that far, but horizontal stripes are definitely in play as Wesley Snipes can attest.  What is more likely is the IRS will hit you with a fine composed of a penalty plus interest.  Oh, by the way, that interest rate is about 6%; that’s not “Pay-day Loan” high, but it’s still pretty freaking high these days.  That certainly can make someone cautious about how far to push Tax optimization, even when they’re clearly in the right.

However, there is a silver lining.  If you want professional help, there are thousands of Certified Public Accountants who are there to help you out.  For under a few hundred dollars most people can probably have their taxes done by a CPA who can make sure that you stay on the IRS’s good side.  Unfortunately, when it comes to developing creative Tax optimization strategies, my experience says there’s a huge range in quality that you’ll get from CPAs.  Several years back I had a horrible experience with H&R Block and thought they were border-line incompetent.  No way would I trust them to advise me on the finer points of maximizing the tax advantages of investing.  But there are amazing CPAs out there right now (like David Silkman who did our small business’s taxes when we lived in California) who I do think can really help.  But this is a real caveat emptor situation.  Maybe Angie’s List might help.

 

Who wins it all?

It all comes down to this.  In the end, I have Asset allocation pulling it out 76-70.  Obviously both investing strategies are amazingly important and getting them right can have an exponential impact on your portfolio.  For me I gave the nod to Asset allocation over Tax optimization for a couple of reasons:

First, if I met a total train wreck of an investor (he was just stuffing cash in his mattress) and I could only give him one piece of advice, I think it would be to get that money invested in some combination of stocks and bonds.  Tax optimization strategies like an IRA or 401k are nice, but first things first.

Second, I think the big rocks for Tax optimization seem to me better understood and more accessible than for Asset allocation.  Most investors probably know that investing in your 401k or an IRA is a good idea, and probably most could tell you why (at least be able to say “it helps with taxes”).  I think that’s different for Asset allocation where you have a lot of investors who are totally off on what is probably appropriate for their situation (age, income, other assets, etc.).

Third, there’s no real “right” answer for Asset allocation.  I could have a lively debate with my dear friends/loyal readers who work in the financial industry like Jessamyn and Mike, where we argued whether the Fox family should be more in stocks or more in bonds.  But there’s no right answer (other than if stocks go up a year from now, then you know you should have been more in stocks).  It depends on so many variables as well as risk tolerance which are super-hard to quantify.  With Tax optimization you can get closer to a right answer—either the tax code allows you to do that or not.  Of course, you typically sacrifice ease of access to your money for tax benefits, so that does add a complication.

Finally, I think it’s easier and cheaper to get expert advice on Tax optimization.  As I mentioned, a good CPA can probably really help guide you on Tax optimization.  Sure, the quality of CPAs is pretty wide, but good ones are out there, and probably they’ll charge you something with in the three-digit range.  With Asset allocation if you want professional help you typically need a financial adviser.  Unfortunately, and this is just my opinion, it’s a little more Wild West for financial advisers than CPAs.  A really good financial adviser is probably worth her weight in gold (140 pound of gold is worth about $2.6 million, so maybe they aren’t worth quite that much), but the range of quality is staggering; there are some real shysters out there.  Also, they’ll probably charge you in the four- or five-digits range.

So there you go.  Put that all together and I think Asset allocation comes out on top 78-71, finishing the sentence, “if you only do one thing in investing make sure you get Asset allocation right.”

bracket-end

 

I hope you have enjoyed reading all these posts on investing as much as I have enjoyed writing them.  While Asset allocation “won” remember that all eight of these are important and should be definitely be considered as you think about bulking up your portfolio.

Final Four–Asset allocation v. Index mutual funds

Stocky Leave a comment

Basketball hoop

Welcome to the first game of the Final Four of my investing strategies tournament.  Here we have Asset allocation taking on Index mutual funds.  In the first round, Asset allocation blew out Diversifying mostly due to the higher returns that younger investors can get by investing more in stocks early in their investing career.  Index mutual funds upset Free money on the strength of lower management fees that can apply throughout an investor’s career and across every account type.  As always, check out the disclaimer.  With that out of the way, let’s see who wins.

bracket-game 4

Reasons for picking Asset allocation:

Last round we saw how being too conservative with Asset allocation can really reduce the returns of younger investors who aren’t as heavily invested in stocks as they should be.  If you go to the other end of the investor’s time horizon, when he or she is older and nearing retirement, you can make equally harmful mistakes.

On one end of the spectrum older investors can become way too risky.  As the years tick by and people get closer to retirement, they begin to take stock (pun intended) of where they are probably a little more closely than they did in their 20s or 30s.  If they aren’t quite where they want to be, knowing that on average stocks have higher returns than bonds, one natural response is to allocate more of their nestegg to stocks to “catch up”.  According to generally accepted investing theory, this is the exact wrong thing to do—as we get closer to retirement you should be reducing your allocation of stocks to lower your risk, not increase it.  Here you’re stepping away from the world of investing and into the world of gambling.  Maybe you’ll get lucky and ride a bull market up to get your portfolio back to where you want it, but you’re definitely putting yourself at risk of hitting a market pothole and putting yourself further behind.

On the other end of the spectrum, they can become way too conservative.  Some people have the natural instinct to want to get completely off the investing train in retirement because they don’t want to have any risk, so they put all their money in bonds or cash.  This is understandable because they’re going to be depending on that nestegg, so it’s got to last.  But the problem is that even in retirement, many people still need the higher returns that stocks provide to balance out the relative safety of their bonds.  This is especially true in a world where people are living longer and it’s not unreasonable to expect retirement to last a few decades or longer.  And actually, that time element also makes the case for stocks being a significant part of your retirement portfolio—you have time to ride out the storms, just not as much time as you had before.

These are what make Asset allocation one of the harder investing strategies to get right, because it’s changing over time and there are shades of grey (at least 50 shades of grey).  Other strategies like Diversification and Free money are much simpler because your strategy is absolute.  Diversification—you should be diversified at all times.  Free money—you should get as much of it as you can at all times.  But with Asset allocation, the right thing to do gradually changes from being mostly in stocks during your early years, and then slowly switching to more bonds and cash as you start to near retirement, but never shifting completely to bonds.

There’s no strict rule on what your Asset allocation should be at different stages of life, but I always look at Vanguard target retirement funds as a bit of a guide (although I’ll write about some of my issues with these types funds in a future post).  With 40 years until retirement, right around when you’re first starting out, Vanguard suggests about 90% stocks and 10% in bonds.  Once you hit retirement Vanguard suggests 40% stocks and 60% bonds.  Notice that even in retirement a very significant portion is still in stocks.

Vanguard target date funds % in stocks % in bonds
2055 (40 years to go) 90% 10%
2035 (20 years to go) 85% 15%
2025 (10 years to go) 70% 30%
In retirement 40% 60%

 

So what does that all mean?  Well early on Asset allocation done properly can get you higher returns over the long run, historically about 3-4% higher than if you completely screwed it up.  Later on, it’s going to help protect you from any market crashes, market corrections, or general market zaniness that occurs.

 

Reasons for picking Index mutual funds:

We know from the Elite Eight round, that one of the major advantages of Index mutual funds is their lower management fees, which are on average about 1% less than actively managed mutual funds.  We also know from The power of a single percentage that saving 1% of your portfolio year after year can lead to some serious ducats (I’ve decided to use as many slang terms for money over the next few posts, so prepare yourself).  But we’re in the Final Four now so we need something more than that.

Not above a little chicanery, Index mutual funds is going to steal a page from Asset allocation’splaybook.  Often with actively managed funds, they keep a significant portion of the fund’s assets in cash so they can buy an investment when the opportunity presents itself.  Of course we know from above that holding cash over the long term leads to lower returns than holding stocks.  Index mutual funds are able to be almost 100% invested in stocks (or whatever asset class you want) because they aren’t picking investments so much as just following the index.  Just doing some simple math, if actively managed funds have 5% of their assets in cash, and over the long term stocks return 6% more than cash let’s say, that comes to a long term benefit of about 0.3% (5% x 6%).  That’s not going to change the world, but even those little bits compounded over decades can make a huge difference.

Index mutual funds is also copying Tax optimization.  When your mutual fund sells shares there are tax implications on that (death and taxes, baby).  That’s why you get that statement every year from your mutual fund telling you what you need to report to the IRS. The more frequently your mutual fund trades stocks, the more likely it is that you’ll have short term gains which are taxed at higher rates.  But with Index mutual funds, trading is minimized because the fund is only following an index like the S&P 500 which doesn’t change that often.  That leads to lower taxes which we know can add up to some serious cheddar (see, I did it again).

There are also people who argue that Index mutual funds do better than actively managed funds because they take the human element out of it.  This is pretty controversial, and if you believe in the theories from A Random Walk Down Wall Street, which I unabashedly do, then shouldn’t active managers do just as well as a passive index?  Hmmm, that sounds like fodder for another post.  People debate this all the time and I’m not convinced that this really drives the needle.

The final major benefit of Index mutual funds is that they’re super easy, especially compared to some of the more difficult investing strategies like Asset allocation.  You can go to a place like Vanguard (that’s where the Fox family’s money is) or Fidelity or a dozen other places and sign up for one of their index funds, then as Ron Popeil says, “you set it and forget it.”  That means you’re getting pretty incredible value for a relatively small amount of work.

 

Who goes on to the championship game?

Index mutual funds pulled out all the stops, but in the end Asset allocation was just too strong.  Index mutual funds will definitely help build your nestegg, probably juicing your returns 1% compared to actively managed funds and maybe even 1.5% if you’re feeling charitable.  That’s nothing to sneeze at, but we’re talking about punching your ticket to the Championship round here, people.

Let’s say you completely abandoned the idea of Index mutual funds and went totally with actively managed funds.  How bad would that be?  It wouldn’t be ideal (just my opinion and one not shared by my good friend Mike), but you’d be fine in the end.  Actually this is what millions of people do all the time and it tends to work out.

Compare that worst-case scenario to Asset allocation’s and you see why they won.  Screwing up early on and investing too much in bonds and cash instead of stocks can cost 3-4% on your returns.  That dwarfs what Index mutual funds bring to the table.  Screwing up closer to retirement can put your whole financial plan at risk.  Ask near-retirees who were to heavily invested in stocks before the 2001 or 2008 crashes what they think.  In the immortal words of Winston Zeddemore “I have seen s%$t that will turn you white.”

bracket-game 5

With Asset allocation the stakes are just too high.  I have Asset allocation pulling away, 68-59.  Be sure to come back tomorrow to see who they take on in the final, either Savings rate or Tax optimization.

First Round: Starting early versus Tax optimization

Stocky 1 Comment

Basketball hoop

We’ve made it to the last contest of the first round, and this one is a doozy.  Yesterday we saw Savings rate take down Mortgage.  Today we have a true Kentucky versus Duke-style clash; this is a match of the real bluebloods of the investing world.  As always, check out the disclaimer.  Let’s go to the game.

bracket-game 3

Reasons for picking Starting early:

Starting early is one of the sage pieces of wisdom everyone gives, and for good reason.  The earlier you start investing, the more time you give the incredible power of compounding.  In this way, Starting early is very similar to Savings rate which we saw won the last game.  Because of the compounding the numbers seem to act “funny” (not funny “ha ha,” but funny as in not a way you would expect unless you are an expert in exponential algebra).

So let’s say Mr Grizzly just got his engineering degree at age 22 and wants to retire with $1 million on his 60th birthday.  Similar to the previous examples his starting salary is $50,000 and it gradually increases to $100,000, and he can get a 6% return on his investments.

If he starts saving at age 22, he will need to save about 9% of his salary to get to the $1 million mark by 60.  However, let’s say he can’t start right away, and instead he starts saving at age 30; now to become a millionaire by age 60 he needs to save about 13% of his income.  Wow!!!  By delaying a measly 8 years early on, he has to increase his savings rate about half again what it was.  If he puts it off until he’s 40, he needs to save 25%–that’s doubled his savings rate compared to starting at 30!!!  And if he delays starting until he’s 50, it will require he save about 67% to become a millionaire by the time he’s 60.

Starting age Savings rate to become millionaire by age 60
22 9%
30 13%
40 25%
50 67%

 

Clearly the earlier you start, the easier it is.  9% of your income isn’t trivial, but it certainly seems manageable.  On the other end of the spectrum, it seems just plain unrealistic to be able to save 67% of your income; even 25% would be a tall order for most.  So everyone can agree it’s better to start earlier rather than later.  Done deal.

But the problem with these types of analyses is saving more comes at a cost.  That $4500 you saved at age 22 (9% of your $50,000 starting salary) meant you couldn’t spend that.  Perhaps that’s not so bad if you were wasting it on clubbing and mani-pedis, but who am I to judge?  But maybe clubbing and mani-pedis are what makes life worth living.  Broadening that out, nearly all of us are making less early in our careers, so how realistic is it for us to be saving right away?

Also, early on you actually have higher expenses like repaying student debt, buying furniture for your new place, buying a work wardrobe, and just kind of experiencing life.  That’s not to say that people can’t be disciplined about those things, but there’s got to be a balance.  I personally started saving about 30% when I first started working and I think maybe I should have traveled a little bit more and enjoyed that time of my life (I was living right outside of New York City after all).

Nonetheless, Saving early is a tremendously powerful force if you can afford to do it.  There’s no doubt in my mind that the Fox family is at a comfortable place right now in large part due to the fact that I started squirreling money away so early.

 

Reasons for picking Tax optimization:

Taxes are a tremendously important part of investing.  It is a dominant force like Shaquille O’Neal on those LSU teams from the early 1990s.  Taxes impact every facet of investing—whether you’re young or old, no matter the type of account you have (401k, IRA, brokerage, Mortgage).

Shaq in college

Obviously taxes take a chunk out of nearly every financial transaction you do.  What makes Tax optimization so important is that during your earning years, that chunk can be in the 30-50% range, obviously depending on a number of factors like your income and the state you live in.  However, in retirement when you’re income is lower, that tax rate might fall to 10% or even less (of course, as my good friends Rich and Mike pointed out, no one knows what future tax rates will be—I am just assuming that tax brackets remain the same as they are today).  Many of the Tax optimization strategies to some degree involve finding ways to not pay taxes at the higher rate when you’re working, but rather pay when you’re retired and your rate is lower.

Just how big of a deal can taxes be?  Let’s look back at that example from The tax man cometh.  Mr and Mrs Grizzly are ready to save $1000 per month, either in a taxable account like a brokerage account or a tax deferred account like a 401k.  Using a regular brokerage account after 30 years (let’s assume a 2% dividend and a 5% stock increase) they have about $815k—certainly nothing to sneeze at.  However, had they invested the exact same amounts in the exact same stocks but instead in a tax deferred account, they would have had $1.12 million.  That’s almost $300k more, just for Tax optimization!!!

2015-02-16 deferred taxes graphic (qd)

The only difference is when they paid taxes on the money and at what rate.  In a taxable account they were paying taxes on the $12,000 each year at their high-income tax rate (34%) and they were paying taxes on qualified dividends (thanks Rich) at a pretty high rate too.  In the tax deferred scenario, they were paying taxes on the money after they were retired which I estimated at about 2% because at that time their income is only what they are spending.

That’s just one example, and there are tons just like that where Tax Optimization can really add up to tons of money.  There’s no such thing as a free lunch, but this gets pretty darn close.  When you put your money in a tax deferred account, it gets more difficult to access if you need it right away, but that seems a pretty small price to pay compared to the massive benefits of tax deferral.

 

Who wins?

This clash of the titans was super close.  In the end I have Tax optimization winning on a Christian Laettner-esque (sorry to all my Kentucky friends) miracle shot to push it to the Final Four.

To me I think this comes down between something that is not very complex but involved sacrifice (Starting early) and something that is fairly complex to pull off but doesn’t involve a lot of sacrifice (Tax optimization).  Ultimately, when Starting early you’re taking money that could have been spent on something else and started investing it.  So long as you weren’t planning on setting the money on fire, that will involve a sacrifice.  Conversely if you do Tax optimization you really aren’t foregoing anything, except a little bit of liquidity.  All it is is being smart with taxes and setting up the right accounts.

There are a lot of pretty easy Tax optimization maneuvers like 401k, IRAs, etc., that only take a few hours to figure out and then you’re set for decades.  So you’re getting those huge benefits without a lot of effort.  But Starting early is requiring a fairly significant sacrifice in your early years that could cause quite a sting.  Put all that together and I have Tax optimization coming out on top 83-82.  I have to confess though, I think Starting early would have beaten a few of these other strategies if it had lucked out a little bit in the draw.

Well, that was a wild first round.  I hope you enjoyed this and we’ll see you tomorrow for the first match of the Final Four, Asset allocation versus Index mutual funds.

 

bracket-game 4

First round: Free money versus Index mutual funds

Stocky 2 Comments

Basketball hoop

After a thrilling first day where we saw Asset allocation blow out Diversification, we are now on to day two where Free money will face off against Index mutual funds.  As always, I am not an expert on these matters.

 

bracket-game 1

Reasons for picking free money:

Free money is . . . well . . . FREE.  And obviously the more money you can contribute to your portfolio the closer you’ll be to retirement, the better you’ll be able to ride out stock market downturns, and the more financial flexibility you’ll have generally.  I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know.

In the US, by far the most common opportunity for Free money is the company match for your 401k.  Of course, credit card rebates are another nice source of free money, but let’s stick with 401k’s.  Typically it looks something like they will match $0.50 for every dollar you contribute up to 6% of your pay.  And there are some companies that are even more generous; Medtronic has historically matched about $0.90 for every dollar up to 6% of your pay.  Do the simple math and your average 401k match comes in at about 3% ($0.50 * 6%).  Ever since I started working in 1999 I have always contributed at least enough to get the entire company match.

If you do a quick calculation (assume you work from 22 to 60, with a salary that starts at $50,000 and rises to $100,000 over the years, with a 6% investment return), the value of that match is about $350,000.  That’s not what your whole 401k would be worth, that’s just the value of the match!!!  Not bad considering the median nestegg for a 60-year-old living in the US is about $160,000.

So who says no to this?  Sadly, about one-third of employees who have access to a 401k plan are “leaving money on the table” by not contributing up to the amount that their employer will match.  This is some really low hanging fruit that is going unpicked.  I get that there is only so much money to go around, but man, every dollar you’re putting in gets you another $0.50 of FREE MONEY.  That’s a guaranteed 50% return; there are a lot of investors who would give their first born for something like that.

 

Reasons for picking index mutual funds:

Index mutual funds are mutual funds that mimic an index like the S&P 500, Barclays Bond index, FTSE Global Cap, or the MSCI US REIT index.  That may sound confusing—the point is these mutual funds find an index already established in the market and do their best to copy it exactly.

Index fund advocates, and I count myself among them with probably about 95% of the Fox’s nestegg in Index mutual funds, believe that these funds actually perform better than actively-managed mutual funds (an actively managed fund is one where the mutual fund manager picks individual stocks or bonds that he or she believes will out-perform the general market).  I personally think the data here is mixed to slightly favorable for index mutual funds (mostly because of tax implications), but that is a pretty deep discussion probably for another blog post.  For this analysis, I’ll assume that actively managed mutual funds and index mutual funds return the same amount.

The undeniable advantage of Index mutual funds is their lower management fee.  Like all things, mutual funds charge a fee for their services; it is a percentage that the fund managers skim off the top to pay for managing the fund.  For actively managed funds that fee averages to about 1% with some higher and some lower.  This goes to paying for all the research done, salaries for the different teams, brochures and disclosures, travel to different conferences, etc., and it tends to be a pretty decent chunk of change.  For Index mutual funds, you really don’t need all that because all the team is doing is tracking a pre-existing index; because of this management fees tends to be fairly low—in the 0.05% to 0.2% range.

Remember The power of a single percentage?  We actually called out mutual fund management fees there as ripe for a 1% coupon.  Running the numbers using the same scenario we just used for Free money (assume you work from 22 to 60, with a salary that starts at $50,000 and rises to $100,000 over the years, with a 6% investment return), that 401k account using a index mutual fund with a fee of 0.2% would leave you with about $990,000.  An actively managed account with a fee of 1% would leave you with about $820,000.  That a difference of $170,000 in your 401k over the course of your investing career.

But that’s just for one account.  Index mutual funds can be used for pretty much all your investing accounts—401k, IRA, 529, brokerage.  Also, they can be used throughout for investing career, from the time you open your first account as a youngster all the way through the end when you shuffle off this mortal coil and leave some cash to your loved ones (more cash than you would otherwise because you were paying lower fees).

 

Who wins?

This turned out to be much closer than I anticipated.  At first I figured that Free money would win this going away, but Index mutual funds definitely came to play.  Free money has a power effect (about 3% of your salary on average), but that is generally limited only to 401k accounts, only to the first 6% of your compensation, and only while you are working.  Even with all those limitations, it makes an enormous difference over your investing lifetime.  Index mutual funds have a smaller impact but a much broader application.  You can use them on every account, with every dollar invested, for every year you’re investing.

In a game that came down to the absolute wire, I think Index mutual funds barely edges out Free money in a Bryce Drew-style miracle finish.  The final score, Index mutual funds 70, Free money 69.  Ultimately I think Index mutual funds and that lower management fee will save more of your money in every corner of your investing portfolio, and that will ultimately lead to a bigger impact on your nest egg.  I hope to see you tomorrow when your Mortgage takes on Savings rate.

bracket-game 2

Top 5—investing moves when you’re just getting started

Stocky Leave a comment

A week ago, my Uncle Lynx passed away.  At the funeral I was chatting with some distant family members (my cousin’s wife’s nephew).  He and his wife are a super cute couple.  They are in their early 20s and just getting started on this crazy journey called adulthood.

As we were chatting, the subject veered towards personal finance (me talking about personal finance . . . imagine that).  This couple’s ears perked up and then seemed genuinely interested; I suppose it’s possible they were just really polite, but I think it was something more.

It got me to thinking about what are the most important things to do in the world of personal finance when you are just getting started.  Here is my Top 5 list:

 

5. Figure out your debt situation: If you’re lucky, you won’t have a lot (or any) debt.  For most of us there is some out there, and that isn’t necessarily a bad thing.  List out every debt you have (student loan, mortgage, credit card, car payment, etc.), the balance, and the interest rate.

On a spreadsheet (see #4) rank them in order of interest rate.  As a general rule I use a cutoff of about 6%.  If your interest rate is above that pay those off right away, starting with the highest interest rate debt first.  If your interest rate is below that, that might be okay to keep that debt and just make the normal monthly payments.

If you have any debt (especially credit card debt) at any rate higher than 10%, that’s a “debt emergency”.  Really look at every purchase you make—if it’s not critical to your survival (food, shelter) then pass that up until your debt is paid off.  The only exception to this is #1—funding your 401k.

You can get creative with your debt by consolidating high interest rate cards onto a lower rate card or one that offers a low teaser rate.  That could save you a ton of money, and you should probably look into that, but ultimately, you’ll need to pay that sucker off.  So just hitting the grindstone of paying off your credit cards is a must.

 

4. Make a budget on a spreadsheet: Take a spreadsheet and put a quick budget together that includes your income, your expenses, and the difference between those two.  This can be simple at first (and it should be simple at first).  Over time, you’ll add more and more sheets to the spreadsheet for things like your mortgage, investments, kids’ education, and other things.

But at the beginning, you need to get a sense of where your money is going.  The budget will give you an aspirational view of this.  After your budget is done, you can track your spending with a website like mint.com.  This two-step process lets you figure where you want to spend your money, and then also look at where you actually spend it.

Of course, this is an iterative process, and as you close a month and look at your expenses, you can see if you’re spending more than what you budgeted.  This isn’t a time to beat yourself up (being too hard on yourself is a sure way to stop looking at your finances closely, and that’s a REALLY bad thing), but a time to ask yourself why you spent more and if it was worth it.

As an aside, using a spreadsheet is a really good skill in general.  I was really good at spreadsheets and it’s hard to overstate the incredible impact it had on my career, as well as the incredible wealth those skills gave me and my family.  And really, my experience with spreadsheets started in college when I was creating a financial budget.

 

3. Educate yourself on investing: At a young age, educate yourself on investing.  Obviously, this blog is the universally acknowledged best place to learn about investing, but I have heard rumors there are others.

www.mrmoneymustache.com is a great website that looks at personal spending and his early posts had a tremendous impact on my outlook.  A Random Walk Down Wall Street is a book on investing that really defined my investing strategy; I read that as a 19-year-old and still think about its insights today.

There are a lot of websites written by millennials about spending and personal finance that might resonate even more.  A few are: millennialmoneyman.com, moneypeach.com, and brokemillennial.com.  Most are about reducing spending and budgets and that sort of thing, but there are some on the nitty gritty of making investing choices.  You’ll want perspectives on both.

The whole point is that you need to know what you are doing here.  Spending 20 hours early in your life to figure out basics like asset allocation, tax avoidance, and fee minimization as well as a general attitude towards saving early can easily lead to hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars.  That comes to about $50,000 per hour—not bad.

 

2. Start an IRA with $1,000: This is as much about the experience gained as it is about actually investing your money.  Vanguard lets you start an IRA with $1,000 as the minimum amount.

You’ll navigate through their website, figure out how to make choices (like Roth or Traditional IRA—go traditional).  You’ll pick your investments, and then you’ll have something to look at every once in a while to see how it’s doing.

So many people are just at a total loss when it comes to setting up accounts for their investments.  That becomes a real problem once you hit 30 or 40 and you’re starting to get behind the 8-ball; you know you need to do something but are kind of clueless on where to start.  Doing it now lets you get your toes wet in this world and makes the next accounts you need to set up (529, 401k, brokerage, etc.) all the less daunting.

 

1. Get the company match on your 401k: #2 was more for experience than for investment.  Here is where you should start walking down the path for investments.  At a minimum, contribute the match and take the free money.

This is so important for a couple reasons.  First, you’re getting that free money.  Second, you’re making your first “asset allocation” decision.  When it comes time to pick which fund to invest in, unless you have very unique circumstances for an early-20s person, I would definitely go with a 100% equity index fund.

Third, your 401k is a really powerful tool.  If you had no other investing tool, you could still grow a 401k to well over a $1 million during your working career.  That is enough to fully fund your retirement.

 

BONUS—Stay poor:  Too many young adults make a huge mistake of trying to mimic the lifestyle their parents provided, once they (the young adults) get out of school.  That first paycheck of $2,000 is going to seem like a ton of money (and it is).  It’s really tempting to decide to buy a new car or go on a kickin’ vacation or upgrade the furniture.  Resist the urge.

Your parents took 25 or more years of working (with pay increases and investment returns) to provide the house and cars and vacations you enjoyed your senior year of high school.  It’s not realistic to think you can have stuff at that level of niceness so early.

A car is a really good example.  In general, automobiles are horrible investments.  To the degree you have a car that can get you from point A to point B, keep it.  A new car will be nice and cool and make your friends gawk, but it’s a horrible use of money.  A couple hundred dollars a month for a car, plus insurance, and maybe $50 for a gym membership, $50 for cable, and $80 for four dinners at a restaurant—those numbers add up.  Those alone could fund your savings in the early years.

Your early 20s are a time when it’s still okay not to have the best and nicest of everything.  If you can embrace that, even when you do have the money, and put that extra money to work in investments you’ll build a very strong financial foundation that will afford you many more opportunities are you reach your 30s and 40s (remember, I did that and I retired at 36).

The tax man cometh

Stocky Leave a comment

“In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes” –Benjamin Franklin

 

I love this woodcut from the 1600s.  I imagine the artist drew it so the skeleton’s hand is asking for the guy’s life, but it kind of looks like he has his hand out asking for money like he’s collecting taxes.  Either way, if you’re death or the tax man, you probably aren’t too popular.

Obviously taxes are important when you’re thinking about investments and your retirement.  Uncle Sam (for all you foreign readers, what is the name of the personified tax collector in your country?) is definitely going to take his share of your earnings and investments.  Given the progressive nature of most countries’ tax codes, as your nest-egg gets larger and larger, they take a bigger percentage, so that raises the stakes.

The government has built the tax code to offer huge tax breaks to people saving for retirement, particularly allowing people to defer taxes from their earning years to their retirement years. That’s really all that accounts like 401k’s and IRAs are doing, taking money you earn when your income is high and allowing you to pay taxes on it when your income is low.  It may not seem like a big deal at first but suffice it to say, optimally managing your tax situation can be the difference of hundreds of thousands of dollars.  As always, it’s important to remember that I’m not a tax expert; also I’ll be making assumptions on future stock returns which in no way guarantee that is what will actually happen in real life.

 

Working tax rate versus retirement tax rate

US tax rates go up pretty quickly the more money you make.  So when you’re in your prime earning years, that is when your tax rate is going to be the highest.  Take my old neighbors Mr and Mrs Grizzly as an example.  They both work and have a combined income of $150,000.  Throw in a couple assumptions like they have two cubs, a mortgage, and live in the great state of California, and they are paying a total of about $41,000 in taxes, about 27% (there’s a great website that I used for these estimates).  Look a little deeper and their marginal tax rate is 43%; that means if they earned one more dollar they would pay $0.43 in taxes, and conversely if they lowered their income by one dollar they would save $0.43 in taxes.  Wow!!!  That’s a lot in taxes.

Now let’s fast forward and think of Mr and Mrs Grizzly in retirement.  Their house is paid off and they don’t have to save for their cubs’ educations, so what they need to support their retirement lifestyle is $80,000 (believe me, I will have many future posts dedicated to estimating how much someone needs per year in retirement, but for now let’s just take the $80k on faith).  Each year they tap into their savings and the $80,000 breaks down into three buckets: $20,000 is interest and dividends; $30,000 is long-term capital gains on the profits from their investments over the years; and $30,000 is the basis, the original money they invested which doesn’t get taxed.  Run your tax calculator again and they’re paying a measly $1,200 in taxes!!!  Read that again; it’s not a misprint.  That’s only 2% compared to the 27% they were paying while they were working.  And their marginal tax rate is 4% in retirement instead of 43% while they were working.

That, my friends, is some powerful stuff!!!  Now, how do Mr and Mrs Grizzly translate that into cash money?

 

The value of deferring taxes

During their working years, Mr and Mrs Grizzly set up their budget to save $1000 per month.  Because they are avid readers of the Stocky Fox, they know they should save that through their 401k’s (in this unfortunate example, let’s assume their cheapskate company doesn’t offer any matching).  In a year they will have saved $12,000 but since 401k’s are tax deferred they don’t pay taxes on that money, saving themselves $5160 in taxes (remember, their marginal tax rate is 43%).  Nearly $5200!!!  That’s some serious honey comb.  They do that each year and after 30 years (let’s assume a 2% dividend and a 5% stock increase), and they have a nice little honey pot of $1.12 million for retirement.  They’ll withdraw their $80,000 per year and pay the lower tax rate on it, and life is good.

The Grizzleys are sitting pretty, but what would happen if didn’t use their 401k to defer taxes and instead invested their money in a normal brokerage account?  Each year, they’d pay the $5200 in taxes but then they would also have to pay taxes on the dividends.  If you assume the same investments as we did above, 2% dividends and 5% stock increase, after 30 years they would have $815k.  That’s nothing to sneeze at, but that’s about $300k less than what they had with their 401k.  Those numbers seem crazy, but that’s the power of tax deferral.

2015-02-16 deferred taxes graphic (qd)

So the lesson is that using tax deferred accounts offers a really powerful way to accelerate the growth of your nest-egg by cutting out the tax man (in a totally legal way, of course).

Invest in 401k before you payoff student debt

Stocky Leave a comment

“The longest journey begins with a single step” –Laozi (580 BCE)

Investing is a long-term game.  As that really smart Chinese philosopher said, that long-term game needs to start with your first move.  For most people, investing will start when they get their first “adult” job after college (you already know how I feel about college).

Some people start with a clean financial slate when they leave college, but many have student debt from all the loans they took for that degree.  That sets up an interesting question as they get their first paychecks: what to do with the money?  You can even make the question more precise and ask: should I use my savings to payoff my student loans or start investing?  Let’s dive right in

My niece Starty Fox just graduated with her engineering degree from State U.  She has $20,000 in student loans that has an interest rate of 4.45% (I think that’s the current rate for government backed student loans).  Because she listened to her wise uncle, she got an engineering degree which presents many job opportunities.  She took a good job paying $54,000 per year (luckily her salary is divisible by 12 so this post is a little easier to write).  Plus, they offer a 401k which matches her contributions up to 6% of her salary.

After she accounts for rent (her parents made it clear she could visit, but not live with them), her car payment, food, and other living expenses  she is able to save 10% of her income each month.  She makes $4,500 per month and has $450 left over at the end of each month (let’s ignore taxes for a second, but just a second).

So what should she do, payoff that nagging student debt as fast as she can or start investing in her company’s 401k?

 

A match lights the world on fire

Let’s say Starty has a neurosis about her debt.  She was raised never to have any debt (although maybe that’s not always the best idea—here and here), so she wants to pay it off as quickly as she can.

If she applied all $450 each month to her student loans, she would pay off that whole $20,000 in a little over 5 years.  There would be a couple things she wouldn’t like.  First, that $450 would be taxed (just like the rest of her income).  Let’s say her marginal tax rate is 20%, so that means the $450 she has set aside is really only $360 after she pays Uncle Sam.  Taxes are unavoidable, so while that’s a bummer for Starty, she accepts it as a fact of life (although maybe she shouldn’t—more on that in a second).

When it is all said and done, she will have paid everything off by the time she turns 27, which isn’t bad.  Through it all she would have paid about $2,300 in interest.  That interest is tax deductible, so it would only feel like about $1,840.  After everything is paid off, she can start investing in her 401k with a clear conscious.

Let’s take the other extreme, and assume that Starty watched Wall Street a lot with her adoring uncle when she was little.  She’s not too concerned about debt, especially when there are other good investment opportunities out there.  She pays her minimum payment on her loan ($150 per month before taxes, $120 after taxes) and then invests the rest in her 401k.

Obviously, the downside of this is it takes her a lot longer to pay off her loan; instead of being done by age 27, she’ll have the debt until she’s 40.  That sucks.  But she more than makes up for that with her 401k.  Every year she contributes $3,600 to her 401k.  When she does this she has three really big spoonfuls of awesomeness working for her:

  1. Tax free—her 401k contributions are pre-tax so just off the top she is saving $30 per month that would go to taxes if she used that money to pay off her loan. That’s enough to buy a new Lululemon outfit and splurge on extra spin classes each year (Foxy Lady just took over my computer for a second).  Sure, eventually she’ll have to pay that in taxes, but there are a lot of things she can do to minimize that when the time comes.
  2. Match—the big one is that Starty gets to take advantage of her company’s match. They match dollar-for-dollar up to 6% of her salary.  Since she’s contributing more than that, she takes complete advantage of the match, and that comes to $270 each month.
  3. Investment returns—obviously this is why we do invest money. On average Starty is going to earn a 6-8% return on her 401k.

If you put that all into the pot and mix it, you’d have a 27-year-old Starty who is debt-free but with nothing in her 401k, or you could have a 27-year-old with $41,000 in her 401k and still with $16,000 in student loans.  Obviously, the 401k option is much better. She has a net worth of $25,000 on her 27th birthday (versus $0 if she paid off her student loans first).

 

The cause of it all

Those numbers tell a pretty powerful story that from a mathematical point of view, paying off your student loan at the lowest level is best so long as you put that money into your 401k (and not spend it on stupid crap).  However, there are some fairly big assumptions there.

Match—obviously the match is a big part of it all.  Without the match the numbers don’t look nearly as good, but the 401k option still comes out ahead.  On her 27th birthday, she would have a net worth of $5,500, without the match.  Many people may complain that this example isn’t realistic because Starty’s 401k match is so generous, but without the match she still comes out to the good.  And we know a 401k without a match is basically like a traditional IRA which is available to everyone.

Liquidity—when Starty chooses to go all in on her 401k she’s losing a lot of financial flexibility.  At 27 she’ll still have $15,000 of debt that she’ll have to pay off plus she’ll have a lot of her money tied up in her 401k which is very hard to access.  If something happened at ages 22-27 she’d be in pretty much the same boat either way, but after age 27 she’d have a little more flexibility if she had killed the college debt.  This becomes a question very similar to the one we raised with the post on the emergency fund.  Personally, I would be willing to roll the dice for that extra $5-25k over five years, but risk aversion is different for all of us.

That’s all good, but fundamentally this boils down to Starty being able to borrow money at 4.45% (3.6% after taxes) and being able to invest it at a higher rate, 7% for argument’s sake.  Over a 20 year time horizon (about how long it takes her to pay off her student loan), stocks have historically done much better than that 4% hurdle.  For all these reasons, it does make a lot of sense—in Starty’s case thousands of dollars each year—to slowly pay off her college debt and put that money into her 401k.

How much should I save during my working years?

Stocky 2 Comments

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Monday we started tacking the enormous question of “How much do I need to retire?”  We dove into the first sub-question:  How much will I spend in retirement?  Now we’re going to take on the next question: How much should I save during my working years?  Then tomorrow we’ll bring it all together by answering the third question: When can I retire?

Let’s start talking about savings.  We know that savings is the fundamental ingredient in investing and we know that starting early provides a great advantage.  We’re going to use the example of my cousin, Skinny Fox.  Skinny is 22 years old, just starting out with a $50,000 per year job.  She expects salary increases of 5% (a little more than inflation) and she’ll eventually top out at a salary of $150,000 per year (in future dollars).

Social Security

The first place to start when thinking about your nestegg is Social Security.  That’s the “forced” savings plan the US government makes you do.  It’s complex and there is a lot of nuance, but basically they’ll take 6.2% of Skinny’s income (plus another 6.2% from Skinny’s employer) over her working career.  When it’s time to hang up the spurs, she’ll get a monthly pension.  So in a very real way, Social Security is your first “savings” method.

Unfortunately, the rules for Social Security aren’t very straight-forward when it comes to figuring out how much you’ll get based on how much you put in.  However, it seems reasonable that a middle-class fox like Skinny will get a middle-class payout from Social Security like $2,000 (in today’s dollars) per month starting when she turns 67.

For Social Security, when Skinny “saves” her 6.2% of income ($3,100 in her first year of work), that gives her a pension that will be worth about $450,000 in today’s dollars; that’s about $1.6 million when Skinny turns 67.

401k

When Skinny Fox was looking for her job she knew how important it was to consider the company’s benefits beyond just the salary.  Her company offers a 401k and matches $0.50 for every dollar up to 6% of her salary.  Skinny knows she should max out her 401k because of tax reasons, but that’s just not realistic for her, so she just contributes the 6% to get her company match.

Her first year she contributes $3,000 to her 401k and her company kicks in a $1,500 match.  Over her entire career her 401k will steadily build until she turns 67 and it’s worth about $1.9 million (in future dollars)!!!

 

IRA and other savings

Skinny is a nervous soul whose father fox always taught her to save, save, save.  She knows that she can contribute to an IRA, after reading this blog she knows it should be a traditional IRA and not a Roth, with $5,000 per year.

When Skinny turns 65, that IRA is worth about $1.2 million.

If she’s still nervous, she can save in a regular brokerage account that doesn’t have the tax advantages of a 401k or IRA.  Each $1,000 per year she saves equates to about $200,000 when she turns 65.

This really illustrates the power of compounding.  I’m not saying that $3,000 per year for her 401k or $5,000 annually for her IRA isn’t a lot of money.  Especially when she’s first starting out—it’s definitely a lot.  But $8,000 doesn’t seem insurmountably unrealistic for Skinny.  Each year after that it gets a little easier.

However, the payoff seems huge.  Slowly and steadily, over her 43-year working career, her 401k will have steadily grown to $1.9 million and her IRA to $1.2 million.  She’ll also have a backstop of Social Security which would have a lump-sum value of about $1.6 million.  Combine all those, and she’s got a nest egg of about $4.7 million in future dollars (about $1.3 million in today’s dollars).

That certainly seems like a lot, but is it enough?  We know from yesterday’s post that $1.1-1.6 million is right in the range of a pretty decent retirement.  So Skinny’s there just based on her 401k, IRA, and Social Security.  The good news is that doesn’t include any home equity she builds over her adult life, extra savings just from making more than she spends, or any inheritances or other unexpected windfalls.  So maybe there’s some cushion there.

On the other hand, she maybe she shouldn’t feel especially comfortable.  She has a clear path to $1.3 million and she’ll need $1.1-1.6 million.  That’s definitely within the margin of error.  What is a vixen to do?

Come back next Monday for our final installment of this blog mini-series where we bring together what you’re going to spend in retirement with how much you have saved for retirement, and we’ll see if it all works.