I'm an American. As such, I can barely find Canada on the map. I do know that poutine is excellent and think that the Smothers Brothers are amusing.

In other words, I don't know what options are available to you. Generally, banks charge higher fees than a discount broker.

I also don't know what is available to a Canadian. However, I do know Canada is somewhere east of Detroit.
This link explains it better than I can.
ETFS vs Mutual funds:
https://investor.vanguard.com/what-w...unds?WT.srch=1

Banks, in general, are the nut low for a place to go for investing. I'm not saying you will never have a good experience at a bank, but going to one to invest is like going to a poker room to pick up girls.

Hello,

This is for a corporation with some assets that I would like to throw in a long-term minimal management type of situation (preferably with low expense ratios)

Risk - Relatively risk adverse. I would say mid-high risk tolerance.

Term - 10+ years (probably 20+)

Amount ~ 5mill (will start out with a lot less until feel comfortable)

US based corporation.

Looking to invest 5-20k before april and trying to figure out what plans I should do. I have been self-employed as a gambler since 2004. I play mostly live 5-10 to 10-25 plo with some 25-50 thrown in so I keep a lot of cash on hand. I have basically been all in cash since cashing out my investments(Roth IRA & account with individual stocks, both with Scottrade) sometime in early 2012 when dealing with a downer.

I'm 32, married with 1 kid and another on the way. My wife is a nurse who is currently a stay at home mom. She has a 401k with her old employer with 25kish in it. She will likely go back to work in a couple of years.

Debt-house and my wife's van which are both around 4% interest.

I've been looking over plans and don't know if I should do a SEP IRA or an individual 401k or start the Roth back up(I'm not sure if it's just sitting there with zero in it or is closed completely). I had planned to use Vanguard for whatever I did opened.

I'm comfortable with high risk.

My wife got form 1099-R in and it had an amount under gross distribution. This kind of stumped us as nothing was withdrawn. I got into her investment page and there are 3 accounts there, a 403(b) which has the bulk of the money, a 401(a), and an Automatic IRA rollover account which is nearly the same # as form 1099-R shows. What exactly is going on here and should I try to move these accounts to Vanguard? They are with TransAmerica now.

Since your income is so uncertain, pay these off before investing.

his house might be 200k, would be pretty irresponsible to pay that off first and not invest anything else.

If his next downturn occurs when his wife is delivering the second kid it would be pretty irresponsible to not be as debt free as possible. If he had a square job my recomendation would be different. Did you even read his situation?
Yes, he should definitely take on more risk. At best he shouldn't put it in anything but an interest bearing account.

I'm not in danger of going broke or anything. It was a combination of things why I cashed everything out, disillusioned with the market and parents ending their relationship with scottrade were also factors. I was just hoping someone knew about SEP vs individual 401 or other plans. I'm not going to pay down my house debt which is at 3.75, I want better returns. Thanks for feedback though, this place appears to have gotten a lot slower than it used to be.

What about getting a personal loan for 3%ish and investing that in the market, that something people do if they have access to cheap money?

That's a good idea when the market hasn't ran up infinite in the past 5 years.
Read a story somewhere of a young guy who just maxed out cheap debt and blindly threw it in the market in late 2011 perfectly timing the dip from government debt ceiling debates. But that is not the norm.

When I was playing poker full time I used a SEP-Ira as a retirement vehicle. Now I'm rolling it over in chunks into a Roth and paying taxes on it while I'm in school and making nill.

As far as your 5-20k... DCA it into Vanguard wellington fund from now until late July.

Anybody know of any growing marijuana related companies that i can buy stock in? I feel that in 2 years marijuana will be legalized and I wanna make a investment now.

These stocks have been trading with both outrageous swings and to outrageous multiples purely on news...much of which is news for the sake of news.

These aren't long term holds yet, but if you want to speculate there is a thread here with multiple guys trading on news events.

as a disclaimer, I think Hemp related companies are far, far more promising than any publicly traded weed related stock. Further disclaimer, stay away from the ticker HEMP. I wish I knew that ticker existed a couple months ago so I could've speculated on it for the names' sake...but I don't think they are legitimately enough involved in the product for it to be a sound investment at this point. There will be others though, just wait.

Have a few questions about refinancing a house. Should I start my own thread, post it here or is there already a thread for those types of questions?

Thanks

Hey guys. I have been reading up on investing and saving up my money.
So far I read grahams Intelligent investor and David Chiltons Wealthy Barber.

Anyway I got interested in saving my money in some global equity fund or a good index fund with a low commission % through dollar cost averaging.

I'm looking in to some funds right now and I don't understand one thing. When I want to buy a certificate in a mutual fund, do I have to pay a commission every time I buy a certificate? It doesn't seem too lucrative to pay my broker when I want to buy very little every month or so.

How do people who use dollar cost averaging go about this?

Thank you.

are you saving for retirement or near term?

Sign up with Vanguard. They allow you to buy their mutual funds commission free.

Probably retirement, was thinking at least 20years.

Can european citizen open account on vanguard too?

*Country you live in- USA
*Income-43k last year, first year of new career- should be at approx 70 within 7 years.
*Risk Tolerance-mid/high
*Timeframe for investment- 20-30 years
*Debt-zero
stable living condition,no kids, long term gf.

-------------------------

I recently finished reading unconventional success by swensen which put much of the fee laden mutual fund industry on blast.

anyway.

my job allows for a deferred comp program, up to 17.5k/year at my age. That amount comes off your gross income before it's taxed and is then invested in whatever breakdown of your 100% you choose- (ie, 20%stable, 20 percent large cap, 20% midcap, 20 small cap, 20% foreign, etc etc).

I've also been looking into Roth IRA possibilities.

just a quick question, should i be looking to hit the 17.5k/yr deferral as fast as possible or be break it down to the 5.5k Roth annually/ 10k deferred or some other combination?

i'm definitely as green as green could be on this subject but don't want to not maximize the time i have to work with and stability of this job and be shooting myself in the foot by not taking proper avenues.

thankya.

I gamboooled on FITX at the recommendation of a friend. Small play purely for gamboool. Gamboool at your own risk.

I don't know this book but minimizing expenses is a great first step. Here is a link to the Bogleheads site that details this philosophy.

http://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Bogle...ent_Philosophy

I assume there is no match or you would have mentioned it? What are the expense ratio's of the available funds? If they are low then I would take advantage of the tax break, if they are high I would pass.

It is good to have a mix of pre tax and post tax tax deferred investments, so a Roth is a good idea.

It is really worth it in the long run to educate yourself on this stuff so your choices make sense for you. If you read the link I posted and follow the stuff linked in it you will learn a lot. Other books I like:
The Coffeehouse Investor: How to Build Wealth, Ignore Wall Street, and Get On with Your Life

The Little Book of Common Sense Investing: The Only Way to Guarantee Your Fair Share of Stock Market Returns (Little Books. Big Profits)by John C. Bogle

There are tons more, but these would be a good start.

Hey everyone,

It is that time of the year where I need to put more money in my SEP and I just wanted to see if my current allocation is reasonable. I use Vanguard and here is the breakdown:

Vanguard FTSE All-World ex-US Index Fund Investor Shares 2.36%
Vanguard FTSE Social Index Fund Investor Shares 19.54%
Vanguard Target Retirement 2050 Fund 50.94%
Vanguard Total Bond Market Index Fund Investor Shares 3.25%
Vanguard Total International Stock Index Fund Investor Shares 4.85%
Vanguard Total Stock Market Index Fund Admiral Shares 19.06%

The first 5 range from .18-.30 expense ratios whereas Admiral Shares are .05.

It probably isn't hard to tell I have no idea what I'm doing. I think I started with the 4 random ones until I had enough for Admiral Shares. I then found the Target Retirement fund and obviously just started using that.

When I make my contribution this year I want to move things so they're where I want them to stay. I know the easiest thing to do is dump it all in the Target Retirement fund but I'm wondering if I should try to invest in more of the funds with low expense ratios like the Admiral Shares.

Thanks!

OK, you have a lot of overlap there. Since you have a target fund, there is no reason to all of those other funds since you basically buying the same securities over and over again and paying additional fees you don't need to pay.

The target date fund, the total bond, and the total stock market fund are all purchasing the same securities. Therefore, you have more exposure to those sectors than you actually think.

Use an app like sigfig or cnnmoney which will give you a visual picture of where your assets are located.

If I were in your shoes, I'd do one of two things. Sell off your other securities and put all the proceeds in the target date fund if you are comfortable with the target date funds asset allocation.

Or if you are not happy with the target fund allocation build a three fund lazy portfolio. http://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Three-fund_portfolio <---- that link does a really good job at explaining it.

Without sounding like a fish, Warren Buffett recently suggested to invest your money into VFINX, the Vanguard S&P 500 index fund, and stated that after he dies 90% of his money is going into an index fund.

I think you could stick with the Retirement Fund and eventually reallocate it further out if you want to stay more heavily weighted in stocks. I've been toying with the idea of selling off my mutual funds and putting that money into index funds instead. I'm not even sure if that is optimal, but without looking it'll probably lower my expenses...plus, they're mutual funds so I'm not sure that is where I should be if I prefer to manage my own money.

Here is a tool from morningstar that allows you to get a picture of how your money is allocated:
http://portfolio.morningstar.com/New...&runMode=MSTAR

+1 to either just putting it all in the total retirement or something like the 3 fund linked above.

As stated, you have a ton of overlap. If you're comfortable with the Target date fund, sell your other funds and dump them into the target.

If you want to do some tinkering, use funds where you currently won't have a lot of exposure.

My recommendations include:

Admiral Emerging markets (EM has underperformed domestic markets big time and are more attractively priced from a long term valuation perspective)

Metals and Mining fund - has just been clobbered for 2.5 years.

Consider the REIT fund as well...especially if you don't have exposure to the real estate market via home ownership.

Finally, if there's one sector of the economy you believe in more than the others, you can use Vanguards ETF sector specific to add weight.

But in the end, the Vanguard Target Date fund is essentially all you need when looking at a gigantic time horizon.