Question stringlengths 14 166 | Answer stringlengths 3 17k |
|---|---|
How Do I Fix Excess Contribution Withdrawl | I think there are several issues here. First, there's the contribution. As littleadv said, there is no excess contribution. Excess contribution is only if you exceed the contribution limit. The contribution limit for Traditional IRAs does not depend on how high your income goes or whether you have a 401(k). It's the de... |
Why buy insurance? | As someone who has worked for both an insurance carrier and an insurance agent, the reason people buy insurance is two fold: to spread risk out, and to get the benefits (when applicable) of approaching risk as a group. What you are really doing when you buy insurance is you are buying in to a large group of people who ... |
Unemployment Insurance Through Options | Options do act, somewhat, like insurance.... However.... An insurance policy will not have such short term expiration time frames. A 20 year term life insurance policy can be thought of as insurance with an expiration. But the expiration on options is in weeks, not decades. So (IMO) options make terrible insurance pol... |
Why can't I short a stock that sells for less than $5? Is there another way to “go short” on them? | A bit of poking around brought me to this thread on the Motley Fool, asking the same basic question: I think the problem is the stock price. For a stock to be sold short, it has to be marginable which means it has to trade over $ 5.00. The broker, therefore, can't borrow the stock for you to sell short because it isn't... |
Why haven't there been personal finance apps or softwares that use regression modeling or A.I.? | What would they be trying to predict? The value YNAB and Mint provide is objective truth about what you've spent. They can force you to think about the tradeoffs inherent in budgeting by showing that you've overspent one category, and making you decide where to find the money to cover it. They can call your attention ... |
Using Marine Traffic (AIS) to make stock picks? | You can. Speculating on marine traffic is more closely tied to oil trades and ocean shipping container rates, than trades on any particular companies. But companies heavily tied to ocean shipping can be ripe for speculation. The baltic dry index is created for this analytical purpose, and that information can be used a... |
How can a Canadian establish US credit score | set up a US company (WY is cheap and easy), go south and open a personal and business bank account, ask for the itin form. file for the itin. set up your EIN for the company. get a credit card for both. pay some mail forwarding service with it. file for taxes in the next year using your itin. prepaid cards do not link ... |
Weekly budgets based on (a variable) monthly budget | I think the real problem here is dealing with the variable income. The envelope solution suggests the problem is that your brother doesn't have the discipline to avoid spending all his money immediately, but maybe that's not it. Maybe he could regulate his expenses just fine, but with such a variable income, he can't s... |
How do share buybacks work? | Something to note is that when a company announces a share buyback program there is usually a time frame and amount of shares that are important details as it isn't like the company will make one big buy back of stock generally. Rather it may take months or even years as noted in the Wikipedia article about share repu... |
What are the contents of fixed annuities? | For a variable annuity, you need to know the underlying investments and how your returns are credited to your account. For a fixed annuity, the issuer is responsible for the commitment to provide the promised rate to you. In a sense, how they invest isn't really your concern. You should be concerned about the overall h... |
Book or web site resources for an absolute beginner to learn about stocks and investing? | The Motley Fool's How to Invest How To Invest Benjamin Graham's The Intelligent Investor The Intelligent Investor If you like The Intelligent Investor then try Benjamin's Security Analysis. But that one is not a beginner book. |
Fund or ETF that simulates the investment goals of an options “straddle” strategy? | Why bother with the ETF? Just trade the options -- at least you have the ability to know what you actually are doing. The "exotic" ETFs the let you "double long" or short indexes aren't options contracts -- they are just collections of unregulated swaps with no transparency. Most of the short/double long ETFs also only... |
To pay off a student loan, should I save up a lump sum payoff payment or pay extra each month? | If you pay extra now you will pay less in interest over the life of the loan. Unless your savings account has a higher interest rate than the loan's rate you are not saving anything. That being said, you may have a greater need for savings due to other things (e.g. you might need a emergency fund). But if you are only ... |
How much money should I put on a house? | Before doing anything else: you want a lawyer involved right from the beginning, to make sure that something reasonable happens with the house if one of you dies or leaves. Seriously, you'll both be safer and happier if it's all explicit. How much you should put on the house is not the right question. Houses don't sell... |
Legitimate unclaimed property that doesn't appear in any state directory? | @ Chris: Companies like Keane, ours, and others know where to look for these funds and where to ask at the correct agencies that are holding this money that is not part of the public links that you have access to. This is how we find this information. Our types of companies spend significant time, money and resources... |
Do stock prices really go down by the amount of the dividend? | Ex-Dividend Price Behavior of Common Stocks would be a study from the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis and University of Minnesota if you want a source for some data. Abstract This study examines common stock prices around ex-dividend dates. Such price data usually contain a mixture of observations - some with and... |
Will I be liable for taxes if I work for my co. in India for 3 months while I am with my husband in UK | The key factors here are You will need to pay tax in the UK only if you live more than 183 days - that too in a tax year. Indian tax system will also classify you as a NR (Non-resident) if you live outside for more than 182 days in a tax year. In your case, your income will be in India and will stay in India. So ther... |
How to work around the Owner Occupancy Affidavit to buy another home in less than a year? | In your particular condition could buy the condo with cash, then get your mortgage on your next house with "less than 20%" down (i.e. with mortgage insurance) but it would still be an owner occupied loan. If you hate the mortgage insurance, you could save up and refi it when you have 20% available, including the initi... |
Fundamentals of creating a diversified portfolio based on numbers? | Good question. There are plenty of investors who think they can simply rely on intuition, and although luck is always present it is not enough to construct a proper portfolio. First of all there are two basic types of portfolio management: Passive and Active. The majority of abnormal gains are made with active portfoli... |
What is a bond fund? | As Michael Pryor answered, a bond fund is a mutual fund that invests in bonds. I'd also consider an ETF based on bonds to be a bond fund, but I'm not sure that all investors would consider these as "bond funds". Not all bond funds are the same -- just like stock funds. You can classify bond funds based on the issuer of... |
How risky is it to keep my emergency fund in stocks? | This is basically the short-term/long-term savings question in another form: savings that you hope are long-term but which may turn short-term very suddenly. You can never completely eliminate the risk of being forced to draw on long term savings during a period when the market is doing Something Unpleasant that would ... |
What is the median retirement savings in the United States today? | Statistics are often tough to grasp. Specifically, we need to understand the exact context and implication of the data and how it's presented. An example - I look at real estate sales data for a given town, and find that for the last 10 years, the average sale price has dropped, 3%/yr, every year for these 10. What... |
Can I buy a new house before selling my current house? | You can make a contingent offer: "I will buy this house if I sell my own." In a highly competitive environment, contingent offers tend to be ignored. (Another commentator described such a contingency clause as synonymous with "Please Reject Me".) You can get a bridge loan: you borrow money for a short term, at punishi... |
Is gold really an investment or just a hedge against inflation? | Gold is not an investment. Gold is a form of money. It and silver have been used as money much longer than paper. Paper money is a relatively recent invention (less than 350 years old) with a horrible track record of preserving wealth. When I exchange my paper US dollars for gold I'm exchanging one form of money fo... |
Why do stock prices of retailers not surge during the holidays? | If you look at S&P 500's closing price for the first trading day on December and January for the last 20 years, you will see that for 10 of these years, stocks did better overall and for 10 others they did worse. Thus you can see that the price of stocks do no necessarily increase. You can play around with the data her... |
The doctor didn't charge the health insurance in time, am I liable? | Here's my thought - call the insurance company back. Ask them to just tell you what the "reasonable and customary" approved payment would be. Offer that exact amount to the hospital, it's what they would have gotten anyway, and you learned a cheap lesson. |
Homeowners: How can you protect yourself from a financial worst-case scenario? | I am lucky enough to have chosen a flexible mortgage that allows me to change payment amounts at certain, very lenient intervals (to a minimum amount). So when I was laid off, the first thing I did was call my bank to lower my payments to a level that allowed me some breathing room, at my new, lower income. If and wh... |
If a stock doesn't pay dividends, then why is the stock worth anything? | The answer is Discounted Cash Flows. Companies that don't pay dividends are, ostensibly reinvesting their cash at returns higher than shareholders could obtain elsewhere. They are reinvesting in productive capacity with the aim of using this greater productive capacity to generate even more cash in the future. This is... |
How much more than my mortgage should I charge for rent? | I am sorry to say, you are asking the wrong question. If I own a rental that I bought with cash, I have zero mortgage. The guy I sell it to uses a hard money lender (charging a high rate) and finances 100%. All of this means nothing to the prospective tenant. In general, one would look at the rent to buy ratio in the ... |
Is it smart to only invest in mid- and small-cap stock equity funds in my 401(k)? | Can you easily stomach the risk of higher volatility that could come with smaller stocks? How certain are you that the funds wouldn't have any asset bloat that could cause them to become large-cap funds for holding to their winners? If having your 401(k) balance get chopped in half over a year doesn't give you any paus... |
Are my parents ripping me off with this deal that doesn't allow me to build my equity in my home? | Talk to your parents, and find out if you are reducing the debt or not. Find buyers, sell the place now and get out the deal. Of course you will have to wait to get a good price on it. Short term you haven't lost that much, but long term you will. Take your 25%, and use it as a down payment on a regular bank mortgag... |
What sort of tax treatment does a charitable micro-lending loan incur? | Lending is not a charitable contribution. Its an investment. If the loan becomes a bad debt - you'll have to show that it had become a bad debt. For example - bankruptcy declaration. You'll have to show an arm's length transaction, for example - real intention to repay (evidenced by payments of principal and interest m... |
Online Foreign Exchange Brokerages: Which ones are good & reputable for smaller trades? | There are many good brokers available in the market and many spammers too. Personally I have been associated with FXCM since 2001 and have never faced any problem. But everyone has their own personal choice and I recommend you to make your own. But the question is how to find out which broker is a good broker and would... |
Why don't share prices of a company rise every other Friday when the company buys shares for its own employees? | This is an old question that has an accepted answer, but it has gotten bumped due to an edit and the answers given are incorrect. I am assuming this means that every other Friday, the company is going into the open public market, buying those shares and then giving it out to the employees. No. Companies will internally... |
Can housing prices rise faster than incomes in the long run? | When over the long term housing costs in a area rise faster than wages rise, the demographic of who lives in the area changes. The size and income parameters change. A region that was full of young singles is now populated with couples with adult children, that means that the businesses and amenities have to change. At... |
When do I sell a stock that I hold as a long-term position? | If you are already invested in a particular stock, I like JoeTaxpayer's answer. Think about it as if you are re-buying the stocks you own every day you decide to keep them and don't set emotional anchor points about what you paid for them or what they might be worth tomorrow. These lead to two major logical fallacies t... |
Why don't forced buy-ins of short sold stock happen much more frequently? | Nobody is going to short sell stocks through a lender that forces people to buy in as soon as it is getting good for them. |
Does a stock's price represent current liquidation of all shares? | What if everyone decided to sell all the shares at a given moment, let's say when the stock is trading at $40? It would fall to the lowest bid price, which could be $0.01 if someone had that bid in place. Here is an example which I happened to find online: Notice there are orders to buy at half the market price and lo... |
Has anyone compared an in-person Tax Advisor to software like Turbo Tax? | Unfortunately, if your taxes are too complicated for the 1040EZ form, then your tax situation is effectively unique and you need to try both options and see for yourself which one is better. If you do your taxes yourself, you may be more likely to do a more thorough job in digging everything up. You might even find th... |
Which Roth IRA is the best for a 21 year old who has about $1500? | Your question seems like you don't understand what a Roth IRA is. A Roth IRA isn't an investment, per se. It is just a type of account that receives special tax treatment. Just like a checking and savings account are different at a bank, a ROTH IRA account is just flagged as such by a brokerage. It isn't an investment... |
First time investing advice (Canada) | Two to three years? That is one long gestation period! :^) Welcome. Congratulations on taking savings into your own hands, you are a winner for taking responsibility for your, and your family's life. If I was you my first priority would be to pay off your car and never buy one on time again. Or you could sell it and... |
How to calculate 1 share movement | Unless other people believe you have a reason for selling at a lower price, your sale probably has no lasting effect at all on the market. Of course, if people see you dump a few million dollars' worth of shares at a discount, they may be inclined to believe you have a reason. But if you just sell a few, they will conc... |
Higher returns from international markets? | I went to Morningstar's "Performance" page for FUSEX (Fideltiy's S&P 500 index fund) and used the "compare" tool to compare it with FOSFX and FWWFX, as well as FEMKX (Fidelity Emerging Markets fund). According to the data there, FOSFX outperformed FUSEX in 2012, FEMKX outperformed FUSED in 2010, and FWWFX outperformed... |
Can my spouse be the primary signer on my car's loan? | Go to your local bank or credit union before talking to a dealership. Ask them if putting both names on the loan makes a difference regarding rates and maximum loan you qualify for. Ask them to run the loan application both ways. Having both names on the loan helps build the credit of the spouse that has a lower score.... |
Tax and financial implications of sharing my apartment with my partner | I am not a lawyer nor a tax accountant, so if such chimes in here I'll gladly defer. But my understanding is: If you're romantically involved and living together you're considered a "household" and thus your finances are deemed shared for tax purposes. Any money your partner gives you toward paying the bills is not co... |
Strategies for paying off my Student loans | Starting up a company is fun, stressful, and exciting. It's also often a lot harder than you expect. Income, revenue, and cash flow are big concerns, and you need to be able to eat while you're hunting down your first paying customers. Don't pay off all the debt if that will leave you without any money for living expen... |
Investing in hemp producers in advance of possible legalization in Canada? | Hemp is already pretty easily grown by farmers here. Canada had 50,000 acres of legal hemp in 2006, but it's been in decline the last 3 years due to the cost, lack of demand, and the high values of some other crops. It's also difficult to harvest due to its size. It's possible that the demand for hemp products will i... |
Is Amazon's offer of a $50 gift card a scam? | Based on my personal experience with that particular offer, I can say that it's not really a scam. I signed up for an Amazon Credit Card to get $70 off a purchase, but then never used the card. In fact, I never even called to activate it! After a few months, I then called to cancel it. I did not see a significant hit t... |
Why do stocks gap up after a buyout is announced? | The price gaps up because the offer is for a price above the current price. Therefore people want to buy now before the price jumps to the offer level. Of course it does depend on the tone of the announcement, which party is making the announcement, and are they announcing an offer or a deal. If the price is $10, and ... |
Why do passive ETFs require so much trading (and incur costs)? | Now, if I'm not mistaken, tracking a value-weighted index is extremely easy - just buy the shares in the exact amount they are in the index and wait. Yes in theory. In practise this is difficult. Most funds that track S&P do it on sample basis. This is to maintain the fund size. Although I don't have / know the exact n... |
Why are there many small banks and more banks in the U.S.? | First, is population density. You didn't say where exactly, but for example here in Tampa, Wells Fargo has 25 branches in the area (though that is a bit larger then what I would think of the Tampa area as a local) Second, we can mix in service expectation. I expect that in addition to "good" online service, "great" ph... |
Investing in income stocks for dividends - worth it? | As a general rule of thumb, age and resiliency of your profession (in terms of high and stable wages) in most cases imply that you have the ABILITY to accept higher than average level of risk by investing in stocks (rather than bonds) in search for capital appreciation (rather than income), simply because you have more... |
How can I stop a merchant from charging a credit card processing fee? | It may seem very simple on its face but you don't know the merchant's agreement. You don't know who is providing the processing equipment. You don't know a lot of things. You know that Visa, Mastercard, Discover, Amex and others have network requirements and agreements. You know that laws have been changed to allow... |
Why are estimated taxes due “early” for the 2nd and 3rd quarters only? | There are too many nuances to the question asked to explore fully but here are a few points to keep in mind. If you are a cash-basis taxpayer (most individuals are), then you are not required to pay taxes on the money that has been billed but not received as yet. If you operate on an accrual basis, then the income acc... |
Should I pay off my credit card online immediately or wait for the bill? | I have money withdrawn near when the bill is due (not early at all) and my credit score is top-notch. It's far, far more important that you don't pay late. I don't think paying early earns you brownie points with FICO. Now, if you have an interest-bearing checking account, and if you pay your balance in full each mon... |
Acquiring first office clothes | Sounds like you're a man, so you're in luck. Our formalwear all looks similar enough that you can get by on a very short rotation. You can buy 1 pair of decent slacks in a versatile color like navy or grey with a pair of brown shoes with matching belt then have as little as 2 button down shirts (white and light blue). ... |
Using stop-loss as risk management: Is it safe? | A stop-loss does not guarantee a sale at the given price; it just automatically triggers an unlimited sale as soon as the market reaches the limit. Depending on the development, your sale could be right at, slightly under, or deeply under the stop-loss limit you gave - it could even be it is never executed, if there ar... |
Are stores that offer military discounts compensated by the government? | Company X located outside a military base offer discounts to military as a form of marketing. They want to encourage a group of potential customers to use their store/service. In some cases they are competing with subsidized store on the base. In other cases their only competition is other stores outside the base. The ... |
Can we estimate the impact of a large buy order on the share price? | I may be underestimating your knowledge of how exchanges work; if so, I apologize. If not, then I believe the answer is relatively straightforward. Lets say price of a stock at time t1 is 15$ . There are many types of price that an exchange reports to the public (as discussed below); let's say that you're referring t... |
What is the difference between a stop order and a stop limit order? | Stop order is shorter term for stop-loss order. The point being that is intended as a protective measure. A buy stop order would be used to limit losses when an investor has sold a stock short. (Meaning that they have borrowed stock and sold it, in hopes that they can take advantage of a decline in the stock's price... |
Does the IRS reprieve those who have to commute for work? | You cannot deduct expenses directly. However, your employer may participate in programs to allow you to make a pretax deduction capped at $255 per month to pay for certain commuting expenses. For personal car commuters the main category is to pay for parking. IRS guidelines Qualified Transportation Benefits This ex... |
Should I Use an Investment Professional? | Even if we accept these claims as being true, neither the fact that their clients are more confident, nor the fact that people who use an investment professional have a higher net worth tells you anything about the value of the service that such professionals provide. Judging a service provider is a complex matter whe... |
Is there any benefit to investing in an index fund? | Beatrice does a good job of summarizing things. Tracking the index yourself is expensive (transaction costs) and tedious (number of transactions, keeping up with the changes, etc.) One of the points of using an index fund is to reduce your workload. Diversification is another point, though that depends on the indexe... |
Is it possible to trade CFD without leverage? | You can but there is no point trading CFD's seeing you may still lose more than your investment due to slippage |
Stranger in Asia wants to send me $3000 in Europe over Western Union because he “likes me”? [duplicate] | It can be a money laundering scheme. The stranger gives you cash for free at first, then proposes to give you more but this time asks you to "spend" a fraction of it (like 80%). So on his side the money comes from a legitimate source. So you do it because after all you get to keep the rest of it and it is "free" money... |
Is leveraging notoriety to raise stock prices illegal in the US? | pump and dump is a common Illegal practice of boiler room operations. It refers to the talking a stock up, both through word of mouth as well as selling shares to unwitting buyers. I fail to see much difference between that practice and this. |
Company A is buying company B, what happens to the stock? | I think the correct statement is that Expedia wants to buy Orbitz for $12/share. The market price is $11, which means there is somebody willing to sell for that price. But you can't say that a stock price of $11 means that everybody is willing to sell for that price. And Expedia is unlikely to bid $12/share for just 40... |
Emptying a Roth IRA account | If you have multiple accounts, you have to empty them all before you can deduct any losses. Your loss is not a capital loss, its a deduction. It is calculated based on the total amount you have withdrawn from all your Roth IRA's, minus the total basis. It will be subject to the 2% AGI treshhold (i.e.: if your AGI is > ... |
Where to start with personal finance? | First of all, make sure you have all your credit cards paid in full -the compounding interests on those can zero out returns on any of your private investments. Fundamentally, there are 2 major parts of personal finance: optimizing the savings output (see frugal blogs for getting costs down, and entrepreneur sites for ... |
How can I find a lost 401K from a past employer? | The Employee Benefits Security Administration within the US Department of Labor is tasked with keeping track of pension and 401K programs. The even have a website to search for abandoned plans: it helps participants and others find out whether a particular plan is in the process of being, or has been, terminated and th... |
How do I get the latest or even realtime information of institutions stock buy/sell action? | Of course not, this is confidential information in the same way that I cannot phone up your bank and ask to see a list of the transactions that you have made. Any bank has to be extremely careful about protecting the private transactions of it's customers and would be subject to heavy fines if it revealed this informat... |
Can I save our credit with a quickie divorce? | My advice to you? Act like responsible adults and owe up to your financial commitments. When you bought your house and took out a loan from the bank, you made an agreement to pay it back. If you breach this agreement, you deserve to have your credit score trashed. What do you think will happen to the $100K+ if you de... |
Bonds vs equities: crash theory | I would suggest looking into Relative Strength Asset Allocation. This type of investment strategy keeps you invested in the best performing asset classes. As a result of investing in this manner it removes the guesswork and moves naturally (say into cash) when the stock market turns down. There is a good whitepaper on... |
Investing for Dummys | You can't get started investing. There are preliminary steps that must be taken prior to beginning to invest: Only once these things are complete can you think about investing. Doing so before hand will only likely lose money in the long run. Figure these steps will take about 2.5 years. So you are 2.5 years from in... |
When a publicly traded company splits into two how are common shares fairly valued, distributed? | How are shareholders sure to receive a fair percentage of each company? At the time the split occurs, each investor owns the same proportion of each new company that they owned in the first. What the investor does with it after that (selling one, for example) is irrelevant from a fairness perspective. Suppose company... |
At what price are dividends re-invested? | If a stock is trading for $11 per share just before a $1 per share dividend is declared, then the share price drops to $10 per share immediately following the declaration. If you owned 100 shares (valued at $1100) before the dividend was declared, then you still own 100 shares (now valued at $1000). Generally, if the d... |
Owning REIT vs owning real estate - which has a better hypothetical ROI? | REIT is to property as Mutual Fund is to stock. In others words, a REIT spreads your risk out over a greater number of properties, making the return safer, at the expense of both upside and downside risk. On average, both would average out to be the same. That said, you have a much wider range of outcomes when investi... |
Can a company block a specific person from buying its stock? | In the UK, this is the very definition of a Public Limited Company. A Limited Company can restrict how its stock is trades and who can buy and sell and when, a Public Limited Company cannot. Most stock exchanges will only allow Public Limited Company stock to be traded. Therefore a company can control who its stock ... |
What type of pension should I get? | If your new employer has a Final Salary or defined benefit type pension scheme, join it. DB plans are attractive because they are often less a risk for the employee. If your employer has a defined contribution scheme and contributes to it, join it and contribute at least up to the maximum amount that they will match – ... |
Where do stock traders get realtime updates on Fed announcements? Is there a feed I could scrape? | Bloomberg terminal is a pretty standard way nowadays to get this information (and a lot more) pretty much in real time. |
How to get started with savings, paying off debt, and retirement? | You have a small emergency fund. Good! Be open about your finances with each other. No secrets, except around gift-giving holidays. Pay off the debts ASAP. Don't accumulate more consumer debt after it's paid off. I wouldn't contribute anything more to the 401k beyond what gives you a maximum match. Free money is fr... |
What is the best way for me to invest my money into my own startup? | Ask your accountant about convertable preference shares. This would permit you to loan money to your company and then convert the debt to equity, should you so choose, at a later stage. As with the answer by bstpierre, these are all contractual arrangements conducted at arms-length. |
Reasons behind a large price movement of a penny stock without any recent news releases? | Yes, in my humble opinion, it can be "safe" to assume that — but not in the sense that your assumption is necessarily or likely correct. Rather, it can be "safe" in the respect that assuming the worst — even if wrong! — could save you from a likely painful and unsuccessful speculation in the highly volatile stock of a ... |
Why is Google's current nasdaq market cap almost twice the current share price * the No. of shares outstanding? | For each class A share (GOOGL) there's a class C share (GOOG), hence the missing half in your calculation. The almost comes from the slightly higher market price of the class A shares (due to them having voting powers) over class C (which have no voting powers). There's also class B share which is owned by the founders... |
How to calculate cash loss over time? | There are two things you need to keep in mind when you look at Inflation as an entity. Inflation is necessary to keep in check the value of goods. As per Moore's Law for example, a mobile phone that you buy for £100 today will be available for £50 in two years. With increased purchasing power, one needs to maintain bal... |
What ETF best tracks the price of gasoline, or else crude oil? | There is no ETF that closely tracks oil or gasoline. This is because all existing oil and gasoline ETFs hold futures contracts or other derivatives. Storing the oil and gasoline would be prohibitively costly. Futures contracts are prone to contango and backwardation, sometimes resulting in large deviations from the pri... |
I paid a contractor to make roof repairs to a house in my LLC. How can I deduct this cost? | This new roof should go on the 2016 LLC business return, but you probably won't be able to expense the entire roof as a repair. A new roof is most likely a capital improvement, which means that it would need to be depreciated over many years instead of expensed all in 2016. The depreciation period for a residential r... |
Would it ever be a bad idea to convert a traditional IRA to a Roth IRA with the following assumptions? | Even if you're paying a lot of taxes now, you're talking marginal dollars when you look at current contribution, and average tax rate when making withdrawals. IE, if you currently pay 28% on your last dollar (and assuming your contribution is entirely in your marginal rate), then you're paying 28% on all of the Roth c... |
Why would I choose a 40-Year depreciation instead of the standard 27.5-Year? | There are specific cases where you are required to use ADS: Required use of ADS. You must use ADS for the following property. Listed property used 50% or less in a qualified business use. See chapter 5 for information on listed property. Any tangible property used predominantly outside the United States during the ye... |
Help! I've cancelled their service, but this company continues to bill my credit card an annual fee. What can I do? | I don't think you should have to cancel your card. Call your customer service line and just indicate to them what has happened. You aren't getting service for what they are charging you and they are refusing to remove it themselves. |
Roth IRA - Vanguard or Fidelity? If a college student had to pick one? | Well, a couple things to keep in mind: Even if you have enough to meet the minimum initial amount, you need to have at least that much income in the year you make the contribution. You'll probably be best served saving up in a savings account so that by the time you have an income (and can thus make contributions), you... |
Any tips for asset allocation across multiple retirement accounts? | I have a similar situation -- five different accounts between me and my wife. Just as you and @Alex B describe, I maintain my asset allocation across the combination of all accounts. I also maintain a spreadsheet to track the targets, deviations from the targets, amounts required to get back in balance, and overall per... |
Paid cash for a car, but dealer wants to change price | As others have said, if the dealer accepted payment and signed over ownership of the vehicle, that's a completed transaction. While there may or may not be a "cooling-off period" in your local laws, those protect the purchaser, not (as far as I know) the seller. The auto dealer could have avoided this by selling for a ... |
Should I buy a house or am I making silly assumptions that I can afford it? | Having convinced myself that there is no point of paying someone's else mortgage Somewhat rhetorical this many years later, but I expect some other kid forcefed the obsession with propping up the housing market might be repeating the nonsense about "paying someone else's mortgage" and read this. Will you be buying yo... |
What effect would a company delisting from the LSE to move to china have on shareholders? | You would still be the legal owner of the shares, so you would almost certainly need to transfer them to a broker than supports the Hong Kong Stock Exchange (which allows you to trade on the Shanghai exchange). In order to delist they would need to go through a process which would include enabling shareholders to conti... |
Is it accurate to say that if I was to trade something, my probability of success can't be worse than random? | In theory, in a perfect world, what you state is almost true. Apart from transaction fees, if you assume that the market is perfectly efficient (ie: public information is immediately reflected in a perfect reflection of future share value, in all share prices when the information becomes available), then in theory any ... |
What are the reasons to get more than one credit card? | nan |
How can one get their FICO/credit scores for free? (really free) | I get my credit scores from all three bureaus for free - no gimmick. I use a combination of banks that offer this service to get my scores. I wrote about this sometime back in my blog. For credit report, the only place to go is AnnualCreditReport.com. I space it out so that I get one every 4 months since there is a ... |
Do I not have a credit score? | You can't get your credit score for free, just the report with the information the score is based on. If you got credit reports through annualcreditreport.com, the Score tab would typically contain an advertisement for purchasing your score. If you have an ad-blocker enabled, that might be blocked, explaining the bl... |
How does giving to charity work? | If you don't have much money, and more important, don't itemize, donations are strictly between you and your karma. If you itemize (from a combination of mortgage interest, property tax, and state tax), by donating used goods, you can get some return on your taxes, and feel good about yourself. When I donate at charit... |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.