back to indexBogleheads® Conference 2011 - Panel of Experts II
Chapters
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19:56 Core Portfolio
23:43 The Dfa 6040 Global Portfolio
30:24 Municipal Bonds
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One thing we started last year, and I'd like to repeat it again this year, is all these 00:00:10.640 |
lovely people came here on their own dime, and I'd like to give them a few minutes to 00:00:16.680 |
either talk about their latest project or something that they find interesting or just 00:00:26.680 |
I got my MBA from Kellogg back in 1982, and, you know, I went to school to learn how to 00:00:33.120 |
beat the market, and along came Bernard Malkiel's random walk down Wall Street. 00:00:37.080 |
You know, Fama French is a little new in investing since then, but behavioral finance is a subject 00:00:45.000 |
I don't know how I graduated thinking that was a logical, rational thing, but I'm using 00:00:54.360 |
Projects, I'm just starting, writing the book was the hardest thing I ever did. 00:00:59.320 |
I'm a math geek, and Bill Balloon, who I guess is not here, giving me a contract with a due 00:01:10.300 |
I'm just starting to get the itch for a second book, which would be a little bit broader 00:01:15.640 |
than investing and include, you know, all the aspects of financial planning from taxes, 00:01:21.640 |
estate planning, budgeting, in kind of some simple terms, and it would be called something 00:01:28.720 |
like Roth's Rules of Common Sense, because common sense is not really all that common. 00:01:35.840 |
You know, just a couple of philosophical musings. 00:01:42.520 |
I considered myself unbelievably lucky I didn't have to, I paid $1,550 a year for my medical 00:01:49.420 |
school tuition, and my graduate school I got for free, and then I started working in 1980, 00:01:57.000 |
and then I sought away some obscene amount of money with the pension rules, and then 00:02:02.160 |
got these, you know, security returns in the '80s and '90s that were just beyond belief. 00:02:08.300 |
And I sort of felt sorry for, you know, until very recently, for the kids who, you know, 00:02:13.880 |
were dealing, you know, with, you know, coming out with enormous amounts of debt from school, 00:02:19.000 |
you know, with overvalued securities to buy into their, you know, their retirement plans. 00:02:23.180 |
And I sort of, I almost felt guilty about it, but now I don't feel so guilty. 00:02:28.120 |
I think that, you know, someone who's 25 or 35 years old and has sought family money again 00:02:33.280 |
is going to get, you know, more than agreeable returns, perhaps the kinds of returns that 00:02:38.880 |
I mean, in 1981 you could get 13% CDs, you know, which have a real rate of return of 00:02:48.080 |
In terms of, you know, where I'm going and what I'm doing, I'm always writing. 00:02:53.320 |
I'm always trying to be on the state writing and learning curve, and I've got to explain 00:02:57.880 |
to a lot of you I've got a project that I'm working on on communications technology and 00:03:06.840 |
It's about 90, perhaps about 93% done, and hopefully it'll be out next year. 00:03:12.600 |
As far as financial publishing, I don't have any great plans. 00:03:15.680 |
I'm thinking of doing some e-publishing, just, you know, putting out Kindle books on my own. 00:03:21.480 |
Maybe not even books, I mean, you know, somebody explained to me several weeks ago a book is 00:03:26.880 |
It's becoming a social construct, and, you know, there's no reason why you can't sell 00:03:32.440 |
10,000 words for, you know, for $2 as easily as you could sell 100,000 words for $25. 00:03:42.400 |
So I may wind up doing little trips and drabs of, you know, encapsulated subjects and doing 00:03:48.400 |
You find the ones you want, and you leave the ones you don't want. 00:04:02.980 |
It would be a lot better if I could say this without him being here and embarrassing him. 00:04:06.800 |
Mike is 27 years old, and he is the future of our organization. 00:04:13.360 |
There's some other posters on our Vogelheads board who are in their 20s, their mid-20s, 00:04:19.120 |
and they are dynamo out there, gung-ho Vogelheads, who are helping to spread the word to their 00:04:28.200 |
The first time I read something that Mike wrote, I thought he was in his mid-40s or 00:04:34.120 |
50s, even in his 60s, who had been retired, and he turns out to have been about 25 at 00:04:39.920 |
And doing what Bill is talking about, he's publishing small books, and he's financing 00:04:47.600 |
his -- this is his living, selling his books. 00:04:51.300 |
But the way he's doing it, he's using the internet and the median of the young folks, 00:04:58.680 |
if you will, to get the message out about the Vogelheads, not unlike what we're trying 00:05:01.960 |
to do on the board, but just taking it to three or four or five or 25 different levels. 00:05:06.840 |
I was at the pleasure of being at a financial bloggers' conference, the very first one that 00:05:11.160 |
they had a couple of weeks ago, and it was all these 20-somethings out here, and they're 00:05:14.680 |
all networking and interconnected and doing all this thing, and Mike is in the middle 00:05:19.040 |
of all that, spreading the Vogelhead message. 00:05:21.560 |
And so he's the future, and the young people are the future of the Vogelheads, and if he 00:05:25.680 |
And he's got the right idea with small books, and I think Bill has realized that, and I've 00:05:32.520 |
And the projects that I might be working on in the future are just going to be -- I was 00:05:37.400 |
I'd just break it down into three or four 60- to 80-page e-books and sell them for what 00:05:45.920 |
But in order to try to spread the Vogelhead message, we're doing -- Wiki is fantastic. 00:05:51.360 |
I don't know if you had any chance to look at what we're doing out there with Wiki. 00:05:57.680 |
It's wonderful what they're doing, and now we're on Facebook, and now we've got people 00:06:02.960 |
like Mike Piper out there spreading the word to the young community. 00:06:06.400 |
I mean, this is the future of the Vogelheads. 00:06:08.320 |
This is spreading the message, and e-technology, if you will, is one way of doing it, and I 00:06:16.360 |
So that's what I'm doing, and I just wanted to give credit to the young folks that are 00:06:22.040 |
here today that are, say, under the age of 40, because you are the future of the Vogelheads. 00:06:27.440 |
I'll second the endorsement of the Wiki site. 00:06:29.560 |
Just before coming here, I sent a message to some of my colleagues at Morningstar.com 00:06:34.120 |
saying that what you all have done there, I think, has evolved into the most useful, 00:06:40.480 |
deep resource for personal finance on the web. 00:06:44.680 |
So I just think it's an extraordinary achievement. 00:06:46.680 |
I'm sure it'll continue to grow and get even deeper and broader, but what you've done so 00:06:52.400 |
I'm honored to be here, honored to be up on this panel. 00:06:57.360 |
As Mel's intro of me alluded to, I spent most of my career at Morningstar focusing on mutual 00:07:03.360 |
funds and helping people select mutual funds, and the longer I did that, the longer I became 00:07:08.560 |
convinced that we were just sort of toiling in the margins of people's financial lives. 00:07:13.280 |
So whether they selected the right large growth fund or whatever they did really paled in 00:07:19.920 |
comparison to did they save enough, did they make semi-sane asset allocation decisions, 00:07:26.040 |
did they not completely undermine their financial plan by selling everything at the wrong moment. 00:07:32.240 |
So I'm really happy in my current role to be able to address a lot of these things, 00:07:37.800 |
to tap resources like a lot of you and external resources and write about a whole lot of topics. 00:07:44.960 |
I write about four or five columns a week and I'm really busy, but tremendously enjoy 00:07:52.160 |
I have become more and more interested in the logistics of retirement planning, so have 00:08:00.840 |
Another topic that's of tremendous interest to me is the decline in cognitive functioning 00:08:05.960 |
as people age and how they must prepare their financial plans for that possibility. 00:08:11.880 |
I know that many of us have experienced that in our own families. 00:08:16.280 |
I'm undergoing that right now with my dad, so it's become front and center with me, and 00:08:20.880 |
thankfully he has me to help him, but a lot of other elderly folks do not. 00:08:25.960 |
So that has become a real cause of mine, helping people, even dedicated do-it-yourselfers who 00:08:31.160 |
have been very effective over their lives, helping them prepare for that day that they 00:08:41.080 |
I know that some users have gotten a little offended by things that I've written, but 00:08:46.680 |
I mean well, and I think it's a really important and critically under-discussed topic. 00:08:52.200 |
Could I just ask that we recognize once again all of the people who are in the infrastructure 00:09:01.920 |
of the local heads, the wiki, and Alex, and the stand-up, and whoever else is here who 00:09:07.280 |
are involved in the actual what goes on in the back. 00:09:45.900 |
I mean, a well-running discussion board or a site is like a tropical garden that needs 00:09:50.300 |
weeding about once every ten minutes, and if you don't weed it, it very quickly becomes 00:09:57.580 |
uninhabitable, and the people on the discussion board who do that really deserve our gratitude. 00:10:06.660 |
Well, Rick and Christine both talked about the wiki, and I think that's probably one 00:10:17.420 |
of the most under-utilized and unrecognized resources available, and it is a vast, vast 00:10:28.020 |
So I've been using the bully pulpit of Forbes to do a series on the wiki to try to get more 00:10:36.380 |
recognition for it, and that's one of the nice things. 00:10:40.020 |
I really don't like having a deadline, and I told Christine earlier that she's my idol, 00:10:47.580 |
and I don't know how she does it, adding up column after column after column. 00:10:51.660 |
Every time I log on to Morningstar, there's Christine with a new column, and Laura and 00:10:57.460 |
I share a column that is a biweekly column, which means Laura writes one week, and then 00:11:03.860 |
two weeks later, I have to write, which means I'm writing one column a month, and here's 00:11:08.220 |
Christine batting out what seems like one a day, so I really don't know how you do it. 00:11:15.700 |
Writing a book is a lot of work, writing columns are a lot of work, especially when you're 00:11:20.300 |
supposed to be retired and playing golf and things like that, but I felt that we were 00:11:28.260 |
given a column at Forbes, and it gives us a choice to spread the word to a lot of people 00:11:37.340 |
who aren't really getting the movement message, so even though it's a chore, I feel that it's 00:11:44.820 |
worth the effort, and that's basically the thing that I love to hate, having a deadline, 00:11:55.420 |
because I thought I packed that in years ago. 00:11:59.340 |
I just want to say something about the wiki, and it's what's, looking at how people are 00:12:05.380 |
using the site, what's an interesting phenomenon is the regular posters, readers, tend not 00:12:14.380 |
to use the wiki that much, however, in the way the internet works, we're getting more 00:12:19.980 |
and more traffic from people who have never been to the site, and they do a Google search 00:12:23.700 |
on something, and basically the more complex the query, or something like non-deductible 00:12:30.420 |
IRA, is leading people to the wiki, so like anything on the internet, if the quality is 00:12:36.900 |
there, the content is there, it eventually gets found, so there's getting more and more 00:12:40.820 |
traffic on it, so it may not be seen as much on the forum part of it, and we're going to 00:12:50.740 |
be doing something to figure out a way to better integrate the two, or at least make 00:12:57.300 |
people more aware of it from there, the regular users, but people aren't, there is a lot of 00:13:02.780 |
activity from people reading the stuff, it's just not as visible. 00:13:09.020 |
Well that's great, now we'll get back to the Q&A, a question from Alex, what about low-cost 00:13:17.540 |
variable annuities, for someone like Vanguard or TIA, prep to fill out any income gaps in 00:13:25.260 |
So, you're talking about a variable annuity instead of a, instead of a speed, right? 00:13:35.300 |
I'll kick that off, I'm not sure what the role of a variable annuity in retirement is, 00:13:42.740 |
that's a hard one, I think for certain investors in the saving phase, a low-cost variable annuity 00:13:51.820 |
can be useful, and here are my criteria for using one, first of all, the person should 00:13:57.340 |
be young, because the compounding advantages of an annuity are greater the longer you are, 00:14:03.700 |
so the perfect candidate for an annuity is actually one who is 15 years old. 00:14:08.420 |
And we've stopped right there for a second, we want to make sure, he's talking about non-qualified 00:14:16.500 |
Correct, correct, and so the second criteria is you don't have any space for sheltered 00:14:26.300 |
assets anywhere else, so you don't have enough in your IRAs and in your 401s, okay, if you've 00:14:32.380 |
got plenty of room in there you certainly don't need a variable annuity, the third thing 00:14:36.580 |
is it has to be in an asset class which is inherently very tax inefficient, okay, and 00:14:40.900 |
that's junk, and that's REITs, alright, so if you can meet those three criteria I think 00:14:49.140 |
that owning a variable annuity is a reasonable thing to do, but very few people meet that 00:14:58.220 |
Yeah, a low-cost one, of course low-cost is part of it, yeah. 00:15:01.580 |
I would say almost always no, you're converting a tax-efficient long-term capital investment. 00:15:09.220 |
No, but I'm saying in retirement, not -- Oh, in a retirement, so you want tax deferral 00:15:13.900 |
within a tax -- No, it's people who just need an income stream that is greater than 3% or 00:15:20.900 |
4% and don't really care about leaving, you know, that's a -- Well, actually it could 00:15:28.220 |
work to leave some money towards an heirs, if there's a low-cost variable annuity, you 00:15:35.220 |
could guarantee yourself that 5% stream in retirement and still leave something for your 00:15:42.260 |
heirs, but you're going to have costs that make, generally speaking, the average mutual 00:15:50.940 |
Well, that's why I asked specifically about TIAA-CRAFT and Vanguard, I mean, I know there's 00:15:58.180 |
a lot of professors, my parents are among them, who are living off of these sorts of 00:16:03.580 |
things with, you know, withdrawal rates that they couldn't have if they were to follow, 00:16:17.380 |
Well, like TIAA-CRAFT -- No, but I mean, what specifically? 00:16:20.700 |
TIAA-TRADITIONAL and, you know, like, say, I don't know, there's maybe 70% TIAA-TRADITIONAL, 00:16:30.780 |
Yeah, but TIAA-CRAFT is kind of a different animal, I mean, they've structured their product 00:16:36.860 |
inside an annuity, but it's not what I think of when I think of a variable annuity, and 00:16:40.820 |
I use Vanguard variable annuities all the time, but as a 1035 to get into something 00:16:46.060 |
ugly, into something, you know, much, much, much less ugly, but still not great. 00:16:51.860 |
Yeah, the TIAA-TRADITIONAL, by the way, until about eight months ago, was an amazing deal, 00:16:57.860 |
because if you qualify for it, and it means that you had to have received some money at 00:17:03.620 |
some point in your life from an educational or a public institution, which, you know, 00:17:08.000 |
probably 90% of people would qualify for, and basically you had what amounted to a money 00:17:12.820 |
market that yielded, and still does yield, 3%, and all you had to do was put it inside 00:17:18.380 |
of an IRA, and money was perfectly liquid, in and out. 00:17:22.980 |
I contacted Vanguard, and my question to the Vanguard people last night was on the variable 00:17:29.660 |
annuity side, because, and we're not going to talk politics or anything here, but if 00:17:37.100 |
taxes on long-term capital gains go up to an ordinary income tax rate, and taxes on 00:17:42.740 |
dividends from stock go up to an ordinary income tax rate, then all of a sudden, the 00:17:50.060 |
Vanguard variable annuity becomes very attractive on a, for taxable accounts, and we've been 00:17:58.140 |
talking with Vanguard for the last year and a half, and it looked like this could occur, 00:18:04.820 |
could occur, not saying it will, but it could, about how we can structure using, how we can 00:18:11.340 |
manage accounts at our company, using Vanguard variable annuities, because right now, there's 00:18:16.780 |
no system at Vanguard to allow money managers to actually manage portfolios of variable 00:18:22.860 |
annuities in a very efficient way, rather than calling up individually and talking with 00:18:27.580 |
somebody on the phone and trying to manage 500 client portfolios by committing 500 individual 00:18:34.260 |
We are working on the system to allow investment advisors like us to be able to efficiently 00:18:41.700 |
manage variable annuities, just like we can manage the Vanguard funds, and I think it's 00:18:47.900 |
an important step, I think, if the tax laws change, that would make very low-cost variable 00:18:55.660 |
annuity products particularly attractive in a lot of asset classes, where right now, they're 00:19:03.420 |
And one other thing that hasn't been tested on, but in a lot of states, variable annuities 00:19:09.540 |
are sheltered from creditors, so there are some people, like, that are subject to lawsuits 00:19:17.220 |
that might consider it doctors, and others who are subject to lawsuits. 00:19:28.420 |
This is a question about small-cap and value and tilting. 00:19:33.260 |
Does anyone like to share their thoughts on either a yes or no on tilting? 00:19:46.180 |
All I'm saying is that the core portfolio is made up.