Author Archives: Megan Russell

The draft 2020 Form 1040 instructions clarify: the $300 limit is per form.

Choosing the right moments to buy convenience with your money brings value to your life.

An important part of the family’s emergency plan is to make sure you have a plan for when the financial spouse can no longer serve the family in that way, either because they are no longer interested or because of their incapacity.

This 2017 article reminds us that there is not one best Roth conversion plan that you can apply to everyone.

Depending on your situation, outright beneficiary designations could be a cleaner estate planning solution.

We have an almost secret code behind the images we select.

The SECURE Act of 2019 changed several things, so here is an updated review of this complex subject.

“Parental Reminder #42” reminds us that goodness is something bigger than we can articulate but, even though we cannot express it fully, it is very important.

On Monday, October 26, 2020, Megan Russell was interviewed by Sunny Burns and Sunmarie Burns of the FamVestor podcast.

Most stayed the same while HSAs and employers saw increased contribution limits.

If you are a responsible saver, keeping the liquidity in your pocket until the bill deadline expands your options for both growth and savings.

We believe that holding on to Energy and waiting for it to recover might mean missing out on greater gains elsewhere.

Beneficiary designations directly to your heirs are a cleaner estate planning solution.

If you have a charity among your heirs, there is the possibility for tax savings.

Not every custodian is willing to accept the complexity, but I am grateful that Schwab is.

While an efficient frontier graph cannot hand you a perfect asset allocation, it remains a useful tool in analyzing what the past can tell us about a wide variety of investments.

We pride ourselves on regularly and seamlessly offering our services regardless of who is working and who is taking time off.

Each spouse has different spending habits and values different things in life. It’s okay for your budget to reflect that.

Here is a guide for how to find out what your bond is worth, decide whether you should keep it until maturity or cash out early, and how to get money for your paper.

Regardless of the usefulness of their questions or their website, I enjoy answering every set of advisor questions I find.

Hopefully this simple guide helps you get started in the right direction for correcting these surprise excess distributions.

Voting early has the same process as voting in-person.

Unfortunately, neither “yes” nor “no” is a correct answer to this question.

No matter how small your savings or when you start accumulating them, those small changes have large effects over time.

The best way to find old shareholder materials is to search your own email inbox.

Individuals with more than $5M may be served well from gifting to utilize the higher estate exclusions before they sunset.

You can transfer up or across the family tree. However, if you want to transfer down a family tree, you can run into taxation problems.

Even if you are just a tiny piece of the puzzle, all the pieces are essential.

The phrase “bad poet” reminds me of that day when I was in elementary school. It is a lesson for each of us, regardless of our income level.

This 2013 article explores whether the person who sits idly by while their stocks increase their net worth deserves the money they make.

In these ways, rebalancing can be of great value to a long-term investor’s portfolio.

Those who flat-lined to cash or who waited to invest their cash until the markets looked better missed out on the recovery.

Now non-nuclear family or friends who are more than 10 years younger than the decedent and in good health are never eligible for stretch provisions and must distribute the whole balance over 10 years.

Yes, we are merely human, but our ideas and our analysis are powerful.

With the grandparents as the owner rather than the parent, the student may have a better chance of receiving financial aid.

Unfortunately, the answer is that you cannot. The 529 account owner receives any state tax deductions for contributions make to their account.

We decided to add two new sectors after generating several hundred efficient frontier graphs of various United States classifications, industries, and sectors over a variety of time periods.

Form ADJ of the 760 lines 8a – 8c are where you report miscellaneous deductions.

In this article, I am reviewing the quantitative measurements and performance metrics of Freedom Investing to see how its risk and return compare to the EAFE Index, its benchmark.

You may or may not want to leave anything to your favorite charity. However, if you do, there are often advantages to using a Donor Advised Fund over designating the charity directly.

Oddly enough, what qualifies something as a unique account is both a unique account registration and investment portfolio selection.

This designation gives both Schwab and your financial advisor the permission to contact the named individual if either of us were ever concerned that you or your finances were being taken advantage of.

If a morally questionable idea is a valuable money maker, then your avoidance of that fund will only give more wealth to those whose conscience is clear investing in it.

This is the financial shock of a trip to hospital. It is upsetting, expensive, and unexpected.

Even though a holding has gone down, there can be several advantages to selling it anyway. Here are six reasons you may want to sell for a loss.

In market downturns, often the newest investor reports recovering the fastest due to a simple reporting error.

Hong Kong has always been an anomaly: a tiny, extremely free country with an expiration date in 2047.

After you have opened your account, there are many methods of contributing to or funding your Charles Schwab account. The best and easiest four methodologies are as follows.

This latest notice now gives both seniors and heirs who have not yet been able to put their formerly RMD funds back into their IRAs the chance of redistributing those funds to the IRA that distributed them.

As a result of new fund additions, we added five new country-specific funds to our Schwab Institutional Intelligent Portfolio asset allocations.