Recent posts by John Ameriks
John Ameriks leads Vanguard's Investment Counseling & Research group, which provides portfolio recommendations along with topical commentary and investment counseling.
Given all the back and forth in Washington these days, with policy meetings and dramatic proposals to revolutionize retirement, I’ve got retirement-income solutions on the brain. So here’s a modest proposal for providing “Retirement Income Security for All.”
A few readers had some strong reactions* to my recent post on the benefits of making investment purchases at the beginning of the year, as opposed to waiting until year-end.
Here’s a pretty simple chart showing hypothetical investment results for two hypothetical investors. Each of them saved $2,500 a year for 25 years, using investment strategies that delivered identical 7% rates of return each year. After 25 years, one investor ended up ahead of the other by more than $11,000. Can you guess why? Read more »
Like everyone else, I’ve been reading (well, skimming) reams of year-end—and in some places, “decade-end”—economic summaries. There’s lots of talk about black swans, financial “Frankensteins,” lost decades, and fundamental changes in investor behavior.
Black swans are old news, and I’ve written on financial innovation and lost decades previously. And I’ve only got a tiny bit to say about investor behavior. I’ll get to that after sharing a few other observations I wish got more attention in all this year-in-reviewing.
The issues aren’t quite the same as those one faces when considering the deepest aspects of personal faith and religious doctrine, but a “Roth conversion” can pose some difficult issues for investors nonetheless. And we’re going to hear much more about this going forward because of a scheduled change in the law: Unless something unexpected happens in D.C., come 2010 there will no longer be income limits on Roth IRA conversions.
There will be a lot written on the issue of whether one should convert or not, as well as endless articles describing all kinds of “strategies” to potentially leverage the change (some legitimate and others more questionable). For me, three things are important in considering this kind of “conversion”: