The Money Mustache Community
Learning, Sharing, and Teaching => Investor Alley => Topic started by: aboatguy on December 17, 2017, 08:22:57 PM
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I've been told its time in the market, not timing the market.
If the tax bill gets signed before the first, I'm leaning toward fully funding my Roth and my wife's Roth on the second since I believe that will give us a couple of good quarters. If the tax bill doesn't get signed I'm leaning towards fully funding both Roths since the market will either fall or it will rise upon the news, giving us a couple of good quarters.
What are your thoughts?
Mike
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Historically lump sum investing has on average beat dollar cost averaging: https://personal.vanguard.com/pdf/ISGDCA.pdf
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Looks like we have 1 thorstach disciple.
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None of the above: We fund our previous year's IRA when we do our taxes. We earn close to cut offs and this allows us to minimize paperwork. Since we use the same strategy every year, we are not tempted by market timing and a couple of months here and there is unlikely to make much difference over the course of decades.
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Cant contribute to roths any more due to income limits but if I could I would dump it all in asap.
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I have some extra cash, but I'm actually trying to pre-pay on some charitable contributions. Figure shifting these contributions from 2018 to 2017 will give me a better shot at the standard deduction next year.
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I would love to fund mine up front, but voted for DCA because I can't afford to do that.
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Basing investment decisions on anecdotes is obviously the best plan! I dumped everything into the S&P 500 at the beginning of 2017 and front loaded my 401k, and reaped the full benefits of 2017 bull.
I was saving to front load again next year, but today I dumped it all into a donor advised fund because the new tax plan is going to stop me from itemizing. Just saved $2000+ on next year's tax bill, score!
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Every year I dump my IRA money in on January 2nd. It's DCA but on a yearly basis. I concentrate on setting the money aside to do this in the last half of the previous year.
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Living paycheck to paycheck so DCA for me. We'd have to stop putting money into our taxable account for Nov and Jan to fully fund two Roth IRAs in January or dump the entire Emergency fund into Roth IRAs. With all the buckets (401Ks x 2, HSA x 2, Roth IRA x 2 and taxable) we end up "broke" (not really, but our budget doesn't allow more than a few thousand dollars of shifting from month to month).
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This may be a dumb question but does it make sense to sell out of a taxable account to fund a trad IRA?
We had a few lucky years where we had way more to invest than our IRA max and so built up taxable accounts that are bigger than our IRAs. Now our income is declining slowly and I would rather have more in tax-deferred. I'd love to cash out and max our two IRAs on Jan 2 if the tax hit isn't too bad. (We may actually be in the 12 percent bracket in 2018 after all our deductions). Thanks.