Recently, Wall Street Journal personal finance columnist Jason Zweig made this observation: Getting rich isn’t the hard part, he said. “Staying rich is the hard part.” On the surface, staying rich might actually seem like the easy part. After all, you simply need to build a balanced portfolio [...]
Tax-smart investing
If there’s one story that seems to have captured the public’s imagination this summer, it’s the revelation that venture capitalist Peter Thiel has managed to accumulate more than $5 billion in his Roth IRA—where it will be entirely tax-free to him. In its reporting, ProPublica, the news outlet [...]
A less taxing retirement
Type the words “safe withdrawal rate” into Google, and it’ll return more than a million results. I’m not surprised by this. People debate about practically everything in personal finance, but the debate around this question is particularly intense. For at least twenty-five years, the conventional [...]
Alvan Bobrow
Let me tell you about Alvan Bobrow. His tale—and specifically his lawsuit—are important for every investor to understand. That’s because the legal loophole he sought to exploit is now a pothole for everyone else. The first thing to know about Bobrow is that he is a tax attorney, and back in 2008, [...]
Four overlooked benefits of Roth conversions
Congress is back at it, aiming to change the tax laws again. Just since 2017, there has been the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA), the SECURE Act and the CARES Act, each of which contained tax provisions, some very significant. And as we speak, Congress and the White House are horse trading on another [...]
