July 15th, 2022 paycheck

Created:

Extended market fund is still down around 30 percent from its 52 week high, so, not putting money there. The multi-factor fund is almost at its minimum for the portfolio. I’m still buying the dip using the total stock market fund, which should be pushing the large-cap portion up a bit.

I’m noticing the small-cap value portion of the portfolio is holding pretty steady at 9 percent, which is what we were hoping for.

I started a new job and should be able to explore the world of employee stock purchase plans.

Rolling over the 401k

Section titled Rolling over the 401k

The options to invest in with my new employer are somewhat limited and foreign. The index funds they have aren’t publicly listed like those at my previous employer. Further, they have a lot of target date funds and an S&P 500. There is a mid-cap, but I’m not entirely sure how it will function. I’m also not sure I can link the account to Personal Capital.

So, I’m leaning toward rolling over the 401k into my Traditional IRA.

I called the custodian for the 401k and they said I had three options:

  1. cash out,
  2. roll over, or
  3. a blend of the two.

Given part of these articles and experiences are for me to explore the emotional side of money for me, I have to say I felt pretty nervous.

Loss aversion.

When I was talking with the agent I remember exclaiming that I didn’t want to close out while the market was down because I wouldn’t be able to reap any benefit from the loss; the drawback to tax-deferred and tax-free accounts. I asked about fees to keep the account open and they would amount to about 0.1 percent per year plus the expense ratio of the funds themselves, which isn’t bad.

When I got off the phone though, I started thinking maybe I’m not really losing much, if anything.

If I cashed out, I’d lose. I would be paying taxes, penalties, and be in a down position to boot. If I rolled it into my employer 401k there’d be a bit of anxiety there because I couldn’t track it the way I’ve grown accustomed.

Meanwhile, going with the Traditional IRA, I know the custodian, have access to all the funds, and so on. Further, I can set it up like the other accounts at Vanguard with the mutual fund and ETF combination to get rid of the little bit of cash that’s in there. Finally, I’d have one less account to worry about.

I would be “losing” two-thirds of my employer contributions; at least that’s how I’m starting to look at it. I also would need to keep tabs on contributions to make sure I didn’t go over the annual limit; if I rolled my old 401k to the new 401k, that would be a non-issue because my new employer would be notified of how much I had contributed with them.

So, pretty sure:

  1. I’ll go straight S&P 500 at the new employer; I should be able to use a standard S&P index fund as a proxy for Personal Capital.
  2. I’ll roll the 401k from my previous employer to my Traditional IRA account; a re-balancing move, which will spend the token I have.
  3. I’m going to see about getting a total stock market and extended market fund added to offerings at my new employer.
  4. And, I’ll see about getting eyes on it using Personal Capital so I’m not manually tracking things.

None of this has to happen any time soon. Who knows? Maybe the market will be back up by the time I actually do it. Though, if I did it now, I’d be selling low and buying low, because I’m definitely not going to cash. We shall see.

Adjusting tolerances

Section titled Adjusting tolerances

After adding the inner bands, I have a rebalancing token. Given I’m still able to impact the portfolio value by about 1 percent with every contribution and it’s not very far beyond the inner band, I doubt I’ll be doing any rebalancing in July.

The plateau

Section titled The plateau

Yep, it’s still a plateau. Even with the surgery my net worth is still hovering around what it been since the beginning of 2022; it’s actually a little higher, just not the steady incline I saw in 2021.

FI experiments

Section titled FI experiments

Details are in the January 15th, 2022 paycheck.

The hypothesis is when the Mark 0.0 mix is down, it’ll be down more than the others. Further, when the Mark 0.0 is up, the others will be up and not too far behind the Mark 0.0. We will track the change since the previous paycheck as well as the change since we started tracking January 2022.