I have it in my Schwab account and there are times when I want to move distributions from other funds into VWINX, but the $75.00 fee discourages that if the amount is not significant. That is the reason to look for another fund that is no-load.

”Since everyone’s situation is unique with respect to withdrawal needs., RMD, and investment horizon, the question is more on financial planning rather than a “drop-in” replacement with a different asset allocation fund.”

“Have you noticed how easy it is to tell yourself that you would be comfortable with a 10% drop in the value of your portfolio until you are seeing it losing $50,000, $100,000 or $150,000 or more . Dollars seem to have a greater impact on your tolerance.”

Shares in two more US regional banks have been suspended. Regulators moved in to halt trading in Los Angeles-based PacWest and Arizona’s Western Alliance on Thursday after they became the latest victims of an escalating crisis that began with Silicon Valley Bank in March.
The message from central banks and bank supervisors is that this is not a rerun of the global financial crisis of 2008. That may be true. With the exception of Switzerland’s Credit Suisse, European banks have escaped the turmoil. It is specific US banks that are the problem.
There are a number of reasons for that: the business models of the banks concerned; failures of regulation; the large number of small and mid-sized banks in the US; and the rapid increase in interest rates from the country’s central bank, the Federal Reserve.
Luis de Guindos, vice-president of the European Central Bank (ECB), remarked on Thursday that “the European banking industry has been clearly outperforming the American one”. Although he will be praying his words do not come back to haunt him, he is broadly right. European banks, including those in the UK, do look more secure than those in the US – primarily because they tend to be bigger and more tightly regulated.
Despite being the 16th biggest bank in the US, Silicon Valley Bank was not considered systemically important and so was less stringently regulated than institutions viewed by federal regulators to be more pivotal. Many of its customers were not covered by deposit insurance and were heavily exposed to losses on US Treasury bonds as interest rates rose. The other banks that failed subsequently have tended to share many of the same characteristics: they were regionally based and are vulnerable to rising borrowing costs.
Unless the Fed rides to the rescue with cuts in interest rates, the options are: amalgamation, regulation or more banks going bust. The response of the US authorities suggests little appetite for a laissez-faire approach.
According to official data, the US has more than 4,000 banks – an average of 80 for each of the 50 states. The number has fallen by more than two-thirds since the peak of more than 14,000 in the early 1980s, but there is certainly room for greater consolidation. In an age of instant internet bank runs, customers will be attracted to the idea that big is beautiful.
The US authorities certainly do not seem averse to further amalgamation. When First Republic ran into trouble, it was seized by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and its deposits and assets were sold to one of the giants of US banking – JP Morgan Chase. Inevitably, there will be more takeovers and fire sales of assets as alternatives to bank failures. It is reasonable to assume that in 10 years’ time the number of US banks will be considerably smaller than it is today.
What’s more, the banks that remain – including those that are not taken over – are likely to be more tightly regulated and more closely supervised. Even if the Fed, the ECB and the Bank of England are right and a repeat of the global financial crisis has been averted, lessons are already being learned.

The Modern Wealth Survey for Charles Schwab by Logica Research shows that of the participants, Americans believe that it takes a net worth, including home equity, of $774,000 to be financially comfortable and $2.2M to be wealthy. FatFIRE Woman has an interesting Net Worth Calculator. The concept behind FatFIRE is “Financial Independence, Retiring Early,” but with enough to have a good quality of life. The calculator shows that the median net worth of households in the 65-year age group is $189,100, including home equity, while ten percent of households at age 65 have a net worth of $2.3 million or higher. Pensions are often not included in net worth calculations and greatly distort comparisons.

Pensions are often not included in net worth calculations and greatly distort comparisons.

First Republic’s loans had famously good credit quality; First Republic got itself in trouble by making low-interest mortgages to very rich people, who will probably pay back those loans. (But the loans have lost value due to the move in interest rates.) And JPMorgan’s investor presentation touts both the “high-quality portfolio” with a “strong credit profile” and also JPMorgan’s own “comprehensive due diligence to support transaction assumptions.” JPMorgan did not need a loss-sharing agreement with the FDIC because it was worried that First Republic’s loans were toxic.
JPMorgan needed a loss-sharing agreement to improve the capital accounting for the deal. I have, above, used simple math — assets minus liabilities, equity divided by assets — to describe bank capital, but actual bank capital requirements are based on risk-weighed assets. Capital is a cushion designed to protect a bank from losses, and a bank needs more capital against risky assets than it does against safe assets. A big pile of mortgages and commercial loans will get an okay risk weighting, but a big pile of mortgages and commercial loans insured by the FDIC will get a better risk weighting. If JPMorgan had just bought these loans outright, its capital ratios would have suffered. But, it says, the “FDIC loss share agreements reduce risk weighting on covered loans,” so its common equity tier 1 capital ratio will still be “consistent with 1Q24 target of 13.5%.”
On an analyst call this morning, JPMorgan Chief Financial Officer Jeremy Barnum discussed this point:
"What I would say broadly is that given the nature of the portfolio and question, I think First Republic is very well-known for very good credit discipline. As you point out, these are primarily rate marks. And therefore, the benefit of the loss share really is the sort of enhancement to the RWA [risk-weighted asset] risk-weighting, which in turn is what makes these otherwise generally not very-high returning assets, in other words, prime jumbo mortgages primarily, actually quite attractive from a returns perspective. So the CET1 [common equity tier 1 capital] numbers fully incorporate the expected risk-weighting of the RWA, and we'll leave it at that, I think."
A normal mortgage loan gets about a 50% risk weight, so at its 13.5% target capital ratio, JPMorgan would need to fund that mortgage with almost 7% equity capital. These mortgages get about a 25% risk weight, meaning that JPMorgan can get away with half as much capital, which makes its return on equity from these mortgages much higher.
This is, by the way, a classic sort of financial engineering, a capital relief trade. You have a situation where the bank has loans that it thinks are very safe, but the regulatory capital requirements treat them as kinda risky; the regulators and the bank disagree on their risk. So the bank finds some well-funded third party that agrees with it that the loans are very safe, and buys very cheap insurance from that third party: The bank thinks the loans are safe, the third party agrees they’re safe, so the insurance premium is low, and insuring the loans lowers their capital requirements. It’s just that, here, the regulator (the FDIC) is also selling JPMorgan the insurance (for free). Everyone agrees that these loans are safe, but the capital regulations treat them as risky. There is a trade to be done. With the regulator.
For that matter, why does JPMorgan need to borrow $50 billion from the FDIC to do this deal? Why can’t it pay $60.6 billion upfront? The answer is not that it couldn’t scrape together the $60.6 billion in cash today; the answer is that JPMorgan, as a big stable bank, needs to keep a lot of cash around in case it has a bank run, and spending so much cash on First Republic would not be a prudent use of liquidity. On the analyst call, Barnum described the FDIC loan in these terms: “The deal also includes a $50 billion 5-year fixed-rate funding facility from the FDIC, which helps manage the ALM [asset/liability management] profile of the transaction, as well as the liquidity consumption.” First Republic had some long-term loans that it funded with short-term deposits, and look what happened to it. JPMorgan is going to fund those long-term loans with long-term borrowing.
You can see the levers here, the financial engineering. The FDIC’s goal here is to minimize the loss to its insurance fund, to sell First Republic for roughly what it is worth. But its other goal is to make sure that the banking system is well capitalized, and selling First Republic for 100% of its asset value doesn’t help with that goal; it just moves the capital hole somewhere else. The solution is some combination of:
Sell First Republic to a very-well-capitalized bank, one that can absorb the capital hole. “Fortress principles position us to invest through cycles — organically and inorganically,” says JPMorgan’s presentation about the deal; it has spent years bragging about its “fortress balance sheet,” and that really does let it do deals like this. But this deal will bring down its capital ratios a bit; a well-capitalized bank that absorbs an insolvent one will become a bit less well capitalized.
Give that bank a discount: JPMorgan is paying a bit more than 100% of the current market value of First Republic’s bonds and loans, but a bit less than 100% of the total value of its assets. It will book a gain on the deal, which will help maintain its capital ratios.
Engineer the deal to optimize the regulatory treatment: If giving JPMorgan an FDIC guarantee on some assets will lower its risk-weighted assets, you do that. If giving JPMorgan a long-term FDIC loan will improve its liquidity ratios, you do that.
You can to some extent trade off the discount against the engineering: Surely JPMorgan could have absorbed First Republic with no loan from the FDIC (worse for its regulatory liquidity requirements) and no loss-sharing agreement (worse for its regulatory capital ratios), but it would have paid less, which means that the FDIC would have paid more. But the FDIC did the math and concluded that the loan and loss-sharing made for a better deal.
You could imagine going further. JPMorgan could have come to the FDIC and the Fed and said “look, we would like to pay full value for these assets, but we have these pesky capital requirements. But you set the capital requirements; you could, you know, waive them a bit. Let us ignore First Republic in calculating our capital ratios; then we won’t need as much capital to do the deal, and we can pay more.” Something a little like that happened in UBS Group AG’s deal to buy Credit Suisse Group AG in March: Swiss regulators, who insisted on the deal, agreed to “grant appropriate transitional periods” for UBS to meet its capital requirements after the deal.
But of course you want to minimize that sort of thing, because the goal here is not just to make sure that First Republic opens for business today or to minimize the dollar losses to the FDIC’s insurance fund. The goal here is to restore confidence in the banking system, to send the message that the crisis is over and everything is fixed. A rescue deal for First Republic that weakens the capital or liquidity of its buyer is not a good solution. You don’t want to do too much financial engineering; you don’t want to leave the buyer technically well capitalized but really in a more dangerous place. But a little engineering is fine.