If one is mentally and emotionally stable (a large positive asset in life and investing); determining how frequently to review one's investment positions should not cause a problem.
I/we worked hard for the money we have invested; and treat investing as an ongoing education. If we don't pay attention, the learning stops and it is time to contact an advisor who you think has as much skill as you.
With observing selected market information; not just one's holdings, it is possible to develop some amount of intuition that won't cause one's investments great harm and should be a positive.
And as @Mark noted; there is satisfaction in growing a garden and investments, too.
I review markets at least once every business day, if I'm home. A weekly review of the portfolio finds its place on the weekend.
From the paper print days some 40 years ago through the value I find at Bloomberg and MFO; I'm a wiser person to investing.
Satisfied I am.
Lastly, writing about advisors above......I'm trying to imagine their phone calls and emails to clients about the choices made, and the YTD returns.
Remain curious,
Catch

@BaluBalu
Some of the items @Anna has been digging through.
--- How many years does Irmaa last?
The Social Security Administration (SSA) determines if you owe an IRMAA based on the income you reported on your IRS tax return two years prior, meaning two years before the year when you pay the IRMAA. For example, Social Security would use tax returns from 2021 to determine your IRMAA in 2023.
--- How long does the Irmaa surcharge last?
Unlike late enrollment penalties, which can last as long as you have Medicare coverage, the IRMAA is calculated every year. You may have to pay the adjustment one year, but not the next if your income falls below the threshold.
IRMAA related search topics, if you're inclined to know more.

I feel it’s educational to follow a portfolio. By so doing one comes to understand and appreciate the interplay among many different types of investments. However, to a degree, it’s also counterproductive. Suspect a lot of us could post better returns if we stopped looking for at least 5 years.
A scatterbrained article citing a half dozen or so knowledgeable investors. But there seems to be a few pertinent take-aways. One relates to the mental stress of checking too often. Another suggests that we are prone to sell too early after a quick gain - diminishing the potential for far greater gains.
Another Good Link - Study shows nearly half of all investors check their performance at least once a day.

I have subscribed to Dan Weiner's newsletter for years, although I have moved farther and farther away from Vanguard. I also used the Fidelity's news letters in the past.
Weiner was especially useful of the background politics and nuances of Vanguards manger selections and recent stumbles.
Unfortunately it appears that both Weiner and Jim Lovell on the Fidelity newsletter were both "Cancelled" by the parent website "Investorplace" Monday. There was no notice to subscribers although both indicate it has happened in their October newsletters.
In it's place I am being deluged with emails from crypto, options, "hot trader" and of course, good ol' Louise Navellier, in addition to about ten other newsletters.
After no response to my email and being unable to cancel online, I did get through to a live person who says they will cancel this stuff.
This is a rather shocking way to treat long term customers, especially people who have been long term subscribers. I am disappointed that in whatever deal Weiner and Lovell cut to get out and obviously sell their mailing list, they would not give us the courtesy of a "Thank you" and an opt out.
As they both got the axe at the same time, it may have been a done deal they were handed as take it or leave it.
Weiner's assistant, Jeff DeMaso has started a new Vanguard service independentvanguardadviser.com which is the same price but it is unclear whether Weiner will be in charge.
Just another loss for individual investors. I bet Vanguard is glad to see him go.

A bit off topic -
Are there any exceptions for IRMMA if in one year you have a spike in income from a sale of business or selling your your primary residence? I have to assume many people live in their houses for 20-30 years and downsizing to a new house will trigger a lot of income, notwithstanding the 250K exemption from gain.

@bee
Thanks for a re-do of Roth conversions. These have been discussed here for many years; but a good reminder for those who may not be familiar and new to this investment area.
@davidrmoran
I presume you're referencing, in part; a non-spousal inheritance of your Roth's, that Secure Act provisions require non-spousal inheritance amounts be withdrawn within a 10 year period, but will not be taxed upon withdrawal. As long as the Roth has been in place for 5 years. Yes?
@msf
Good reminders for everyone regarding charity and IRMAA.
et al Keep in mind that tax rates will become "different" after the Trump era tax changes expire in 2025. Whatever the rates become, could impact some of your taxable income, which would include RMD's. Yup, not that far away for planning purposes.
Below links do not require a log-in.
Fidelity Roth conversion Q & A
Fidelity Roth conversion calculator
Lastly, relative to the thread topic; everyone's monetary needs and asset base are different.
Remain curious,
Catch

For the most part I agree and have been incremental Roth conversions for years. But there are also reasons to retain some traditional pre-tax funds. Two charitable issues come to mind:
- It is much more tax efficient to leave T-IRAs to charities than to leave other assets to charities. Compare bequeathing $100 in a T-IRA with converting that $100 to a Roth (leaving, say, $88) and bequeathing that to charity. The direct T-IRA donation does better even than donating appreciated assets. Sure you avoid the cap gains tax on appreciated assets, but you still purchased those assets with post-tax dollars. So those assets cost you more than what you paid for assets in a T-IRA.
- If you're older than 70½ you can donate up to $100K/year to charities from a T-IRA without having to pay any income tax on the withdrawals. If you are already itemizing it is close to a wash, because then you can add the contribution to your deductions and that balances out the extra income generated by withdrawing the T-IRA money. But most people can't itemize, and even if you are itemizing, that two step process (withdraw and then contribute) increases your AGI which can impact other things (e.g. increasing income subject to 3.8% Medicare surtax, increasing IRMAA, etc.).

@BenWP,
… Starting SWR prior to RMD may actually help lower RMD. Roth conversions early in retirement might also help lower RMDs. If SWRs come from tax deferred accounts they are a component of RMD. If SWR withdrawals are lower than RMDs, the remaining RMD dollars (after taxes are paid) could be contributed to a Roth IRA (if you or your spouse have work income).

This has been a point of friction in my household. I want to do Roth conversions while my wife thinks it is crazy to pay taxes today that will otherwise be due in 12 years. I tell her the tax will be higher then. She is unfazed.

Yes, i'm sitting back, just watching it all with (no doubt) some very temporary glee.
Glad I found BHB when I did! ...I'm dying to see my PRISX pick itself up out of the ditch. ...It's only a relief-rally, anyhow.
*bumped into KIT JUCKES last night on Bloomberg TV. He's always interesting, to my mind. He's the FX guy at Societe Generale.
From a Linked-In profile:
"I have been busily ignoring Linkedin for years. Linkedin have created another profile of me, as 'bloke what works for Societe Generale'. I am slowly going to start trying to figure this malarky out so if I ignore you or fail to connect with lifelong friends, it's cos I'm rubbish....
My random thoughts can be found on twitter (@kitjuckes), or by finding my occasional blog on any search engine.
I was born close enough to Eldoret to be slightly disappointed I can't run a marathon in anything like 2 hours. After that, I spent a lot of time in France, some in boarding school and then some in London, studying economics (though I seem to have spent an awful lot of time playing hockey, tennis and bridge, instead of studying). About a week before my finals I worked out that I really, really like economics, and some time later I worked out that what I am really interested in, is economic history. By then I'd decided to spend six years studying the wrong bits of economics. If I'd worked it all out earlier I'd be an academic, and my wife and children would have deserted me…..so it's all for the best."

Thanks @Yogibearbull. Hopefully, a few years from now we will not look back and conclude Archegos was part or start of the process of collapse of financial excesses.
I did not buy anything today, though based on weekend research I wanted to buy some stuff. I got tempted but thought may be everybody else too came back from the weekend with a buy list and jumped in from the get go. The market was already racing by 5he time I woke up.

This fantastic ride for I-Bonds started on Nov 1, 2021. There have been skeptics all along - from "too good to be true", to "this cannot last", to "they may be bad few years from now", to "it is only for $10K/$20K/$25K", etc.
Well, enjoy the ride, and if it ends, sell in a year, or two, or three...with penalty for 3-mo interest (-:)
I got on it as soon as Treasury Direct could confirm my new account (by 12/2021).

In 2022, both stocks and bonds had bear markets simultaneously. This caused heavy losses in allocation/balanced portfolios as well as risk-parity portfolios. Bonds failed to moderate declines due to stocks and, instead, contributed significantly to portfolio losses. Reasons were many - rapid Fed tightening, strong dollar, high inflation, post-pandemic fragile economies, recession fears, Russia-Ukraine war, supply-chain disruptions, chaos in oil/gas markets, etc. Purpose here is to record how bad things were by 2022/Q3.
Allocation/balanced portfolios were the 2nd worst with -21% 2022YTD (the record was -27.3% for full 1931). Other bad (full) years with double-digit % declines were 1930 (-13.3%), 1974 (-14.7%) and 2008 (-13.9%). Table below is from Twitter LINK1
Risk-parity portfolio performance was among the worst in history. These portfolios try to equalize volatilities of stock and bond portions and then use leverage. Twitter LINK2
There is growing appreciation for multi-asset funds that include stocks-bonds-alternatives. Prominent examples of these are FMSDX, VPGDX. These have to be battle-tested in future, but by 2022/Q3, their performance was FMSDX -16.80%, VPGDX -16.12% and that compared well with traditional moderate-allocation index fund VBINX -20.85% (active moderate-allocation funds were around this).
It was bad, but far from the worst year for SP500. Twitter LINK3
Image with 60-40 Table https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FeJ8OKuXwAMqguu?format=png&name=small

"SWR (which is type of payout...that hopefully last a lifetime) should have in it's SWR methodology considerations for performance ( in both up and down markets)."
I'm surely not math gifted but how could that could be done? How could a Safe Withdrawal Rate methodology possibly predict what types of market conditions, either good or bad, might exist in any given time span?
Yes, one can construct a bracket of simulations that cover a range of overall market conditions in a given number-of-years time frame, and in fact I did exactly that over a span of fifty years prior to retirement. That helps one to see what range of asset mixes would be required to insure a decent retirement over a given length of time.
But that's a different animal than a projection that yields a number that guarantees an optimal withdrawal percentage over an entire retirement time span. If such a projection erred substantially in predicting poor market conditions, the retirement pot would be underfunded. If it erred substantially in predicting unusually good market conditions, then the retirement scheme would provide significantly less income than possible. "Safe", yes, but not terribly efficient.
Seems to me that there's no such thing as "one ring to rule them all" in financial projections over a long period of time.

@msf, thanks for the details on I-Bonds.
I didn't check beyond the history published by Treasury Direct. One can see there also that for a while the limits applied separately to paper and electronic Savings Bonds but those were unified later.
My Twitter post was a response to Jason Zweig's WSJ article that has been cited by many secondary stories on this issue. My purpose there was that the limits have fluctuated over the years and were quite high at one time. Twitter has severe word/character limits.
I used legacy TD system years ago and only last year opened the TD account online.

How many of those Vanguard defined contribution accounts are held by people who have only worked for their employer a few years? How many of those participants have other DC accounts at former employers or have additional retirement savings in IRAs?

Vanguard estimates that a typical participant should target a total contribution rate of 12% to 15%, including both employee and employer contributions. Forty-seven percent of participants had total employee and employer contribution rates that met those thresholds or reached the statutory contribution limit.

https://institutional.vanguard.com/content/dam/inst/vanguard-has/insights-pdfs/22_TL_HAS_FullReport_2022.pdf
If one were to include IRA contributions, the percentage of participating employees meeting the recommended thresholds would be higher.
------
Hulbert grossly misread the BC study, or I did. That study contains only a single graph with a 12% figure in it. That is the rate of coverage by both defined contribution and defined benefit plans. The study says that 73% of workers were covered by DC plans alone in 2019.
As far as actually participating (having accounts) in DC plans is concerned, the BLS reports that in private industry (in 2021), 68% of workers had access to retirement plans. 75% of those participated. In other words, a majority of workers in private industry had retirement accounts.
Government workers? Even better. 92% had access to retirement plans, and 89% of those participated. over 4/5 of government workers had retirement accounts.
https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2021/68-percent-of-private-industry-workers-had-access-to-retirement-plans-in-2021.htm
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A statistic from the Vanguard plan that I find informative is that only 2-3% of participating employees with wages under $100K max out (Figure 49). The figure would be even lower if we included the 1/3 of employees who aren't offered a plan, or the 1/4 of those who have that option but don't participate.
For all the consternation about limitations on contribution amounts, it's almost exclusively the higher salaried employees who would benefit from increasing the limit.

She's done well by being in the right place at the right time when tech stocks shot the moon in recent years. Frankly I think she's reckless with other people's money, trades in/out of things too bleepin' much chasing momentum, and has far too much faith in one sector. The ARK article (ARKticle?) in this month's MFO commentary describes it in very stark terms.
I also tend to avoid any money manager who becomes a 'rock star' in the finp0rn media --- Rob Arnott, Michael Hassenstab, Bill Gross, etc. They end up believing their own soundbytes before dramatically flaming out.

@Baseball_Fan -
What is your advice for a 25 year old working individual who has a 401-K tax deferred option available at work and who does not expect to need to withdraw any funds for at least 40 years and who likely will not need all the funds for at least 50 years, assuming you would not advise investing a large portion, if any, in equities?
Where are you going with the lengthy diatribe directed towards equities? Would you advise such an individual to invest his or her retirement money instead in cash? In bonds? Divide it into cash, bonds and equities? Or to seek to time the markets? Would that all of us at 25 were so blessed with those market timing skills that we might glide easily in and out of the most “profitable” investments of the day over the next half century.
For some reference - 50 years ago the DJI was around 750. The hand held calculator hadn’t yet appeared on store shelves. Most of us watched black and white TV and the cassette player was about to replace the 8-track as state of the art music. A gallon of gas cost 25 cents. $3500 bought you an upscale sedan off a new car lot. A modest home in many areas sold for $20,000 - $25,000. Computers were the size of a room and generated immense heat - yet were less powerful than an iphone today. Your 1970s dollar’s buying power today? One shudders to think.

The problem, as I see it, with academic research like this is that it emphasizes the theoretical and ignores what has actually occurred. Had these same researchers performed the same analysis 40 years ago would they have come to a different conclusion? I doubt it (not when your data base extends back to 1890). And if someone had based their withdrawal strategy on this conclusion back in 1982 that person might well have lived penuriously and died leaving behind not a small but an enormous fortune. So I'll go on the record and call this bunk. Ask me in 30 years which of us was right.

Couple things to ponder re "stocks for the long run"...
article in Marketwatch, Statman, June 2017...
Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Samuelson argued that the advocacy of time-diversification is built on framing errors that mislead investors into an illusory happy ending, as if the probability of losses over the long run is zero.
To understand the nature of these framing errors, consider an investor who invests $1,000 in a portfolio with a 50–50 chance to gain 20% or lose 10% each year, as laid out in Figure 1. The investor has a 50% probability of losing money if her horizon is one year, but she has only a 25% probability of losing money if it is two years.
If risk is framed as the probability of losing money, risk declines as the horizon increases, but if risk is framed as the amount of money that can be lost, risk increases as the horizon increases. The investor might lose $100 after one year, but she might lose more, $190, after two years.

from Wishful Thinking About the Risk of Stocks in the Long Run: Bodie, March 2020
By looking at the average rate of return rather than the amount of wealth at the end of the holding period, the impression is created that risk declines with the length of one’s time horizon. The standard deviation of the average rate of return declines with the length of the time horizon because it is an average.
The problem is that, although the principle of diversification works across securities and
asset classes, it does not work over time. Even a highly diversified portfolio of stocks does not become safe in the long run. Yet here is the kind of thing customers are told on a typical website: Invest in stocks, either individually or in mutual funds, for long-term growth. While in any given year stocks can be more volatile than other investments, over time, they have typically outperformed all other types of investments while staying ahead of inflation. Stocks should be the core of a long-term investing strategy. If stocks are so great for the long run, then why don’t the same firms offering this advice offer a performance guarantee to pay at least what a customer contributes to a diversified equity portfolio adjusted for inflation? After all, the firm managing the fund is in a much better position to evaluate and manage the risk than the customer is. If the firm believes what it is saying, it ought to offer a free guarantee for its product. That’s what other industries do. Of course, option-pricing theory shows that such a guarantee is far from free.
My thoughts/questions/concerns"
If stocks are "safer" in the long run why Puts cost more, the longer the strike date is?
We as humans are not generally wired to hold thru large downdrafts...I saw many corporate types happlily retire in 06' then come crawling back begging for their old jobs in 09'...they weren't real happy, nor real motivated to say the least...
Why sit thru the downdraft? Who cares if you leave some schekels on the table getting back in
Even if I was 25 years old, I would max hold 65% stocks..first downdraft, you will sell, saw it over and over in 07', 08' with younger colleagues at work
Markets since early 70s, have seen relatively political stability, rule of law, etc...things are looking kind of squirrely now at best...who knows what will happen

@Lewis -- I would argue that ARKK also engages in a form of value investing if you broaden the definition of value as paying for something today that you expect to sell for higher tomorrow. ARKK is obviously using growth and discount rate assumptions different than what "classic" value investors do but it's all value investing the way I see it
@Balu, @Dennis -- I bought at Schwab through a grandfathered eligibility situation which might not be available to everybody. I've been watching this fund since February when I just missed buying into it before it publicly closed. Strategy is quant + fundamental as described at https://www.invenomic.com/_files/ugd/8592d8_c3a2c82a2bdd4701b77dcfdf2100a230.pdf Currently net 25% long positioning which I'm good with. Invenomic provides monthly commentary which is not common. Standpoint's Eric Crittenden provides monthly commentary too
Per portfolio visualizer inception to date performance is over 22% vs. SPY which is over 9%. 3Y performance numbers starting 10/01/2019 are 34% and 8% respectively. Any performance numbers below 3 years I don't pay much attention too but BIVIX has been on fire in 2022 YTD 30% vs. -23% for SPY