What's a bank account :-)
Seriously, the only bank accounts I have are for other benefits - a local bank account ($250 balance) to get a safe deposit box and a legacy BofA eChecking account ($0) to get a 10% bonus on my credit card cash rewards.
Bill pay, ATM, checking - all out of my brokerage accounts. Merrill Lynch pioneered CMAs a third of a century ago.
Yes, you can have VG transfer money to a bank account. Every time you get a dividend from a fund, you'll need to check that it has hit your settlement account, then transfer that amount to your bank. (VG will automate transfers, but you can't set it up for a variable amount, such as the dividends from a fund.)
I have VG fund dividends deposited directly and automatically into my non-VG brokerage account (where I have full CMA features), but that's because they are in VG fund accounts, not a VG brokerage account.
BTW, there can be a benefit to using a "real" bank. Some financial institutions won't set up links to brokerages. Capital One 360 (not to be confused with Capital One) would not set up a link to Fidelity (Fidelity uses UMB as its bank for checks, but the account doesn't show up as a "real" bank). But Capital One 360 had no problem setting up a link to Schwab bank (not a Schwab brokerage account), because that is a real bank.

Hi @AndyJ
Have not checked; but just from the top of the head recall.
The 60 day rule "sale" holding period for some funds is not necessarily a Fido fee, if I recall properly. Fido, of course; does have rules like this for some of their own funds (90 days, etc.) and other vendors set similar rules for some of their funds as well.
Sidenote: we have Fido brokerage accts. which we use to comingle everything (stocks, etfs, funds). About 3 years ago I did a "boo-boo" with an electronic purchase (wrong ticker, which of course means wrong fund). I was really busy during this time and realized 2-3 days after the fact that this wasn't the fund I had planned to purchase. This fund had a 60 or 90 day (short term trading fee of .75%). I called, spoke directly with a Fido rep., explained the situation (already had the fund and didn't want more) and they reversed the transaction.........ended with thank you; and there won't be any fee. Have a nice day.
A 5 minute phone call fix.
Anyone correct me on this, if you know otherwise.
Regards,
Catch

IMHO, physical access to brokerages is overrated. At Fidelity, if I have any complex issues, it seems they always need to call the back office - something I could just as easily do without standing there waiting for the rep to talk with someone on the phone.
Both T. Rowe Price and Vanguard seem to have originally set up their brokerages as a convenience for their fund investors. Comments you read from the nineties will reflect this. VBS (Vanguard Brokerage Services) changed clearing houses several years ago (it used to be Pershing, it is now self-clearing, like Schwab, Fidelity, etc.) More recent reviews reflect this improvement.
In contrast, T. Rowe Price still uses Pershing, as does TIAA-CREF, and many smaller brokerages. I know BobC has not had kind words about Pershing. My experiences with Pershing are more mixed, but at this point I wouldn't consider Pershing a plus.
T. Rowe Price, like most brokerages, gives you more perks as your total AUM increase. (At $100K, you get free M* membership.) In contrast, Vanguard only counts Vanguard investments (Vanguard funds, Vanguard ETFs, Vanguard annuities, etc.) toward your level of service. At $1M (Flagship), they'll give you 25 free TF fund trades/year.
As a fund investor what would attract me to Vanguard is their access to some institutional class shares at lower mins than you find elsewhere (e.g. PIMCO @ $25K vs. $100K at most other brokerages).
You asked about div reinvestment. Both brokerages do, here are their pages:
Vanguard dividend reinvestment
T. Rowe Price disclosures (open the 2nd to last disclosure at the bottom of the page)

Several years ago, I tried to open an account at Vanguard so I could purchase their funds without the transaction fee that Schwab charges. Vanguard lost my application, not once, not twice, but three times...at that point, I decided to stay with Schwab.

Regarding liquidity risk, this is a reason why I (and others) suggest that an annuity be purchased only to cover essential cash flow needs, i.e. those expenses which you cannot reduce.
Reiterating one of the risks in the article cited by Lewis - inflation risk. I don't think it's as much of a risk for longevity insurance (assuming you buy enough to deal with inflation up to the point at which it starts paying), because that income stream won't go on for decades. But an immediate annuity could run for several decades, if you've got good health and luck.
Regarding insurance company risk - as a general rule of thumb, an insurance company cannot be rated higher than its sovereign's debt - thus S&P doesn't rate any insurer AAA. (S&P says that it's because they invest in - gasp - Treasuries.)
That article lists the 5 AAA insuers in 2011. That list hasn't changed much since then:
NYLife, TIAA-CREF, Knights of Columbus, Northwestern Mutual, and USAA.
(I got both that list and the quirk about sovereign debt from a TIAA-CREF rep I spoke with a few years ago; he said he had to explain to people why TIAA-CREF wasn't AAA rated anymore.)
Here's a 2014 list - it looks like Fitch downgraded USAA to Aa1 from Aaa (no other ratings agency made a change), otheriwse, all the usual suspects are still top rated. It also has Berkshire Hathaway and Gen Re in this top group.
Any of these insurers IMHO would be fine. I especially like TIAA-CREF because unlike the other insurers, it does not have a separate subsidiary in NY to comply with the more stringent NYS reserve requirements. I believe you get that same higher standard across all 50 states with this insurer.

I like Faber and find him highly amusing (who else has responded to the question on CNBC of how you should allocate assets with "it depends on how many girlfriends you have"?)
I hope that there is not another 2008.
That said, this is my honest view:
That if it looks like we may be heading in that direction, the Fed will bail out Radio Shack (after the fact), Shake Shack and even Shaq.
They will try every voodoo economic BS tactic left. You will see QE4, you will see NIRP. Heck, a ban on physical cash so that no one can escape NIRP wouldn't surprise me. Every trick in the book will be used - you think that what's going on in Shanghai in terms of banning short selling and other "rules" can't be put into place here, at least to some degree?
They will bail out, print and nationalize like there's no tomorrow - if it comes to that, because the alternative if we have another 2008 and go back to square one is this:
All of the attitude by the Fed of "don't audit us, don't question us and no we aren't going to respond to an investigation about the Fed leaking information" will be ignored in a bleeping hurry.
If we have had QE1, 2 and 3 and operation twist and all other manner of financial engineering BS and we find ourselves back at square one after another 2008-style situation, Janet and company will have a lot of 'splaining to do (and they don't seem fond of that) because the anger will be immense and Congress will ab-so-lutely point the finger at them.
You think people were mad at Wall Street after 2008? LOL, at the very least twice as bad if it happens again.
If we have another 2008, in some ways it'll be game over. There will be tumbleweeds hosting CNBC because no one will be watching. The rejection of stocks by the public will be extraordinary - you're not going to get anyone back in and probably for years. The Fed will be too busy in hearings to do much. Attempts to push the public back into risk assets after that will be likely met with legitimate anger (or at least a collective middle finger.)
So yeah, I believe that there is a sense of "reflate or bust" desperation with governments around the world who don't want another 2008 because of all of the many things that would imply.
Perhaps I'll be wrong but I continue to fear that this time around if there's a crisis you will want to own assets instead of sitting in cash or bonds.
We'll see.
---
Someone posted this at ZH in the comments section years ago and I don't disagree with the gist of it, although I'm not as negative and think the how/why (I don't think they'd print like there's no tomorrow because this is the end, but because they believe another 2008 would be some degree of "game over") is different. I don't think another 2008 would be "the end", but I perhaps can see where it would be the end of the global economy as we know it today. Perhaps this is "the ultimate bubble" for use of a better term and what we look like as a global economy on the other side of it will be very different.
"Hope you didn't put much money on that bet, Dawg. These fuckers are going to print hard enough to wake the dead. They'll print like mo'fos, print like mad men, print like fly pimps. Print until their eyes bleed.
They will print via the swaps, via bank bailouts and mergers, via fixed Treasury yields, via real honest-to-God negative interest rates, via loans to banks on no collateral, via payroll tax reductions, and in the end via actual fiat paper instruments which they might very well drop in bails from actual mutherfucking helicopters.
They will not give two figs what anyone thinks.
Here is why.
Because this is the Goddamned end of it my friend. There is no accounting beyond this point. There will be no history of it. No one to take notes of rates of exchange, or of the graft and violence, nobody to worry about the deficit or the GDP or the national debt of any nation large or small under the blazing Goddamned sun.
End. Of. It. Does anyone bitch about how Rome totally debased their coinage at the end? Hell no. But whoever did it had enough to hand and grabbed some land with a nice vineyard and sat back and waited for the Middle Ages to start 700 years further on.
And that's what a singularity is about. Anything that passes through is striped of all meaning. Nothing we think is important now will remain so beyond the event horizon. Nobody will remember, nobody will write about it, nobody will be held to any standard. Ever for ever."

I remember reading an article years ago about research indicating that women investors tended to be more patient than male ones who were more aggressive and overly-eager to prove themselves. It would fit the psychological stereotypes at least that women need to be more patient to put up with their children and their husbands. If you're a believer in buy and hold investing--and the studies indicate it is a superior strategy--then women should be superior investors. Then again there are some aggressively run funds that have performed well, but they tend to be more volatile and prone to blowups. Think of that classic CGM Focus and Ken Heebner. If ever there was an alpha male investment strategy, it was his. Meanwhile, Susan Byrne at Westwood had a more patient approach, trying to hit singles and doubles instead of home runs.

Faber's macro commentaries make sense (and I agree w/some of them), but he's been calling for a catastrophic drop for so long (YEARS!) that people now dismiss him as a perma-bear whenever he's quoted/interviewed in the financial media and/or tells people to adjust their allocations.
But, like most pundits, despite "being wrong" for YEARS when The Big One(tm) does come, whenever it comes, I'm sure he'll be right out there saying he-told-us-so.
Frankly I think the 'generational buying opportunity' was not 2008-09, but will occur at the bottom of the NEXT global market crash ... which I agree w/Faber will happen in the forseeable future. I remain ready to pounce, but am also quite comfortably positioned in the markets and will remain there for a looooong time to come.

Here's Microsoft's Windows Lifecycle (support) page:
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/lifecycle
Windows 7 "mainstream" support has already ended. "Extended support" runs to 1/14/2020. As near as I can figure, that means primarily security patches.
Microsoft's policy is to provide at least 5 years mainstream support and an additional 5 years extended support. The way the policy is worded, it sounds like Microsoft is guaranteeing at least seven years support after the next version is released. So even if you buy the current release a day before the next release comes out, you're guaranteed at least seven years of support.
Not that I'm a Microsoft lover, but that sounds like a reasonable amount of time. A company cannot dedicate resources forever to support a system that's three versions old. And machines are usually replaced in less time than that.

Mary Miller did a bang-up job as head of T. Rowe Price's fixed income division. Before taking over, their fixed income funds were mostly duds. IMHO, she turned the division around and it remains competitive to this day. She left Price several years ago for government service.
From Wikipedia: "Mary John Miller serves as the U.S. Department of the Treasury's Under Secretary for Domestic Finance ... responsible for developing and coordinating Treasury's policies and guidance in the areas of financial institutions, federal debt financing, financial regulation, and capital markets. ... Previously, Miller served as Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Financial Markets ... Prior to joining Treasury, Miller spent 26 years working for T. Rowe Price Group, Inc., where she was the director of the Fixed Income Division and a member of the firm's Management Committee. In November of 2011, Miller was included on The New Republic's list of Washington's most powerful, least famous people."
To the basic question here: I suspect it's for the same reason that males seem to dominate this board. For every Anna, you'll find three male-sounding names like Ted, Old Joe or Hank. Probably has to do with the relative attraction finance holds for the genders - especially when they are young. No doubt gender stereotyping plays a big part. That's also been an issue in many scientific/technical areas which largely attracted males until quite recently.

Matthews Asia Dividend has been a stalwart for years. We use it as a core hold in many client accounts. It is like the Energizer bunny. We call it the 'chicken' way to have China exposure.

MAPIX = Chicken (China) and Dumplings (dividends)!

When Bubbles Burst: China Edition
Posted on July 8, 2015 by David Ott
Acropolis Investment Management

You may be looking at the largely flat emerging markets returns in that chart, feeling nervous about Greece and China and wondering whether you should have emerging markets exposure at all. I completely understand the question and have two answers that I’ll bet you can anticipate.
First, having two assets that you expect to earn positive rates of return over long periods that don’t move in lockstep with each other is a huge benefit to a portfolio – it’s the basis for diversification. If all assets were correlated with each other, you couldn’t lower portfolio risk by having the two assets.
Second, the valuations overseas are much more attractive than they are in the US (and if you put a positive spin on the recent declines, you can say that they are getting more attractive every day).
One of the better (though highly imperfect) measures of valuation is the Shiller PE ratio, which looks at current prices compared to 10 years of earnings to remove some of the volatility in the ‘e’ part of the ratio.
The PE-ratio of the S&P 500 is currently around 26, which historically is very expensive. I wrote in February of 2014 that the market was overvalued on this basis and it’s more true today than it was then (which is why you don’t make big moves based on the Shiller PE ratio).

Whether you look at the Shiller PE or several other valuation metrics, you can see that emerging markets are the cheapest across the board. That doesn’t tell us anything about returns in the short run, but if the future is like the past, it should tell a lot about long-term future returns.
This entry was posted in Daily Insights
http://acrinv.com/when-bubbles-burst-china-edition/
Round and round we go !
Managing Rate Hike Expectations Down… Again
If the US economy is still poised to grow, why are Treasury yields tumbling? Greece is probably the explanation. China’s sagging stock market isn’t helping either. The weakness in equities is unnerving investors in Asia and around the world at a time when global growth appears to be faltering. Markit Economics noted earlier this week in its global PMI report that growth in June weakened to its slowest pace in five months as output in emerging markets contracted.
Is the Fed likely to start raising rates in the current climate? Probably not, although we’ll know more after Sunday, when the new-world-post-ultimatum order for Europe emerges. Meantime, it’s risk-off for a world that’s forced to endure another phase of blowback that can be traced to the Great Recession… six years later, and counting. When the dust clears, it’s not unreasonable to imagine that we’ll be back where we started: modest growth and more than a few caveats. That, of course, will lay the groundwork for a renewal in forecasting that a rate hike is just around the corner.

http://www.capitalspectator.com/managing-rate-hike-expectations-down-again/

Matthews Asia Dividend has been a stalwart for years. We use it as a core hold in many client accounts. It is like the Energizer bunny. We call it the 'chicken' way to have China exposure.

@davidrmoran
Thank you. Will check regarding the reversion method you noted for Windows.
I'm just not so willing as in prior years to keep messing around with a system to learn more new tweaks.
I'd much rather use the time for family and investing.
@Gandalf
Chrome may likely become the browser to use here. An aside: Visited a few small car shows in Michigan recently (2 massive shows coming in August). Geez, I sure would like to take a late 60's machine down the on ramp at the nearby interstate and just slam through the gears with a close-ratio 4 speed to run fast for the next 4 or 5 miles.

Hi @msf
Thank you for this info. We will need to purchase another laptop soon for our daughter's use in school, as the current unit is suffering a problem with the ribbon cable connections to the display screen. A teardown fix exists, and I would be in the mood for such a repair 10 years ago, but not today.
I have been scratching my head on this; as the laptop to be replaced is using Vista, which we won't miss, but my laptop still runs Windows 7 and I'm pleased with this and would prefer to purchase a new laptop with Win7 and not Win8.
Still looking around, and have not placed much time into this search at this point.
Lastly, a brother in law bought a replacement laptop a few years ago with Win8 and he was not very pleased with changes that had been made.

DoubleLine has Luz Padilla @ DLENX

Have been invested with Luz Padilla for several years. Managing the asset class of EM debt is no small feast. She has achieved solid returns without incurring additional risk comparing to her peers.

Hi Dex,
Your interpretation of BobC’s 50/50 market odds is very naïve. Formally, your reading might be called a Probit (PROBibility unIT) statistical measure. That form of measurement reduces the stats to an overly simplistic either/or positive/negative final judgment. Based on your post, you are satisfied with an equally weighted outcomes probability. The historical data does not support that weighting.
Either/or results need not be equally weighted. When a baseball hitter makes an official plate appearance, he can register either a hit or make an out. Extending your assessment, he has a 50/50 likelihood of either outcome, batting averages notwithstanding. You will surely go bankrupt if you accept the hit side of that wager.
Allow me to recite another extreme example of the problems assigning an equal probability to a bifurcation event for the mistaken reason that there are merely two possible happenings. Weather serves as a terrific illustration.
In my part of the Southern California landscape, any weather forecaster would lose his license to practice if he assigned a 50/50 odds for rain or clear on any given day. The proper odds likely hover at the 2/98 level against rain. Bifurcation does not typically translate into equally probable events.
From a Franklin Templeton market summary, over the past 88 years, the S&P 500 recorded 64 Up and 24 Down years. That is a 73% likelihood of a positive annual return. For the 64 positive return years, the annual average return was slightly North of 22%. For the 24 negative return years, the annual average loss was just South of -13% . So, not only do the odds favor a positive annual year, the returns for the positive years swamp the less likely negative years. That’s a double positive.
These favorable equity return stats are the basis for investing in stocks. The historical data shows that fixed income investments (like Bonds) have a higher likelihood of a positive annual return than stocks, but the payoffs are more muted. That’s why most portfolios that seek growth emphasize its stock components.
I’m sure you are familiar with these commonplace statistics. Given that familiarity, I’m puzzled by your submittal. You are just plain wrongheaded if you really believe that, without further mitigating circumstances, the odds are 50/50 that equities will deliver a positive or a negative reward/penalty in any given year.
Of course you’re free to assign whatever probabilities you like to the markets, but that’s being more than naïve; that’s completely ignoring the available database at your investment peril.
Good luck, and you will certainly need all of it if that’s your understanding and use of market statistics. I hope you were just joking or that I misread your post.
Best Wishes.

Yeah, "Edge of Night". Went on for years... Just like the problems with IE.

LOL. Isn't that the truth.

I'll scrimp on unnecessary expenses (e.g, I pay about $10-$30/year for cellphone service, depending on my limited usage). But I won't cut corners on essentials, like health care, or on family (stop smirking, all you people thinking of Greece :-)).

I'm thinking about going to this one. Which do you use?
https://ringplus.net/

That looks great, at least worth trying - you can't beat free.
Mine is a legacy plan, no longer offered: T-Mobile prepaid (the old one). When I was doing more traveling for consulting work, I'd pay $100 for 1000 minutes which would usually last me the year. Now, I'm hardly using any minutes. Just need the line.
For that, all I need to do is top it off with $10/year (30 minutes airtime) - that keeps the account active and retains all unused minutes. If I ever get close to zero minutes left, I'll pay $100 for another thousand minutes, which will last me several years at my current usage rate.
Here's a page describing the old prepaid plan and the new one:
http://www.prepaidphonenews.com/2014/08/good-news-bad-news-changes-coming-to-t.html
The new one isn't that much worse than what I have, depending on your usage pattern.

Sure I'll "buy" it.
Bear markets are as inevitable as the proverbial "death and taxes." What to do? Depends on age & circumstances. Youngsters can ride out several bears and still be fine - if history is a precedent.
But retirees are in a different boat and need to be very careful about the degree of risk they assume. This is always the case, whether you think a bear market is on the horizon or not. I take seriously the warnings (err ... rumblings) of David Snowball and Ed Studzinski and others in recent years. Of course, the problem with such warnings is they can be premature by years. That doesn't dismiss their validity.
I think what these persons are really concerned about is that many retirees who can't afford to lose much may be assuming too much risk. (And they're likely correct in their assessment.)
Oh - I took a 20% hit in 08 - but got it all back the following year. And, I'd weather another 20% hit just fine. But have grown more cautious with age and time - preferring to dwell mostly among conservative offerings like RPSIX, TRRIX, RPGAX and PRWCX. These will not prevent a loss - but they will help dampen the blow when the bear comes.
FWIW. - Thanks MJG