Updated, including new bonus and tax warning. Fidelity Spire is Fidelity’s new mobile app, which adds fintech-y features and is separate from their main Fidelity app. You can link your external accounts, track balances, and set financial goals. (Fidelity acquired fintech startup eMoney in 2015, and is using that technology for account aggregation.) You can also link up “real” Fidelity accounts like their brokerage accounts and perform commission-free trades within the app. New $100 Fidelity account bonus. If you open a new, eligible Fidelity account via the Spire app or fidelity.com/spire and maintain an automatic monthly deposit of $25+ for 6 months, you can get a $100 bonus. Hat tip to DoC. You must open via the Fidelitiy Spire app or… [Read More...]

Updated. My favorite option in the now-crowded “robo-advisor” category is technically not a registered advisor at all, it is M1 Finance. Here’s a quick rundown of what makes them different: Fully customizable. You pick your own target asset allocation “pie”. (You can add ETFs or individual stocks.) You can simply copy one of the many model portfolios out there, or customize it as you like. You have full control! M1 handles the boring stuff, like rebalancing or dividing a $100 contribution across 8 different ETFs. Here is my pie which I named the My Money Blog Portfolio. No commissions. Free stock/ETF trades with a low $100 minimum account size for taxable accounts and a $500 minimum for retirement accounts. 0.00% management… [Read More...]

Perhaps it is because I somehow ended up buying $5,000 in gold coins a couple weeks ago, but I’ve been doing some reading about gold again. The stock market is at higher and higher valuations, while the Fed promises that interest rates will stay low for a long time. The real yield on TIPS remains negative, meaning that it is highly unlikely that any high-quality investment-grade bonds will beat inflation over the next decade. Is there really no alternative? This Compound Advisors article does a great job exploring why gold is not an ideal hedge against inflation. The comparison chart below of performance since 1975 summarizes things in one picture. Over the 50 years since the US came off the gold standard, gold has only barely … [Read More...]

The WSJ article How to Know if Your Retirement Savings Are on Track tries to answer what is likely a very common question: My wife and I are in our early 50s. We hope to retire in about a dozen years, and we are trying to figure out if our nest egg is on track. How large should our savings be at our age? Obviously, everyone’s situation is different, but the WSJ appears to have collected the rules of thumb from a few big financial firms – including Fidelity, T. Rowe Price, and JP Morgan – and averaged them into this chart: The chart indicates that a couple with a gross household income of $75,000 should target a nest egg of $412,500 at age 55, with that … [Read More...]

This WSJ article is the first mainstream financial article that I’ve seen discuss the high interest rates paid on Bitcoin and stablecoin (cryptocurrency backed by a “stable” asset like the US dollar). I am (again) not a cryptocurrency expert, but it does seem appropriate to educate and warn other curious investors about the risks. Here’s my take: The price of Bitcoin can vary a lot. It probably went up or down by a hundred dollars in the time you took to read this sentence. Stablecoin prices tend to vary less because they promise to be backed by a stable asset. USDT (Tether) and USDC (USD Coin) are both currently trading exactly at US$1.00, so it appears that the public believes this claim. However, US … [Read More...]