Life after TSP 3

[Rolo]

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Hey Ecurb!

I have Scottrade for my regular brokerage account and they are great. Eventually, I will move all of my IRA's (my Roth and SEP and my wife-to-be's Roth) over to Scottrade and link them to one login. Excellent service, options, and no fees. Simplify.

I am surprised at how many investment firms dork up the rollover thing. You can:

• Withdraw all of your money
• Tell them to not withhold taxes as you are doing a transfer
• Keep your money for up to sixty days
• Place it into a new IRA account

or

• State that you want to do a DIRECT CUSTODIAL TRANSFER to Acme Investments, Inc. and to not withhold taxes. Usually, Acme will handle the transfer and not TSP.

This is all in the IRS tax code. I highly recommend Ernst & Young and J.K. Lasser's tax guides. Be sure to click on TSPtalk's Amazon.com links to shop there. Incidentally, I buy 90% of my books from Amazon.

Crap. I ordered a bunch of books there (not investment related) and didn't think to use Tom's links. D'oh!

 

[Guest]

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Ecurb,

I, too, have been with Scottrade for almost 2 years and they, by far are the best for mutual funds.

Good things:

1-no fees for buying mutual funds from the start. In other words, if you have one account and want to buy 10 different mutual funds, there are no fees! I checked with Ameritrade and others and they would charge like $34 or so per fund that you buy! That would be $340 in fees from the above example.

2- If you keep money in a fund for ninety days, there is no fee when you sell (as long as the mutual fund doesn't have a back load or redemtion fee) Now, if you use Potomac, Rydex, or Profunds family of funds, you can have the money in their funds as short as one day, move it between funds (let's say profund bear to profund bull) in those families, and not incur a fee. You can also sell the before mentioned funds after one day and not incur a fee. If using other funds, the fee is only $17 per fund if not kept for 90 days. This is much cheeper than anyone out there.

3- Internet site is easy to work with and you have up to 4:00 pm (3:00 pm for Rydex, Potomac, and Profunds) to sell or buy and you will get the end of day's price. Once you get the hang of it, you can sell like 5 funds in 5 minutes, it really becomes easy.

Drawbacks:

1- Once you sell, you have a 3 day waiting period before you can buy again. This of course, is unless you are transferring within families of funds. For instance, you can transfer from a Bull market fund to a bear market fund within Rydex and it will happen the same day, but you can't make another move with that money for 3 days. All this slows down the timers and day traders, so if you are not trying that approach I would'nt worry about this point #1

2. You don't get any advice. If you're doing it on you own, this doesn't matter.

3. It doesn't have every mutual fund choice. I have done research on different types of funds (small cap growth, large cap value, etc.) and some of the top performing funds over the past 5-10 years are not offered by Scottrade. Which comes to the last sort of drawback.

4. You now have many, many choices. It's no longer 5 funds to choose from but 5000, and that's just mutual funds. It can get confusing.

Incidently, I've lost quite a bit of money this year with all those choices and bad decisions on my part. I'm not sure your philosophy, but you may want to get some help, here (not from me by any means) or an investment advisor before moving it. Rolo kind of touched on this.

That's my two cents and I hope it helps. By the way, I have this same decision with a pension rollover, so I feel your pain.

Joel

 

[Guest]

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You'll need to do "a little" research on the fund you choose too. Some require different minimums to invest in them. Usually lower for an IRA account. Joel said he has invested using less than the "minimum" and it apparently isn't a big problem. I believe it's up the fund manager to accept your offer or not.

I did however see one fund that required a $5,000,000.00 minimum investment! :shockon't "quite" have that much yet...........Yet...........:^

Good luck,

M_M

 

[Guest]

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Joel, have you or anybody else done much research on ETF's? I'm tring to find out if they have any "inverse" ETF's or 2X ETF's. Any idea?

Thanks,

M_M

 

[Ecurb]

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Rolo, Joel, and M_M,

Thanks guys for the advice, I was certain you guys would have great advice and suggestions for us.It will take some time to research and digest all you guys have written. Again, it is much appreciated.

Ecurb

 

[Rolo]

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"Investment Advisor"

BAH!

The "Investment Advisors" herded quite a number of people (g/f being one of them) off the tech-bubble cliff, all the while preaching "safe" mutual funds.

If you are a member of this site, then you can likely do a better job than any "Investment Advisor".

And you can keep the fees for yourself that you would pay for mediocre advice.

Also, many places charge an annual fee just for having an account as well as a minimum balance fee. That's like paying to have a checking account--who the hell does that anymore? Scottrade has none of this. I pay fees for NOTHING. Ever. Not even ATM fees. I will not be nickel-and-dimed by the system.

[line]

Sound investing is not difficult--it just takes a little effort and some time.

Jiggy active-trading takes more effort, more time, and Tums.