you will have to contact her HR department to be sure. Or, you will have to contact yours.

Despite what others say about "Open Enrollment period" there is some capability to fix foul-ups like this. Whether she can get out of paying for her plan and remain employed is up to HR.

I think you could do this in quicken.

I use quicken for Mac, and unfortunately, Quicken thinks in terms of accounts. I think in terms of purpose. At one investment company I have an account that is mostly intended as college savings (to supplement the kids' 529s), but there is a mutual fund that is NOT part of the college savings.

In Quicken, I download transactions and then drag them from the account they were downloaded into to the account I want them in.

Oh....another thought: in Quicken, I can look at accounts, and I can look at groups of accounts. Quicken aggregates the separate account data from my 3 credit cards into "Credit Cards." I can look at accounts separately or together, as I see fit.

Technically, none.... sort of.

The deadline for contributing to a Traditional IRA for tax year 2022 is April 18th, 2023.

The convention is to make the Roth conversion as immediately as possible to avoid incurring taxes -- if the after-tax T-IRA contribution grows from 6000 to 7123.56 between the contribution and the conversion, then you need to pay taxes on the difference.

Don't start gambling until you've got money you can afford to gamble.

I'm 40 years older than you. I remember when the newspaper boy would bring a big-city newspaper and it would have every stock's price listed in a big multi-page table.

The first investing I did I didn't actually do... my mother, the notary, forged my signature on a form to open me a brokerage account. Then she bought me something and gave it to me for my college graduation.

Next, it was the 401k at my first big-boy job. I put 25% into the company stock fund.

My next big investment was the wedding. Not the reception, but finding the right woman to marry.

Then a house.

Then, after our first kid was born, I was finally making enough and life was stable enough that we started investing outside the 401k...but before we started investing outside the 401k, we were maximizing our contribution into the 401k.

All this was through mutual funds. Not stock, not bonds, not pork belly futures, and not currency trading. Mutual funds that combined money of different investors to buy a few shares of this and a few shares of that and a few shares of something else.

And eventually, we did open a gambling account and bought some stock. We've bought some stinkers and some winners. We bought 10 shares of McDonalds on a whim at 23 bucks. It's now trading at 270, if I recall correctly. But we also bought some BP 3 months before the Darkwater Horizon disaster. And we've bought stock in a company that went bankrupt.

The key is diversity. Eventually every company falls on hard times, one way or another. When I was your age, the most popular entertainer was Bill Cosby. He's had a rough few years now. Imagine where I'd be had I invested in a television production company he could have owned.

My retirement (and frankly all my serious investing) is in Mutual funds. not necessarily index funds, but mutual funds.

I think index funds are a good place to start... and you can trade inside a retirement account without any tax implications.

Is your regular trading account hrough Chase/JP Morgan?

I don't know who charges fees and who doesn't. JP Morgan might.

the investments themselves are not fee free. Well, maybe if you buy straight stock they are. It would not surprise me to find out that the S&P 500 index fund JP Morgan would let you have would have more in internal fees than Vanguard or Schwab or Fidelity.

By the way, it may not be any easier to use Chase for investing... I have two different websites for Fidelity: one is my college savings account (529s) and the other is the 401k plan my employer provides. They're linked - I can log in to one and move back and forth between the two, but the UIs are very different, having different looks and feels.

Funny story. driving home MLK weekend this year, and I've been exchanging emails with my FIL. He thinks 401k's are awesome and IRAs suck.

It turns out he had a 401k invested in an S&P 500 index fund through his former employer. (He's retired). IRA? At a bank. In CDs.

S&P 500 index fund over the long haul (which he was) will always beat CDs.

Before dissing an IRA at a bank, I did a quick look. It turns out Chase offers investing through JP Morgan wealth advisors. So if they shuffle you to JP Morgan, it might be fine. If it's in CDs? It really sucks.

Here's what I want you to do:

• get in touch with a JP Morgan advisor. Ask them one question: "After fees, if I had invested 10k with JP Morgan in an S&P 500 index fund at the beginning of 2019, how much would I have had at the end of 2019?" Make sure they don't give you some wishy-washy answer about fees.
• Do the same with Vanguard
• Do the same with Schwab
• Do the same with Fidelity

(Basically I'm asking you to do the same thing retroPencil abbreviated...and fees are sometimes not obvious.)

The money isn't fully there yet. Such transfers take time to be trusted that they've actually occurred. This is money, after all.

The last thing they want is for the trade to occur and to have some oddity occur meaning the money didn't really get transferred.

The idea of the rule-of-thumb is to use as a guide - as an upper bound. Lower, of course, is better.

I'm a little confused. 3 weeks notice to work from the office? Have you been living too far to commute? Is the 1391 rent place too far to commute to the office?

My rule of thumb I heard way back in the dark ages was no more than 1/4 of gross salary for rent. 1/4 of 6.4k = 1.6k.

by the way... back in May (April?) I deliberately pushed my utilization over 30%. Temporarily my score dropped to 783, but it bounced back over 800 reasonably quickly.

I'd be inclined to put pressure on them to fix it...like it needs to be fixed by the time paychecks next come out or I'm filing a claim.

But I've never been in this situation myself. So I don't know how much you want to piss off your employer or not.

We carry 3 credit cards; two are over 30 years old. We've financed all 5 new cars(*) we've bought. We bought a house and paid off the mortgage. And our credit score is floating around 800-820. One month one score peaked at 843.

Apparently having credit cards older than most redditors isn't enough. Having 30+ years of "perfect" history is not enough. Every time I get a credit summary, it keeps whining about not having the proper types of loans.

I'd love to hit the magic 850, but I don't care enough to game the system.

(*) -- we properly financed 3 cars. New car #4 we wrote a check for 50% and financed the other half. I wasn't emotionally ready to write a check to buy a car. I could've. Car #5, I walked into the dealership intending to write a check to pay for the car, but found out our email-ngotiated price included $500 factory financing incentive. So I played the game, asked the dealership what was the minimum I'd have to finance to get the incentive, AND could I pay it off immediately. After confirming both by reading the fine print, I financed about 1/3 and wrote a check for 2/3. Then as soon as I got the first bill, I sent them a payment in full and paid off the loan. I paid about $22 dollars in interest to get that $500 incentive.

The way you responded makes me think it's your spouse doing the lying.

If you are the primary beneficiary, it doesn't really matter. Also, did the "liar" actually lie, or fail to update information after marriage? A lie of omission.....

I think this is a very loving thing to do. Just make sure you do it right and you understand all the implications -- particularly the implications to college financial aid.

You'd probably want to create some sort of account to defer the taxes. My grandmother or grandparents created for me an UGMA. I created 529s for our kids.

A 529 is for post-HS education. It grows tax free and can be used tax free on educational expenses. And, you can remain the owner, with each kid a beneficiary. If they don't spend it all on college, the beneficiary-ship can be moved around. Or, unqualified withdrawals can be made, paying taxes plus a 10% penalty tax on the growth. Scholarship offsets can be withdrawn penalty free but not tax free. My first two kids got partial scholarships, and we were able to take money out of their 529s penalty-free (but not tax free) up to the amount of the scholarship earned in that calendar year.

And UGMA or UTMA would be owned by the child but administered by you until they reach the age of majority in yoru (or their) state. My understanding is that for financial aid purposes, this would count as their asset and under current rules would significantly lower how much aid they're eligible for.

Back in the dark ages when Reagan was president and I was in college, I didn't even know about the UGMA my grandparents had created. I don't know whether it was just grandma or both -- my grandfather died youngish of cancer, and my parents split book-ended his illness. Anyway, mom worked at the University, so my parents were able to pay 100% of my cost to attend. So I didn't even learn of the UGMA for another 10 years -- in Clinton's second term I think.

Long time ago...back in 1990: we moved across the county to shorten wife's commute. We didn't drag our phone number with us -- the phone company wanted a lot of money for that privilege back then. They gave us a very nice phone number. I think it was 965-0333. Or something like that.

Well, we started getting calls for Budget Rent-a-Car. You see, they used to have a suburban branch near us, but it closed 6 months before, and when we applied for a phone line, the phone company recycled that number to us.

We were technologically savvy -- we had an actual answering machine. With tiny cassette tapes. We changed the message to state "this is not Budget Rent-a-Car. This is a private residence. Please leave a message for 965-0333." Even with that message, one day I came home from work to a message (old-lady voice): "Hello? I'd like to rent a car?"

My point is it is very likely that you are the "illicit" user -- that the person who's drug store account you've stolen legitimately had what's now your phone number back when they set up the account. I'm not aware of anything mandating that they change their drug store rewards account just because they've given up a phone number.

You can specify which lots to sell.

I've never sold my RSUs immediately, but I have sold to diversify, and I have told the brokerage exactly which lots (vestings) I'm selling.

Just as a test, I put in a sell order (I'm previewing it now), and I've told it to sell 1 share from each of 12 different lots. 12 total shares. But that's the software provided by the brokerage my company has selected. Yours may vary.

Time to go hit cancel.

did you sign any refinancing paperwork?

Your county / city / state probably has a website when you can look at property ownership and such. If there's a mortgage, there'll be paperwork there. I doubt very much that they'd put the mortgage just in her name if both of you own the home, but you never know for sure.

Almost 20 years ago now, we got an offer to refi our house -- the offer came in my wife's name even though I was sole breadwinner and she a SAHM. We filled it out and refinanced (lowering our interest rate from 6.625 to 4.875 AND reducing the term at the same time to 15 years). We know a few other people who got the same offer from Wells Fargo. In every case, SAHM, husband sole-breadwinner, and offer to the wife. We think Wells was trying to improve their gender stats on mortgages?

you mean lying?

Married / Single doesn't really matter much to the IRA or the Financial Institution. IRAs are held singly anyway.

All checking "single" affects is what happens if you die. You're supposed to specify a beneficiary for the IRA for when you die. The primary beneficiary should be your spouse. Your financial institution probably just wants to know about your marital status so they can get the primary beneficiary correct. If you are married and don't put your spouse, they might want documentation that your spouse is okay with not being the primary beneficiary.

Okay. There are really two choices here, not 3.

• Mutual Funds
• Exchange-Traded funds

The two are the same, except for how they're bought/sold.

• Mutual Funds are bought by the dollar, based on a price calculated based on the value of all the components shortly after close of market.
• Exchange Traded funds are bought by the share, and are traded like stock. In theory you can snag a lower price by using stock trading techniques. But you can only buy in units of shares... So If the ETF is trading at 151.66 and you have 200,000 to invest, then you can buy 1318 shares of the ETF, leaving behind $111.88.

Index funds are just a sub-speciality of Mutual Funds (or, frankly, of ETFs)

Funds can be:

• actively managed.
  They hire smart people to research and watch and choose what to invest in. The manager might have heard of supply issues on Apple's part, and might be seeing that Toro's weed-eaters are selling extraordinarily well...and adjust their buying plans to match. But with that expertise comes extra cost. Expense ratios tend to be higher, and there's "loads" which are nothing more than trading fees.
• indexed.
  These follow a pre-defined index, like the "Dow Industrials" or the S&P 500. But there's lots of different indexes out there. The advantage is that it's cheap and easy for the manager to manage. You put your 200,000 in, the index tells them exactly how much of Apple, how much of BP, and how much of Toro to buy.

Both can be indexed.

Gotcha.

Why you and not any of your siblings?

The wiki has some very good suggestions as to how to invest. Investing a trust is no different than investing a 401k or investing an IRA.

I suggest talking with Mom, and talking with the other trust beneficiaries...just to get their ideas.

There's no hurry to invest though. Let the money sit in the bank for a while. Probably a better interest rate than a checking account.

It was a bunch of years ago that we got a windfall. We ended up putting a bunch of the cash into CDs for just a little while - while we decided what to do. Not sure I'd recommend CDs today, but maybe that's not a bad place to start.

Where is this money now? How has it been invested?

Why do you think you need to change anything?

Who is this FA, how do you pay her, and can you give a little more detail as to the plan?

Oh, and why does she recommend Whole Life?

There's really no magic here. You need to either cut your spending, or you need to bring in more income, or both.

Next time you go shopping, buy the store-brand ketchup instead of Heinz. Make coffee at home instead of stopping at Starbucks.

See if you can work a few extra hours.