Archives for January 2023

Personal Capital: $100 Visa Gift Card For Financial Advisory Sales Call (Expired)

Posted on January 5, 2023 // 12 Comments

Update: This offer is now expired and not currently available. I am leaving up the details for those that did the deal previously.

Expired offer:

$100 offer is back. You must sign up by 1/31/23 and have your meeting by 2/28/2023. Personal Capital is an investment advisory service that offers several free online financial tools as a way to introduce themselves to potential clients. I mention them once a quarter, as I use them to track my Humble Portfolio performance and asset allocation across various brokerage and 401k accounts. They also have various retirement planning tools for projecting required savings rates and future income. Below is a screenshot from my own account. (Morningstar recently started charging for their Portfolio X-ray service, leaving Personal Capital as one of the few such services left.)

After you sign up for their free tools, Personal Capital will usually call you once and introduce themselves and their services. They want to help you manage your portfolio for a management fee that is somewhere between the cost of the average 100% digital robo-advisor and a traditional human advisor from a Big Firm. If you politely decline, as I did, they won’t hard-sell and won’t call you again. (Much more pleasant than trying to cancel my cable service!) You can keep using their free software after that without hassle.

Now through 1/31/2023, Personal Capital will explicitly pay you a $100 Visa gift card if you sign up for their free tools and receive a financial advisory analysis and sales call from them. You will need to sync up your investments accounts showing total investable assets of at least $250,000. You do not need to accept the proposal or pay for financial advice, but you do need to listen to their presentation.

The next conversation you have could come with $100. Here’s how:

– Sign up for our free, easy-to-use financial tools including our Retirement Planner
– Link your bank and investment accounts
– Receive your free financial analysis after talking with an expert
– Treat yourself with your FREE $100 Visa® gift card**

Offer fine print:

Offer available through Feb 28, 2023. If you schedule an appointment with a Personal Capital Advisor and participate in both an initial call and a second call in which you receive a recommendation and proposal for paid investment advisory services by Feb 28, 2023 (a “Recommendation”), then you will receive receive a $100 Visa®* Gift Card (the “Gift Card”). The Gift Card will be provided via email no later than Mar 31, 2023 through Thnks.com (“Thnks”), an independent third-party gifting platform. By participating in this promotion, you are agreeing to allow Personal Capital to share your email address with Thnks for Gift Card fulfillment purposes and agreeing that information collected from promotion participants may be used by PCAC or affiliates for marketing or solicitation of paid products or services.

The Gift Card is only available to prospective clients who receive a promotional offer. To qualify as a prospective client, you must: (1) have a minimum of $250,000 in investable assets, (2) not have redeemed a Personal Capital promotion in the previous 24 months, and (3) answer a suitability survey posed at the beginning of the initial call with a Personal Capital Advisor at which time the Advisor (at his or her sole discretion) will make a determination as to whether you qualify as a prospective client for paid advisory services offered by Personal Capital Advisors Corporation. Using an ad blocker may adversely affect our ability to determine your account eligibility in the program. This offer is not transferable and cannot be redeemed in any other manner. Final determination of eligibility is at Personal Capital’s sole discretion.

I am now an affiliate of Personal Capital Advisors Corporation (“PCAC”) and will be compensated if you sign up for this offer though my link above. To be blunt, if you don’t want to listen to a full presentation, I would just sign up for the free tools and skip the advisor call. The free tools are truly useful just on their own and Personal Capital has never bothered me again after their initial call. But if you do want to hear what they have to say and maybe get a little free advice, then right now you can get a $100 gift card on top (instead of nothing).

Filed Under: Deals & Offers, Investing //

2023 Retirement and Benefit Account Contribution Limits: 401k, 403b, IRA, HSA, DCFSA

Posted on January 5, 2023 // Leave a Comment

The beginning of the year is also a good time to check on the new annual contribution limits for retirement and benefit accounts, many of which are indexed to inflation. Our income has been quite variable these last few years, so I regularly adjust our paycheck deferral percentages based on expected income for the year. I still try to max things out if I can, or at least stay on pace to do so. This 2023 SHRM article has a nice summary of 2023 vs. 2022 numbers for most employer-based retirement and benefit accounts.

401k/403b Employer-Sponsored Accounts.

For example, I would break down the applicable limit down to monthly and bi-weekly amounts:

  • $22,500 annual limit = $1,875 per monthly paycheck.
  • $22,500 annual limit = $865.38 per bi-weekly paycheck.

The higher maximum limits are useful are for those folks that have the ability to contribute extra money into their 401k accounts on an after-tax basis (and then potentially perform an in-service Roth rollover), or those self-employed persons with SEP IRAs or Self-Employed 401k plans.

If you are contributing to a pre-tax account instead of a Roth, you could also use a paycheck calculator to find the detailed impact to your after-tax “take home” pay.

The investment options in 401k plans have also improved on average steadily over the years with lower fees and costs, allowing your money to compound even faster.

Traditional/Roth IRAs. The annual contribution limits are up $500 from last year, now $6,500 with an additional $1,000 allowed for those age 50+.

  • $6,500 annual limit = $541.67 per monthly paycheck.
  • $6,500 annual limit = $250 per bi-weekly paycheck.

Most brokerage accounts (Vanguard, Fidelity, M1 Finance) will allow you to set up automatic investments on a weekly, biweekly, or monthly basis. As long as you have enough money in your linked checking account, the broker will transfer the cash over and then invest it on a recurring basis. You may even be able to sync it to take out money the very same or next day as when your paycheck hits.

Health Savings Accounts are often treated as the equivalent of a “Healthcare IRA” due the potential triple tax benefits (tax-deduction on contributions, tax-deferred growth for decades, and tax-free withdrawals towards qualified healthcare expenses). This assumes that you have a high-deductible health insurance plan (more popular every year as they are cheaper for employers too), you can cover your current healthcare expenses out-of-pocket, and you can still afford to contribute to the HSA. Up a little for 2023.

Healthcare Flexible Spending Accounts are still an commonly-available option for others. Up a little for 2023.

Dependent Care FSAs are easy tax savings if you have children in daycare and/or preschool. These are not indexed to inflation.

Even if you aren’t hitting the limits, just increasing your salary deferral contribution rate 1% higher than last year can make a substantial difference if you keep it up. Simple evergreen advice. The easiest way for me not to eat potato chips is not the have them in the house. (Looking at you, Costco bag of Himalayan Salt Kettle Chips…) The easiest way to make sure you don’t spend the money that you want to invest, is to never have it touch your bank account.

Filed Under: Investing, Retirement //

Portfolio Asset Class Returns, 2022 Year-End Review

Posted on January 3, 2023 // 1 Comment

yearendreview

Happy New Year! I enjoyed a little winter nap. This worked out fine as successful investing does not require constant attention. To be honest, if all my research and/or experience showed that lot of trading activity led to greater returns, I’d probably be happily trading away right now. But the opposite is closer to the truth, which means I have to make up rules to keep myself from unnecessary action. Here is the obligatory Warren Buffett quote:

Benign neglect, bordering on sloth, remains the hallmark of our investment process.

I used to login to look at my portfolio daily. Then I switched to tracking monthly returns on my low-cost index fund holdings across various asset classes. Now, I only rebalance with incoming cashflows based on my quarterly portfolio updates, and only check my official performance numbers and make major adjustments (selling something) at most once a year. Per Morningstar, here are the annual returns for select asset classes as benchmarked by popular ETFs after market close 12/30/22.

Commentary. Unlike years like 2020 and 2021 where nearly everything went up, 2022 was a year when nearly everything went down. Considering how high inflation was as well, there really was no place to hide.

The “set and forget” Vanguard Target Retirement 2055 fund (roughly 90% diversified stocks and 10% bonds) was down 17.5% in 2022, the biggest loss since the Financial Crisis in 2008. Still, if you have been a steady investor over the past several years, your average return over that span certainly isn’t horrible:

In my mind, this was one of those “inevitable” years. Sooner or later, all that money being pumped into the economy was going to lead to inflation. I had no idea it would be this year, but it was. As such, nobody can predict what 2023 will hold. I still like what I own overall. I just have to make sure our financial position allows us to survive any short-term panics in order to stay invested for the long-term.

Filed Under: Investing //
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