Financier Forums

Tax time went pretty smoothly! They just provided a 1099-OID and 1099-B and it was simple to plug them into FreeTaxUSA. It looks like my Net Annualized Return is now down to 6.6%. Hopefully it will stabilize soon since my initial purchase was about a year ago.

I started working about a year and a half ago (I'm 25) and last year and after maxing out my Roth IRA and Roth 403b I actually started putting money towards an appropriately named Mega Backdoor Roth IRA. Essentially, if your work allows, you can put money into a Taxable 401k/403b and convert it to a Roth 401k/403b every pay period without any tax penalties.

Basically, the total contribution limit for your tax deferred accounts is $54,000. So the amount that you can do this backdoor is: Total Contribution Limit ($54,000) - Roth IRA ($5,500) - Max of 401k/403b ($18,000) - Employer contribution (for me ~$10,000) = Amount you can do the backdoor ($20,500)

Last year was a trial run, so I didn't put as much as I could, but I didn't owe anything at tax time after doing this with ~$10,000! I don't know about HSA's though or if they contribute to the amount your tax deferred accounts in this way (I can't get one). I also made sure to ask the financial people at my work to double-check this was all legal. They said they had never heard of anyone doing this, but it all checks out!

I haven't tried any from Udemy personally, but I have audited Coursera and edX courses over the past year. Both of them allow you to audit for free, but pay if you want course credit.

@Sunflash I think a small amount is justified, but I have less fear hosting it on my own than letting dropbox or any other cloud platform house my data. Security through obscurity has some benefits! I tend to think that the more complex (amount of jobs) and less open-source a program is, the less secure. For example, Owncloud since it does contact, calendar, and file sync may be less secure than, say, Pydio which only does file sync but is open-source and pays for external audits. Pydio may be less secure than Syncthing which only syncs the files and has no web interface to view all of the files (it has one showing the status of machines and such). I know this isn't a perfect rule, but I tend to use it as a gauge. Others probably know a lot more about the security of servers, I think that just having a file server in the first place and using open source is a good step in the right direction.

To warn you, Owncloud may have a rocky road ahead (in my opinion) since a lot of their core developers recently left and forked it to Nextcloud, which is now being actively developed. I haven't really kept up with the divide, though.

You could always check out yunohost https://yunohost.org/#/ it's one of the things I run on my personal server and seems to work pretty well! I would also recommend cozy cloud https://cozy.io/en/, but I'm not sure if it's stable enough yet.

Hey Everyone! I'm Brennan and I've been lurking on YNAB for probably the past year and here for a little while. I'm just starting my financial journey (graduated in 2015) so I'm getting more practical experience! Anyway, I look forward to watching financier grow and being a part of the community.

I guess I've been on a little opening spree for the past year or so. Not as much as some people I've seen, but just here or there when I see good signup bonuses.

I have currently:

Chase Sapphire Preferred	This was previously used as a catch-all after getting the signup bonus. I need to keep this one active to get Chase UR points.
Chase Freedom	Used for whatever 5% category is rotating through this quarter.
Sallie Mae Rewards	This card gives 5% back on gas, groceries, and Amazon. It's unfortunately going away next March, though...
US Bank Cash+	This card gives 5% cashback on two chosen categories and 2% on a third category. I mainly use this to get 5% back on gym memberships, department stores, and charity at the end of the year.
Chase Freedom Unlimited	I just got this for the signup bonus last month, but this will replace the Sapphire Preferred as my catch-all card.
Chase Southwest Rapid Rewards Plus	I just got this for the signup bonus last month, but will cancel the card before the annual fee kicks in next year.
Capital One Quicksilver	This is my oldest card, so I just keep it open to keep my credit score up.

I guess when the Sallie Mae finally kicks the bucket I'll have to look for another gas/groceries/Amazon combination!

Sorry for posting on something so old, but I figured I should stop lurking!

I've been using Lending Club for about a year now. I think it's a pretty good investment source, but I've only put 1k into it as a test. After a year, I have a calculated NAR of 7.52% which isn't too bad, but is a lot less than it seems you could previously get through the service. I'm waiting to see at tax time how difficult things are (only have a taxable account with them) and use that to measure if I want to continue using the service.