WCI #423: Rollovers, Roth, and Investing

This is the White Coat Investor Podcast where we help those who wear the white coat get a fair shake on Wall Street. We've been helping doctors and other high income professionals stop doing dumb things with their money since 2011.

This is White Coat Investor podcast number 423 brought to you by Laurel Road for doctors. Laurel Road is committed to serving the unique financial needs of residents and doctors. We want to help make your money work harder and smarter. If credit card debt is weighing you down and you're struggling with monthly payments, a personal loan designed for residents with special repayment terms during training could help you consolidate your debt check if you qualify for a lower rate. Plus, White Coat readers also get an additional rate discount when they apply through LaurelRoad.com WCI for terms and conditions, please visit www.l LaurelRoad.com WCI that's www.l LaurelRoad.com WCI. Thor Road is a brand KeyBank NA member FDIC all right, welcome back to the White Coat Investor Podcast. We're glad you're here. We're glad you're doing what you do out there in your life. I had a wonderful opportunity to raft recently with a medical student at the University of Oklahoma and boy, it's always refreshing to talk to people at the beginning of this wonderful career and see their optimism and their zeal. And as you're staring at a decade plus of training, it's pretty wild to compare that to the burned out doctors I talked to in mid career that definitely have somewhat different priorities. But kudos to those of you who have come into this career and are doing it for the right reason and can stay committed to it for a long, long time. Obviously everybody has a little bit of that zeal knocked out of them and a little bit of that optimism and idealism knocked out of them along the way. Maybe mostly during their intern year, but trying to keep some of it sure makes the career more enjoyable as you go along. Okay, we got a scholarship. We're trying to give away money to medical students and other professional students who are eligible as well. The eligibility criteria this year are you gotta be full time in good standing at your school. It has to be a brick and mortar school. No online schools, no hybrid programs. If you're doing a whole bunch of stuff online, your school's not going to count. Okay? We don't take undergraduates. If you've already received scholarships equal to or greater than the cost of tuition at your school, you're not eligible. You're not eligible. If you're a resident, even if you're a dental resident paying tuition, you got to be a student, okay? But you can be a student of medicine, whether an MD or do. You can be a dental student. You can be a PA you can be an np. Be aware, lots of NP schools are hybrid or online schools, so those ones won't qualify. You can also be even a crna. You can be an OT or a PT if your program leads to a doctorate degree. So it's basically any high income professional. Law counts, pharmacy counts, optometry counts, any accounts. Now, in the past, most of our winners have been medical students. Occasionally we have a dental student. Most of them are medical students. But any of these categories can apply, right? Veterinarians. I didn't mention veterinarians. Or anesthesia assistants. Those all qualify as well. To apply, you got to be at a school in the U.S. u.S. States, District of Columbia, territories, but you got to be in the US we got to be able to verify that you're actually there and in good standing. But those are the rules for application. There's only going to be one category this year. We're not going to do two categories. We're trying to simplify things, not only for our staff, but for our judges. So it's one category. There's going to be 10 winners. We're just going to split the pot evenly between those 10 winners of all the money we can raise for this scholarship. You can write about anything you want. Past winners like to tell inspiring but true stories about themselves or family and their background. You can share anecdotes from your experience in medical or other professional school. It's the financial website, right? So putting a financial component in there is probably a good idea. Some people have even won, just given tips for how they survived and thrived in medical school in the past. Humor's good. Interest is good. Inspiration is good. Ten winners are going to be selected. You can apply whitecoatinvestor.com scholarship. You have all summer to apply. And we're going to try to get as many applications as we can because we want to affect as many people for good as we can here at the White Coat Investor. Okay. The other problem we have is we need people to judge these essays, these applications. They're a maximum of about 1,000 words. Okay? And the judges are going to participate in a couple of rounds. 10 essays per round. So you got to read 20 essays to be a judge. It's a volunteer position. We don't pay you, but we need judges. We don't want to be the ones deciding who wins this scholarship money? We feel like we've got a little bit too much of a conflict there and so we want white coat investors, just regular white coat investor audience members, to be the judges. You can't be a resident, you can't be a student. But if you're in your career, you're retired, doesn't matter what career, you can be a scholarship judge. Email scholarshiphitecodeinvestor.com, just say I want to be a judge in the title and that'll be enough. We'll get you signed up. You'll have to read these essays in September and October when the judging is happening and you can help us decide who wins. It's a lot of fun every year and we get to directly reduce the indebtedness of a whole bunch of students and maybe more importantly, get the word out a little bit more about the importance of financial literacy and financial discipline among professional students. Okay, enough of that stuff. So let's get into your questions today. We're going to spend a lot of time on the Speak Pipe today. If you don't know, you can leave questions for us to answer here on the podcast on the speak pipe. That's whitecoatinvestor.com speakpipe you can record up to a minute and a half. I think it's 90 seconds is what the limit is right now. You do not have to use all 90 seconds. All right, it's fine to leave 30 seconds with your question, but do provide the details you think we'd need to help people Answer your question again. Whitecoatinvestor.com speakpipe here's our first question. It's about 401ks.

Hey Jim, I'm a physician in a large multi specialty group. We were recently acquired and we'll be integrating into a larger parent corporation. In addition to typical benefits, we'll have access to an executive savings plan. This is a 409, a non qualified top hat plan, meaning it's only available to employees in certain salary grades. You can make tax referred contributions of up to 80% of your base salary and up to 100% of your incentive compensation with no pre specified dollar limit that I can see in any of the plan documents. The plan matches 50 cents on the dollar on up to 6% of base or incentive compensation which at 50 cents on the dollar would be a 3% maximum match. Vesting is immediate. You do have the ability to make planned withdrawals for specific life events like college tuition or for emergencies when you separate from employment. You have five different options of how things get distributed to you, but it cannot be rolled over into any other vehicle. You'll pay taxes on the distributions at your then current tax rate on both the contributions and on interest accrued. The five options are an immediate lump sum, a five year delayed lump sum, a ten year delayed lump sum, or you can take it in 5 or 10 equal annual installments as a non qualified plan. I know the big thing is to have reasonable confidence in your employer's long term solvency. I have no concerns about that in my particular case. Overall, this seems like a really great way to reduce tax burden for W2 employed docs in their highest income earning years when they're in their highest tax brackets and then spread that income out over a long period of time, potentially at a much lower bracket. Any additional thoughts on how to contribute and maximize the benefits of this type of plan?

Okay, let's talk about 409. And probably the best way to think about a 409 is to lump it in with a non governmental 457 plan. These are both types of deferred compensation plans. They are non qualified. They are as deferred compensation. They belong to your employer still. And this is the main downside of these plans is they are, you know, they're great asset protection technique for you because they're not available to your creditors, but they are available to the creditors of your employer. This has mostly been a theoretical risk for decades that we talk about when we talk about these deferred compensation plans. You don't want to put more in there than you're really comfortable losing in the event that your employer ends up going bankrupt. That's a little less theoretical. More recently, Steward, the corporation that used to own my hospital is apparently maybe some of the docs that work for Steward are going to lose some of the deferred compensation money. This hasn't all settled out yet and I'll be talking about it in great depth once it does settle out. But for the first time that I know of, I think we may be seeing some docs actually lose deferred compensation money. So this is your big risk to use a 409 or to use a non governmental 457 program. And that's what you got to be thinking about as you choose whether to use these other things to think about. You got to think about fees, you got to think about the investment options, make sure those are acceptable. Make sure especially the distribution options are acceptable. And it sounds like you've got enough, enough options there that the distribution Options are acceptable. If those all look okay and your employer seems financially stable, then the question is, how much do you put in there? Well, first of all, make sure deferring taxes still make sense for you. Right? If you've already got $5 million in tax deferred accounts, you may not want to put more into tax deferred accounts. You may be better off at that point in tax free accounts or doing more Roth conversions or you know, making more Roth contributions or possibly even in a taxable account. Although most of the time you're going to be better off in some sort of a tax protected account like a 409 than you would in a taxable account. At least when saving long term for retirement, that tax protected growth is just pretty valuable. So those are the things to be thinking about. It sounds like they'll let you put a whole bunch of money in. You probably ought to put in at least enough to get the match. And I'd probably put something in every year. But if they let you put $100,000 in there a year, I might not do that. Do you really want to have 2 million or 3 or 4 million dollars in there that you're lying awake at night worrying about your employer going under for? So maybe trying to get that account to a mid six figure amount is reasonable. That sort of amount a multimillionaire retiring doctor could afford to lose in the event that something happened to the employer. But I don't know that I'd try to get a lot more than that into a deferred compensation plan that's not yours. Now this is different from a 401. This is different from a 403. This is even different from a 401, a 409 or a non governmental 457 plan. You might want to be careful exactly how much you put in there. I know the tax deferral is valuable, but I've talked to a few people over the years who have been sweating it out, wondering if they're going to lose some of this money. And even the ones who didn't end up losing any money said it wasn't worth it to have to worry about it for six months or 18 months or whatever while they were worried they were going to lose that money due to their employer going bankrupt. So keep that in mind. Hope that's helpful. Our quote of the day today comes from PT Barnum who said money is good for nothing unless you know the value of it by experience. All right, another question off the speak pipe. This one about rollovers.

Hi Jim, this is Schweiza from Irvine. If I have an old employer rollover IRA and also some post tax traditional IRA contributions, how can I then rollover my rollover IRA into my current employer 401k and separate the post tax traditional contributions?

Is this a possibility?

If my plan allows. Thank you.

All right. Hope Irvine is treating you well. I spent a month out there as a resident doing an ultrasound rotation. It was a great experience. I went out to the beach almost every day. I was doing some boogie boarding every day. I wish the waves were bigger. Well, one day the waves were bigger and I still went out. And I learned an important lesson that you don't always want the waves to be bigger. It turns out they can be too big. But as far as your question, here's what I would do. In general, most qualified plans like 401 s and 403 s that accept rollovers from an IRA will accept tax deferred money and may accept tax free money. Roth money. Right. But they generally don't accept after tax contributions. That's not a bad thing though because here's what you do. You look at how much of it is tax deferred and you say, I'm going to roll this much into my 401. Great. And you do that rollover. That money comes out and all the money that's left is now after tax money and you just do a Roth conversion on that. There's no tax cost to it since you didn't get a tax deduction when you put the money in. And now it's in a Roth IRA and can grow tax free forever after that. So this is called isolating your basis so it can be converted. And this is a good thing to do. Lots of people with after tax money and IRAs or in the Federal Thrift Savings Plan, try to do this sort of thing deliberately to try to isolate that basis and do a Roth conversion on it. So I think that's probably the solution to your issue. All right, next question is about mega backdoor Roths.

Hi Dr. Dali, thanks for everything that you do. I'm a urologist in the Midwest and I have a question for you about megabackdoor. It's become a pretty popular, popular item these days. And my 4.3B plan, I'm a hospital employed physician, allows for either pre tax or after tax contributions to 403. Given that, I thought that would be a nice setup if it offers both to potentially also be able to do mega backdoor rollover. I've asked people in my hospital in The HR department, no one seems to have heard of Mega Backdoor. And I even called the plan administration through Lincoln Financial Group and they couldn't tell me if the plan was eligible for Mega Backdoor. And in fact, even the guy on the phone said he's never heard of Mega Backdoor. So I'm a little bit stuck in knowing or understanding if I'm able to contribute to that. And how else would I know? Even if I got the plan documents, I'm sure it may not be spelled out there. So any advice you can give me on that or who to talk to would be great. Thanks a lot. Thanks for everything you do.

Bye. Okay, Matt, here's the problem. You are using the phraseology that informed investors, financially literate people use, which is the mega backdoor Roth IRA process. Your HR people, the people running your 401, they may not be in that category. That's why they've never heard this term. This is not unusual at all, though, so you need to ask the right questions. Rather than asking, can I do a Mega backdoor Roth ira? You want to ask can I make after tax, not Roth employee contributions to this plan? Because remember, there's three types of contributions, right? There's pre tax, there's Roth, and there's after tax. A lot of people don't understand the difference between Roth and after tax. Right? The Roth account, future earnings are all tax free. After tax money, future earnings are all tax deferred. That's the difference between them, right? You're allowed to make this, you know, in 2025, you're under 50, it's $23,500. You can make it as a tax deferred contribution or a Roth contribution. And the after tax employee contributions are all above and beyond that $23,500 contribution. So find out, can I make these contributions in the plan? And the answer will be yes or no, right? You're saying it allows pre tax and allows after tax. They may think you're asking about Roth. If all they're offering is two categories, it's usually pre tax or tax deferred and Roth or tax free contributions. They usually don't offer pre tax and true after tax employee contributions. Okay, so first figure out, can I make the contributions? The second question to ask is can I do in plan Roth conversions? Now you're speaking their language. Now they should understand the questions you're asking. If your plan allows both of those steps, then you can do the mega backdoor Roth IRA process. Because the process is put in after tax money and then do a Roth conversion on it. That's the process. But they've got to allow both steps. If they don't allow both steps, you can't do this with your plan. I mean, you could make after tax contributions, but you probably don't want to. You're probably better off most of the time just investing in a taxable account than doing that. Because the problem is in a taxable account, you get long term capital gains treatment. You can get qualified dividend tax treatment in that after tax account. If you never do a Roth conversion on it, you're paying ordinary income tax rates on the gains and you got to have a lot of years of tax protected growth to make up for the fees in the plan and especially to make up for the fact that you're paying at ordinary income tax rates rather than the lower long term capital gains rates in the taxable account. Right. You can't donate shares to charity. You can't do tax loss harvesting all these things you can't do in that account that most of the time I think you're better off in taxable if you can't also do the Roth conversion step. All right, thanks everybody out there for trying to sort this stuff out. I mean, thanks for your regular job too. This is why you get paid a lot, is because your job is hard and it's an important job for our society. So if no one's told you, thank you today. Thank you very much. But for those of you who are going above and beyond and also trying to get great retirement plans in place, and you're trying to get plans in place that allow mega backdoor Roth contributions or lower fees or better investment options, thank you for what you're doing. It matters not just for you, but also for your coworkers who may not even know that they've got a less than ideal retirement plan. Okay, we've talked about the mega backdoor Roth. Let's talk about the backdoor Roth. Hey, Jim, longtime lurker, first time contributor, my question is, I performed a backdoor Roth for my wife, but we have since had a baby and she decided to quit her job and stay at home. Her 401k is now giving her the boot and the funds need to be transferred out sometime soon. What are my options here to avoid the pro rata rule? Okay, well, the pro rata rule basically says you can't have any money In a traditional IRA, SEP IRA or simple IRA or a rollover IRA, which is just another type of traditional IRA. On December 31st of the year you did a Roth conversion or that conversion will be prorated. So if they're trying to kick her out of the 401k, you've got a few options. One, are they just trying or are they doing it? Most 401s, once you have a certain amount of money in there, can't kick you out. They want you to leave because you cost them money, but they can't kick you out. In my partnership 401, I think the limit is $7,000. Once you have at least $7,000 in the plan, we can't kick you out. We can encourage you to leave, we can charge you higher fees, but we can't actually throw you out. So make sure she's actually being kicked out. Because one option is to just leave the money in the 401. Right? 401 money. 403 money doesn't count toward that pro rata calculation. So your conversion won't be prorated if she just has money still in the 401 at the end of the year. If it is less than $7,000 or whatever and they can kick you out, then that's not a huge deal either. Right? Just convert it all. Yeah, it's going to cost you 2,000 or $3,000 in taxes, but just convert it to a Roth IRA and you don't have any traditional IRA money and you can just do spousal backdoor Roth IRAs every year based on your income. So that solves the problem as well. If your spouse goes back to work, gets another 401 or 403 or becomes self employed and gets a solo 401, you can also roll the money in there. So those are your three options so you can explore them. But if truly they're kicking her out of the plan and it's got to go into a traditional IRA because she doesn't have anywhere else to put it and you don't want to convert it because it's such a large amount, you can't afford the taxes on it or something. Well, she's going to get prorated. It's not the end of the world. It's not illegal to be prorated. It just doesn't accomplish what you're trying to accomplish. But it's not like it's a terrible thing, right? Just get prorated. Fill the tax forms out rightly, fill them out correctly. That's Form 8606 that you do every year to report those non deductible contributions and conversions and you can carry those balances forward each year. It's not the end of the world. It's just not as good as it could be if you didn't get prorate okay, let's take a question about dividend funds. I have a question for you in regards to the high yield dividend funds that are available, specifically the ETFs of WiMax and MSTY. I know they are both very high risk, but do pay significant dividends. I'm about 10 years out from retirement with approximately $1,500,000 in the 401 that I currently have. Would this be a good option to move into now with the current market, or would this be something to stay away from? Thanks. Any help is appreciated. Okay, there's a lot wrapped up in that question and it's actually going to take a pretty extensive discussion to unwrap it all. Part of the issue is when you're making a financial plan, even just the investing portion of your financial plan, there's four steps, right? The first is you set your goals. The second is you choose which accounts you're going to be investing in, right? The third one is you choose your asset allocation or mix of different types of investments you're going to have in the plan. And finally, you select investments. Now, in the Speak pipe message, this white coat investor has come to me just asking about investments without giving me any information whatsoever about the goals, the accounts, or the asset allocation. So it shouldn't be any surprise that I really can't answer this question without anything more than you need a written investing plan. Make a written investing plan. Follow that plan. If the plan includes msty, then invest in msty. But if the plan does not include msty, then don't invest in that. So my assumption, based on the fact that I got this question, like most of the questions I get, my assumption is that there is no written investing plan. So step one is go get in a written investing plan. Now, if you feel competent that you're financially literate enough that you can do this yourself, go write your own investing plan. That's what I did. Read some books, spend some time on forums, asking questions. Read lots of blog posts, listen to this podcast. Eventually you get to the point where you're like, oh yeah, that's no big deal. I can write my own investing plan. Another option is taking our fire your financial advisor course. The whole point of this online course is, which is about $800, is to help you write your written investing plan. That's the point. To take you from zero to hero and basically spoon feed you everything you need to know to write an investing plan. Well, actually a comprehensive financial plan that includes an investing plan without having to hire a professional to do it. The third option is to hire a professional just to help you write the plan. Then you implement it, you maintain it, and finally, you can hire a professional to not only write the plan, but implement it and maintain it. You know that's a full service financial planner and investment manager, right? And we've got lists of those professionals that we recommend to you that you can find at the website under the recommended tab. So you got to take one of those options, get yourself a written investing plan, and then you can quit asking questions like this because you'll have all the answers in the plan. If you're not sure what to do, you go back to the plan and it'll tell you what to do. Katie and I wrote a plan in 2004 that we're basically still following. We've made a few tiny tweaks to it over the years, but that's basically the same financial plan we're following more than two decades later. This works. And if you stick with your plan, stay the course with it, eventually, if you're like most docs, if you're like most white coat investors, you're going to retire as a financially independent multimillionaire. It's not that complicated. It's not that hard. You can do it. Thousands and thousands of white coat investors before you have done it. Okay, now that we've had that discussion under there, there are a lot of people out there in investment land that focus mostly inappropriately on income, the income from the portfolio. Right. The amount the portfolio pays out. And rather than focusing on the total return of the portfolio, for example, if a stock index fund has a return of 10% one year, perhaps 2% of that will be income and the other 8% will be appreciation of the stocks in that fund. Okay, so the income is 2% and the total return is 10%. Now, does that mean you can only spend 2% if you own that fund? No. You can declare your own dividend anytime you want and sell a few shares of that fund. You'll probably get long term capital gains treatment on it, which is the exact same tax treatment that a qualified dividend gets. And you can take out 4% or 5% or 6% or whatever you want. Right. I mean, you Keep taking out 5 or 6 or 7 or 8% every year, you might run out of money. But Certainly taking out 4% is widely acknowledged to be highly likely to be sustainable for 30 plus years. So some of that comes as the dividends, some of that comes from selling shares. So you're not stuck just looking for something with a higher income. Higher income does not mean higher return, at least not necessarily. So some people get so fixated on income that they buy investments just for the high income. And sometimes there's investments out there that have an income of 8% a year, but a total return of 4% a year. Well, how does that happen? Well, they're actually paying you out your principal every year, right? So what really matters in the long run is your total return, not your income. So don't get too fixated on income as that will often lead you to make bad portfolio decisions. The reason why you can spend more than your than just the income the portfolio is providing is because you're not immortal. This idea that you can't spend principal is crazy. If you never spend principal, you will die with at least as much as you retired with, right? And so basically you work for years and years and years and decades and for money you didn't even need. So it's okay to spend your principal in retirement. You just have to be careful how much of it you spend. So it is likely to last you throughout the retirement you're likely to have. And if you start worrying about not quite having enough or running out of money and having to live on only Social Security, well, there are some other things you can do, like buying single premium immediate annuities, putting a floor under your spending to be sure you'll never run out of money. So there are other things you can do if that's the big concern. Just spending principle is probably foolish. Okay, hope that's helpful as a discussion of income. Now let's talk about this specific investment which I know nothing about. Right. So when I get asked about an investment or I'm curious about investment, first thing I do is I put the ticker symbol in this case MSTY into Google along with the word Morningstar. That takes me to morningstar.com, which gives you lots of basic information about funds and exchange traded funds. So when I put in MSTY into here, I see that this fund has an expense ratio of 0.99%. Okay, so 99 basis points. By comparison, a total stock Market Index Fund ETF at Vanguard VTI has an expense ratio of 0.03% or 3 basis points. So in essence, this mutual fund is 33 times as expensive as one that just buys all the stocks in the US So that kind of gives you a Sense of what's going on here. Right. Somebody is selling their services to pick stocks, to pick these, you know, option income strategy, whatever they're doing in this fund. Okay. So you know you're going to pay more and that's going to cost you more. Now, are you getting more? I have no idea. Let's click on the performance tab and see how long this thing's been around. Oh, looks like it just started in 2024. It's brand new, right? Has it done pretty well in the last year? Well, Tom, let's see. We got some trailing returns. It made 85% in the last year. That sounds pretty awesome. 85% is a great return for the last year now. So I think what you ought to do, knowing this now, is I think you ought to get in a time machine and go back one year and buy msty a year ago. That's what I recommend you do. If you don't have a functional time machine, you're going to need a new investing method. You're going to have to invest based on how something's going to do going forward. So I would recommend a crystal ball. Unfortunately, I don't know where to send you to get an accurate crystal ball. I have no idea what the returns for this fund are going to be going forward. I can tell you they're not going to be 85% every year. And in fact, a typical fund that has a return of 85% in one year will often have terribly negative returns in other years. That's a really risky fund, the fact that it had an 85% return in one year. So no idea what that's going to do in the future. For example, this last week as I'm recording this, it dropped 8%. So this is pretty volatile stuff. Now. What are they doing in this fund? I have no idea. It sounds like more than just picking stocks, though. The name says option income strategy, so I'm guessing they're buying some options. If we look under the hood and see what's in the fund, it tells us that there's a whole bunch of large cap blend stocks in it, but that there's also a lot of derivative income. So it sounds like, yeah, they're buying options. So you're paying somebody to buy options for you, and hopefully they're really good at it and only buy options that make money and avoid options that don't make money. I'm not a huge fan of options. I think it's a lot more complicated way to invest than it is to just go Buy shares of companies that are profitable, the most profitable corporations in the history of the world and holding them for decades. And when they make money, you make money. You know, these are your Exxons, these are your apples, these are your Nvidia's, these are your whatever stock of choice you might have as they make money over the years, you share in those profits. When you're buying options, you're kind of gambling on future price increases or future price drops, depending on what kind of options you're buying. Now there are reasons for certain people or companies to buy options so they can lock in pricing and those sorts of things for their inputs and that sort of stuff. But in general, as an investor, I'm not a huge fan of it. And I think most people buying MSTY right now are probably performance chasing, right? Not only are you paying 1% a year in expenses, but you're just trying to get another 85% because that's what it did in the last year. Well, I'll tell you what, these guys are talented enough to get 85% every year. They will soon be managing many, many billions of dollars. Right now they're managing just $4 billion. Just to give you a sense of how much that is, let's compare that to the Vanguard Total Stock Market ETF, which is VTI. That's about 25% of my portfolio. It manages $1.7 trillion. The other one's 4 billion. This is $1.7 trillion. So it's like 500 times larger. I think if I were considering this sort of a strategy, I would spend a lot of time researching it. And my written investing statement would say I'm going to try to pick mutual funds that follow an option strategy to try to have supercharged returns so I can retire in three years or something. That's what my written investing plan would say if I was going to include an investment like this in it. But this is pretty risky business to be be chasing performance in funds like this. Hope that's helpful for you. Okay, our next question is from Dan. Let's take a listen.

Hi Dr. Dalle, this is Dan from the Midwest. I had a question regarding asset allocation and then also asset location. I'm in the sixth year of my training program and going to be in attending next year. So for the first three to four years of residency I just did 90% total US stock market and 10% total US bond market, kind of based on my risk tolerance. And over the last couple years I've started dabbling in individual stocks. So I'M thinking about switching my asset allocation to 80% total U.S. stock market, 10% total U.S. bond market and then 10% individual stocks. That would include anything like, you know, individual publicly traded securities, real estate in the future, anything like that. Keep it at a minimum of, sorry, maximum of 10% of my portfolio. And then my other question is regarding where should I place these assets in terms of traditional post tax and then Roth. So I recently read that you should be placing your highest expected return assets in Roth. So like total US Stock market and individual securities and then bonds should actually go in pre tax or taxable. I haven't really been paying attention to asset location too much, so I just wanted to get your thoughts on both my asset allocation and then asset location. Thanks for all you do.

All right, Dan, lots to talk about there. Let's start with this idea of picking stocks. Okay? What you're talking about, this 10% of your portfolio is what a lot of people call their play money account, right? They use it to chase crypto assets or to pick Nvidias and Tesla or whatever the stock of the day is, or to short things or to buy options or to, you know, play around with their money a little bit. This never made a lot of sense to me, right? If I have play money, I'm probably buying a raft with it or I'm going to Turkey with it, right? This investing stuff is serious business for me. So I don't have play money. I don't have 10% that I fart around with. If I'm going to put money into something, I expect it to make money. I expect it to make some sort of contribution to the portfolio. I want high returns. I want low correlation with the other assets I want, if I can get it, simplicity. I want tax efficiency. You know, those are kind of the goals when I'm putting together my portfolio. When I'm choosing my investments, it's not the investment du jour. That said, if putting 5% or even 10% of your portfolio into a Play Money kind of account allows you to stay the course with the other 90% plus of the portfolio is probably fine to do. You can basically do anything you want with 5% of your portfolio. You can light it on fire if you want and you'll probably be okay. If you're like most white coat investors, saving adequately, your career lasts a reasonable period of time and you stay the course with a reasonable plan with the rest of it, do whatever you want. It's your money. But let's talk about a few things. When it Comes to stock picking, it doesn't make any logical sense to me to pick stocks with 10% of your portfolio. If you can pick stocks well enough that you can beat an index fund, why wouldn't you do it with 90% of your portfolio instead of 10%? That doesn't make any sense to me. And if you can do it well enough to beat an index fund, why are you only managing your money in the first place? You could be charging a lot of money to other people and other institutions for your stock picking ability. If you don't have the ability to pick stocks well enough to beat an index fund, is this really fun enough for you to be losing that much money doing it? I mean, 10% of your portfolio might not be that much now, but eventually it'll be a huge portion of your portfolio or a huge amount of money. The same portion of your portfolio, I suppose. But now all of a sudden you're losing real money and you can calculate if you're underperforming 1% or 2% or 3% a year of that 10% of your portfolio. How many thousands of dollars is that? And is it really that fun that is worth losing all that money? Not to mention the tax consequences of buying this and selling that and buying this and swapping to this. There are tax consequences to changing things around, particularly in a taxable account. So I think you really need to step back and ask, is this really that fun? Is this really what I want to do with that 10% of my portfolio? I think it's okay to invest a small percentage of your portfolio into alternative assets or real estate or whatever, right? But when it comes to picking stocks, I think that that is pretty clear that the best way to invest in the stock market, the publicly traded corporations of the world, is to just buy them all via an index fund. It's very tax efficient. You'll outperform over the long term, 95% plus of active investors. And it takes basically no time and no money. It's basically free and takes 30 seconds. Right? It's a very good way to invest in stocks. And I think you really gotta ask yourself if you really want to invest in stocks in some other way. Okay. As far as asset location goes, well, it depends on what you're investing in and how you're investing in it. If you're buying and selling stocks every week, you need to have this thing in a tax protected account. You don't want to be paying all these capital gains taxes from all your buying and selling activities. So that would Suggest you put it in probably not your 401k because it's probably not going to let you do this. Some do they have a brokerage window, but it's probably going in your Roth ira. If you're buying and selling stocks all the time, that's probably the place to put it, just because the tax consequences won't be so bad. Now. You're right. In general, you'll end up with more money on an after tax basis if you have more aggressive investments that have a higher long term return in the Roth account. Now, I'm not sure you're going to have a higher long term return trying to pick your own stocks, but if you're convinced that you're going to have a higher long term return, then that's probably where you want to put that money, especially if you're churning it pretty rapidly. But if you're talking about investing in other stuff, it might be a little trickier to invest in that. In a Roth ira, for example, you mentioned real estate. If you're going to buy the property down the street, I don't recommend putting that in your Roth ira. I think you're better off having that outside of your retirement accounts. So it really depends on what you're putting in there as far as asset location goes. But there's a lot of principles to asset location. Go to the website, type in asset location in the search bar and my post on this will come up. It's a lengthy post, talks about a lot of the principles to consider and anybody who tells you this stuff is simple, just doesn't understand the issue. There's a lot that goes into asset location. I don't have nearly enough information from you to really tell you exactly where to put this account, especially since I don't know exactly what you're going to be investing in or how you're going to be investing in it. All right, let's take another question about an individual stock. Hi Dr. Dali. I saw that Coinbase is getting added to The S&P 500, much to my dislike. I do not want to own any crypto as I do not see any value in it. But I own a lot of the S&P 500 index funds. Do you have any suggestions on how to change my portfolio to limit my exposure to Coinbase? Do I need to be concerned about this? Thanks. Okay, well, if this is really your concern and you really want to invest in the S&P 500, the way you deal with this is by shorting Coinbase. So you buy the S&P 500. And then you short Coinbase. So that essentially zeros out the amount of Coinbase that's in the S&P 500. And it's like you now own the S&P 499. But bear in mind there's lots of companies that have some of their assets in cryptocurrency and other crypto assets. So if you're trying to get all crypto out of your portfolio, you're going to have to short a lot more than Coinbase. There's quite a few companies, I'll bet if we Google a list, companies that own bitcoin, we'll see a pretty good list here. 215 public companies. So that's a whole bunch of them. You know, Tesla's on the list, for example, lots of others on there. I don't recognize all of them, but there's, there's plenty of plenty of companies out there. So if you go down this road and you're trying to get rid of everything with any exposure to crypto, I think you're going to end up with a really complicated portfolio. I'm not sure I'd recommend that. In general, something like Coinbase is going to make a relatively tiny contribution to the S&P 500's return. I think you're fine to just ignore it, just buy them all. And there's one that does something you don't like. Big deal. You got 499 others. Okay, now a larger question. I'm not a huge fan of the S&P 500. It's only large cap stocks, right? It's obviously only US stocks, but it's only large cap stocks. And some people actually can front run this index. When they announce they're going to add Coinbase to it, well, everybody goes out and buys Coinbase. And then all The S&P 500 funds have to go buy Coinbase. And they pay kind of a, a little bit too much money for it because it got front run. The nice thing about a total stock market index fund is you own everything. So you're not getting front run. It's not lowering your returns that way. It's a broader, more diversified index. It owns large caps, mid caps and small caps. I just think it's better than an S&P 500 fund. So I'm not a big fan of an S&P 500 being your primary holding or your primary US stock holding. I'm much more of a fan of the total Stock Market index fund. I have 25% of my portfolio in the total stock market index fund. I have none of it in an S&P 500 fund. Even when I do tax loss harvesting, I generally swap into another total stock market index fund rather than a 500 index fund. So you probably ought to ask yourself why am I investing in 500 index funds to start with? Maybe switching over if there's no tax consequences to doing it, Switching over to a total stock market index fund having a little bit more diversification. I fear that a lot of people in S&P 500 funds these days are just performance chasing. The last few years large caps have done better than small caps and so S&P 500 funds have had better returns than total stock market funds. But I would not expect that in the long term. But as far as trying to limit exposure to various companies because they grow tobacco or they are big pharma or they invest in crypto, I think you're better off not trying to dabble in all that kind of stuff. Just buy them all, recognize that you can affect the things you care about in this world with your charitable contributions and your work and not try to get out of everything like that. Another option if you might be simpler than trying to short all the companies that own crypto is just pick an ETF that invests in companies that are really exposed to crypto. I'm sure there's one out there and just short that. That would be an option as well. So hope that's helpful to you. I'm not sure I like what you're wanting to do, but if you want to do it, that's how you do it. All right, we've come close to the end of our podcast. This one was brought to you by Laurel Road for Doctors. They are committed to serving the unique financial needs of residents and attending physicians. We want to help make your money work harder and smarter. 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