(My wife and I will soon be enjoying our timeshare on a three week snow birding vacation in the Texas cities of San Antonio, Austin, and Galveston. If you live in or near any of these cities (Houston?) and would like to join us for a meet up, contact me, we’d love to meet you.)
Every week I find a few great articles I feel are especially valuable. Following are this week’s best. I hope you find them as useful as I did.
This week’s favorites include 21 small actions that will make you richer, a reason you should not do any Roth conversions, why envy is the cancer of the soul, the sweet spot for Roth IRA conversions, and a feel good story about a doctor who saved a family from drowning.
Happy reading!
It is our habits that will make our lives richer in so many ways. Do you have good habits or bad habits? Do they move you forward every day? Darius Foroux shares with us 21 Small Actions That Will Make You Richer. It’s the little things that make the difference. Keep doing them and you keep growing towards your goals. Incorporate a few of these now and keep adding one every few weeks and you will be amazed at the results.
I don’t have any Roth products in my portfolio since they didn’t exist when I started investing and when they did exist I didn’t qualify to use them. Even without using a Roth account, I was able to retire in my early 50s. Because of my large traditional IRA balance, I shouldn’t do the backdoor Roth IRA. I have never done any Roth conversions because I prefer to pay those taxes as late as possible. It was nice to read how the White Coat Investor has finally realized that making Roth conversions is not always the right choice, or the only acceptable choice as it is often portrayed by many advisors. The article is Why Wealthy Charitable People Should Not Do Roth Conversions. Roth is only one tool in our quiver. Don’t kick yourself because you are not using Roth accounts, especially if you are older, nearing retirement, or already retired.
Nothing devalues the car I drive more than seeing a brand new car in my neighbor’s driveway. My car was perfectly fine until I saw my neighbor’s new car and got envious and suddenly needed to keep up. Envy can lead us to do bad things in life. More to That shares with us a discussion of envy in Envy is the Cancer of the Soul. Have your ever stopped yourself because you noticed you were feeling envy and shouldn’t have been feeling that way? When you see your best friend succeed are you happy for them or envious of their success? Read this article to keep envy in check.
For those of you convinced you want to do Roth IRA conversions, and don’t fall into the situation discussed above, is there a sweet spot for the conversion rate? Stop Ironing Shirts thinks there is and shares it with us in The Sweet Spot for Roth IRA Conversions. Have you ever calculated a sweet spot for your Roth conversions at your tax rate? What did you find?
I thought it would be nice to include a feel good story in my favorites. We are often reading about some bad doctor who did some awful thing. Not enough stories are published when doctors do great things. So here you go. Medscape published the story of a doctor who could not stand by and see a family drown. He jumped into action and Saved a Drowning Family in a Dangerous River. I would like to think I would do the same if I was faced with the situation described. I hope you would also.
I hope you enjoy these articles as much as I did. I look forward to updating you again next week with a few more articles I find especially interesting. If you read an especially good article, send me the link so I can share it with others.
