Buy, Sell, or Hold

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Originally posted by: friedmush

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Originally posted by: pjstroh
I don't see much opportunity in the market right now. When Clorox is selling at 25x earnings you know things are getting a little over priced.

I've been putting all my new capital towards paying down my mortgage this year. I'm on pace to have it paid off by my 47th birthday.

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I did something similar, paying off house at 46, a few months prior to turning 47. Once I reached a point where standard deduction outweighed itemized deductions, I couldn't pay off house fast enough.

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Originally posted by: Roulette Man
Paying off your mortgage early is simply poor financial planning. Assuming you have good credit, you should have an outrageously low mortgage. You should be maxing out your 401k and then investing. You should only pay your regular mortgage payment. There are too many people who retire with their houses paid for, but have virtually no retirement savings.

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Originally posted by: billryan
I disagree.Get your house paid off and then you can finance retirement. Keeping debt just to have a tax deduction is for suckers. If you want a tax deduction, donate money to your favorite charity, not a blood sucking mortgage company.

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Originally posted by: billryan
Only the dumb ones.
Allow me to illustrate, using nice round numbers.
I earn 100,00 a year, and have a 5% mortgage for $200,000. I pay Citibank $10,000 a year in interest and get to deduct it from my taxes. I'm in the 25% bracket so I get to lower my taxes by $2500. In otherwords, to avoid paying Uncle Sam $2500,, I pay Citibank $10,000. Do I want to pay Uncle Sam another $2500 or Citibank another $10,000. Hmmmm.
Pay off your house, drive a paid in full car, and your retirement will never be in doubt. Imagine being thirty five or forty, owning a paid in full home, driving a car with no payments and having a job that pays you well. You'd need sunglasses. You'd win so much, that you'd occasionally want to lose just to see if you still can
I truly believe most financial advisors are sheep who follow the crowd and have their own interest above their clients. They push the flavor of the month and get paid whether I make money or not. Living in NY, I imagine I had a higher than normal amount of friends go into Wall St. and Financial Services. In my opinion, it's not a field that attracts the best and the brightest. Many of my friends that got hired by Morgan Stanley, Citi, and Merrill Lynch got their jobs because they were student athletes at various Metro schools like St Johns or Fordham, or out of town like Duke and came with deep rolodexs. It's a Boys Club.

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Originally posted by: billryan
So should I listen to someone who has some radio show once a week or Dave Ramsey, who has the number three syndicated show in
the country six days a week.
The example I offered is almost word for word from his offerings.
Compounding? The single most powerful force in the Universe? The largest factor in allowing me to retire and move to Vegas? Guess I never heard of it.
Let's face it. Financial Services are not a noble profession people enter because they want to help people. F..A.s are in it for the money. Just this week I had someone trying to sell me a single payment/ life insurance policy that was absolutely inappropriate for someone in my situation but it carried an upfront commission to him worth almost twenty grand. That guy should be selling timeshares. My instruction to him was find an instrument with a guaranteed return of 6 percent or more in the 75,000 range. Instead he presents me with garbage in the half million dollar range.
Maybe it's because Long Island seems to be ground zero for ponzi like schemes, or that stocks of my own choosing seem to do as well or better than managed funds,
In any event, I'm sure there are some outstanding advisors out there, but of those looking for clients in the million to two million class, the wolves seeming outnumber the shepherds.

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