bookie71

ditto

"Patience, Grasshopper." (Kung Fu) -I watched one company for over twenty years before it became cheap enough to buy. Each year I would take annual report and write down the key ratios on an old fashioned spread sheet, then it suddenly was selling for about 1/2 book. It is about 1/3 of my portfolio. Later I found out the company was aggressively buying back its stock.

You might want to check out Alaska USA Federal Credit Union, it has offices in Seattle as well.

Don't forget the Chou funds, they have done rather nicely.

Are we the only ones who have bought discounted deeds of trust? These are from seller financed real estate and over the last 30 years we have averaged about 12-15 % annual return. These are in our company profit sharing and thus tax free.

from Fortune http://management.fortune.cnn.com/2012/11/16/jeff-bezos-amazon/

There is a nice article about him in a recent Fortune.

discounted deeds of trust?

I have been listening to the audio book in the pickup and I highly recommend it.

It doesn't matter what others think, this is a VERY personal decision. You should go with what makes you more comfortable and fits your personality. As I have aged I lean to pay it off and not having to worry about debts or payments, BUT again it doesn't matter what i think, it is what you think and what lets you sleep well at night. Rationale is not as important as peace of mind. jmho

Don't forget that with compounding, the early mistakes really add up.

You might check with the local SBA as years ago they had some fairly good pamphlets.

Letting a stockbroker talk me out of buying 10 shares of Berkshire at 60 with my first HR-10 (Keough) contribution. I have learned to do my own thing.

We are talking about totally different things.

Let's see you deducted $20K, but if you had a major repair or losses of $ several hundred thousand K then you could only deduct about 25K. If you were playing by old rules and Congress changed the rules retroactive then you were screwed.

In many places you can buy "discounted deeds of trust" and use your own local knowledge of real estate values. This is an alternative.

You are probably correct in that there will be no taxes on the Roth in the future, but talk to some folks who invested in real estate and then found in the 80's that congress changed the rules and they couldn't deduct their losses. Also if they put in a VAT then you could be indirectly taxed.

But don't forget that the taxes you would have paid will be compounding and growing. To compare you need to take after tax (1000-250 (tax)) 750 and compare with 1000 compounded. Then you don't normally draw down all at once, so you can somewhat control the tax. The biggest thing is something you have no control over, Congress and the President. It is an extremely complex issue and sometimes there is no easy answer.

I have used Yahoo, put in the symbol, go to the stock summary page and click on "historic prices"

You never own real estate, you only rent it from the taxing authority.

Mine are at Schwab, prices are reasonable (not lowest) but they have always handled any problems with good speed

AND most student debt survives bankruptcy.

The problem is I never bought MIG, I only asked if anyone had thoughts on it, and referred to a quarterly earnings report. On CRVP I got out a long time ago before it dived so much.

Thanks

Thanks