Wise Stocks & Interest Assets – Beware of PFICs!

Many Americans in the UK use Wise (formerly known as TransferWise) to transfer money between GBP and USD and take advantage of their “Borderless” accounts to facilitate a multi-currency lifestyle. I used Wise myself when I first moved to the UK, and generally think it’s a great product – it was a vital lifeline for

News Alert: Chancellor to allow UK residents to purchase US ETFs!

For those UK residents who haven’t seen the news today, the Chancellor has announced a package of reforms. Reading into them, one is of particular interest to many UK Bogleheads (especially US citizens in the UK) – an intention to repeal the requirements for a KID/KIID, and quite explicitly to enable access to US ETFs.

IRA Contributions in UCITS ETFs through Interactive Brokers

One of my financial experiments for this year was was to use one of the lesser-known options for US citizens abroad to buy index funds – buying a non-US UCITS ETF inside a US IRA. Depending on exchange rates and my employer’s performance, I may also be within touching distance of the Roth IRA income

Bridging to Retirement – Splitting SIPP & ISA Contributions

Edit 06Dec21: I realized that this is all completely wrong! You can get the same effect, without paying National Insurance, by just putting part of the money to the pension, then taking the 62% hit on the take home cash for an ISA. For example, for £1,000 of pre-tax income, put £475 in your salary

A Phased Approach to Emergency Funds

In my recent post on my approach to bonds and cash, I mentioned that I don’t have any dedicated emergency fund at all. I know this flies in the face of conventional personal finance wisdom, but I think I’ve got a pretty sound justification. My personal approach is not quite so aggressive as somebody like

Buying Index Funds – 2 More Options

In the last few weeks, I’ve run across two more options for buying index funds, the key building blocks of my portfolio (and of anybody taking a passive, buy-and-hold, Bogleheads-ish approach). I haven’t implemented either of them yet, but wanted to share what I’ve found and I’d be very interested to hear if any of

RMDs vs Lifetime Allowance – Which Alligator Should You Focus On?

Fair warning: this post is for people who have reason to be concerned about both RMDs and the Lifetime Allowance. If you don’t have a Traditional 401k/IRA/etc. balance or you have no concerns about exceeding the LTA, you can skip on past – just focus on the one that affects you. Also – this one

Managing the Lifetime Allowance

We learned a little bit about the Lifetime Allowance in my post on UK Pension Withdrawal Options – mostly by pointing to the excellent Monevator post on the topic. Today, we’ll dig a little bit deeper, to see how we might avoid paying HRMC an extra 25% of our hard earned savings. I’m going to

UK Pension Withdrawal Options

Continuing with our interlude from the Withdrawal Strategies series – this is the second of three posts: Required Minimum Distributions from Traditional IRA, 401(k), etc. and how to manage them UK Pension withdrawal options Managing the Lifetime Allowance (I added this one because it was going to be too long to fit in the others!)

US & UK Tax on Traditional to Roth Conversions

I’m working on a series of posts about retirement withdrawal strategies and managing US and UK taxes in retirement, and I keep drafting a comment that “I’ll do a post on Roth conversions in the future” – I’m just going to do it now 🙂 There’s already a lot out there about a Roth Conversion