10 years ago, I graduated Uni with no debt and about $1,000 net worth.

My first job (engineer) paid $100k/yr. After taxes & expenses, I saved $70k per year for 3 years.

With $200k net worth, I lived on $5k per year and for the past 7 years, I worked only 30% of the time – just enough to cover my expenses without dipping into my savings.

This year I sold bitcoin (bought for $7,000. sold for $1,000,000). My target to retire-retire was $800,000, so I've finally reached my goal.

The sell orders executed so fast that I don't know where to put it. I already stuffed every US bank that I have to the $250k FDIC max, but my last sell order exceeds that. I've applied to open bank accounts with maybe 100 banks in the US, and I've only succeeded in opening 1. My requirements:

[1] No monthly fees
[2] No inactivity fees
[3] No phone or phone number required
[4] Online Banking with 2FA support (TOTP, Webauthn, or email)

99% of the banks that I've tried to open with auto-deny me. My credit is great. When I call and ask why, they say something about the information I gave them not matching their records. The ones that have an appeal process told me "the system" denied me, and there's nothing they can do – even supervisors.

My long-term plan is to buy a small condo in a city and a lot of land in the country. But it'll probably take me 6-24 months to find and finish those deals, and in the meantime I want to keep my money somewhere safe.

I'm also a bit worried about the USD tanking. I've looked into banks in Europe and Canada, but Canada requires a tax ID and I only speak English. Can anyone recommend a very stable bank abroad (with English language support) that a US American can open remotely that meets the above requirements?

Where would you put your money if you were in my situation?

With Thanksgiving in the US right around the corner, I found this article about gratitude from a FI perspective. This is from a few years ago, but the message is evergreen.

Link is to the Bogleheads forum post where someone posted a link back in August. Before now, you had to call in to request the change, and it could take a few days, but now it's online and allegedly is done the next day.

I don't know when they added this, but I think it was sometime this year because I remember considering it last EOY (that's when I usually rebalance).

Here is a direct link, or you can get there on the website: Transact > Buy & Sell > Convert Vanguard mutual funds to ETFs. You can select either a number of shares or a percent of the total position.

As to why you may want to do this, here are a few reasons:

• converting shares classes isn't a taxable event (but you can't go ETF -> mutual fund)
• ETFs have a slighly lower ER (0.01-0.02% in most cases, so not huge)
• easier if you want to ACATS transfer shares to a different brokerage
• if you have a mix of ETFs and mutual funds, rebalancing between ETFs is easier, so moving a portion of your mutual funds to ETFs may be worthwhile

Have you taken advantage of Vanguard's mutual fund -> ETF conversion? Do you think you'll use this new online tool?

Link is to an older podcast episode, and The Money Guy YouTube channel occasionally talks about FINE instead of FIRE.

Here's the definitions of each:

• FINE - Financial Independence Next Endeavor
• FIRE - Financial Independence Retire Early

Basically, FINE focuses on what you plan to do after achieving financial independence, whereas FIRE tends to focus on cessation of working. I always called it FI (leave off the retirement part), but I suppose FINE works.

Anyway, just wondering what everyone else is planning to do once they hit Financial Independence, whether that's retirement or starting something new. I'll leave mine in the comments.

This is a link to a spreadsheet to help determine which funds to place into taxable vs tax-advantaged space.

Here is a link to the Bogleheads wiki about tax-efficient fund placement:

If all else is equal, international funds have a small tax advantage over US funds, because they are eligible for the foreign tax credit.

TL;DR:

• put international funds in taxable and file for the foreign tax credit each year
• the total difference is like 0.1-0.2%, so optimizing fees may be more impactful than going through this exercise

This wasn't good enough for me, especially as I'm looking into applying a small-cap tilt to my portfolio and really like optimizing things, so I went digging for more information.

Foreign Tax Credit

When you own stocks or otherwise make money in another country, that other country may charge taxes, and the IRS will also charge taxes on any dividends you receive, regardless of source. This ends up in double taxation, because you're being taxed on your dividends by both the US and the foreign country.

To eliminate the double taxation, you can file form 1116 to recoup the foreign taxes by getting a credit (or deduction, but that's rarely better). This Bogleheads wiki doc has more information if you want it.

For many funds (e.g. VXUS), the FTC ends up being something like 0.25%, so if it's in a tax-advantaged account, you'd end up with a 0.25% tax drag on your investments due to foreign taxes you can't recoup.

Tax-efficiency

When deciding where to place funds, you generally want fewer dividends and capital gains in your taxable brokerage accounts and to put the higher dividend-yielding assets in your tax-advantaged accounts. And if you have to have capital gains, you want to make sure your taxable account has mostly qualified capital gains so they're taxed at the long-term capital gains rate instead of the (in most cases) higher income tax rate.

However, the foreign tax credit changes things, since you can only get it if your investments are in a taxable brokerage account. There are cases where you'd prefer a higher total dividend in your taxable account provided the tax credit more than makes up for the difference in total taxes.

Worked example w/ VTI and VXUS

For example, let's say you have equivalent amounts of VXUS and VTI. VXUS has 3.34% total dividend yield whereas VTI has 1.66% (both as-of 2021). So you'd want VXUS in tax advantaged and VTI in taxable, right? Wrong. The total taxes for both are:

• VXUS - 0.56%, of which 0.26% is recoverable foreign taxes, for a net of 0.30%
• VTI - 0.32%

Here are two scenarios (assuming you have no state income tax, are in the 22% bracket w/ 15% LTCG):

• VTI in taxable - VXUS pays 0.26% in foreign taxes, for a total tax bill of 0.26% (0.26% + 0.26) / 2
• VXUS in taxable - 0.30% net taxes (0.56% - 0.26%), for a total tax bill of 0.15% (0.30% / 2)

So in this case, holding VXUS in taxable saves about 0.11% in total taxes paid.

Added notes

I added some Avantis funds (known for value funds) on here that are interesting:

• AVUV - US small-cap value fund
• AVDV - developed markets small-cap value fund
• AVES - emerging markets value fund

So please, make a copy and mess around with your own figures. You can add some funds as well if you like, just fill in the bolded sections in the "funds" tab and it should work for you.

I'd appreciate a second pair of eyes as well if you feel so inclined.

Anyway, do you bother with adjust fund placement?

I generally don't like to make political posts, but this one has an interesting correlation to some of the culture around FI, which is things we can and can't control (i.e. this older post about circle of control, which echoes The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People).

So even if you're not in the US or just aren't interested anymore in the election (i.e. I already voted last week), there's still some interesting points about what the head of government can and can't do, as well as what the rest of government has and doesn't have control over.

Stocks are all over the place right now, and there's a lot of concern about what might happen after the results are announced. I hope this article can bring a little peace since a lot of what the market and news orgs are worried about aren't really things the President has direct control over, and the rest of government will have a delayed impact.

It's certainly an important decision and there will be significant impacts, but sometimes it helps to take a step back and look past the excitement in the news cycle.