Three Key Investment Ingredients for Portfolios

This video highlights what I believe are the three primary investment ingredients used for building portfolios (assets + strategies + products). Understanding this high-level categorization and how these ingredients differ can make you a better consumer of financial products and services.

Exchange-traded Fund: Tax Efficiency

Some people attribute their tax efficiency to the low-turnover nature of the indices underlying many ETFs. Low turnover is a factor but there is another critical driver of ETF tax efficiency: their in-kind creation and redemption process. If you like this topic, you may also want to read this article.

 

Financial planning: Asset location

Here I discuss financial planning strategies involving asset location (not to be confused with asset allocation). This involves both income and investment-related taxes but is important enough to warrant its own video. I also wrote an article on this topic.

Financial planning: Investment-related taxes

Here I discuss financial planning strategies for reducing the amount of investment-related taxes one may pay. Investment-related taxes are those which apply to dividends, bond interest, rental income, etc. in taxable accounts. I also wrote an article on this topic with more details.

 

Financial planning: Income Tax

Here I discuss financial planning strategies for reducing the amount of income tax one may pay on money they earn (spoiler: optimize the use of your retirement accounts!). I also wrote an article on this topic with more details.

 
 

Retirement income

Can you imagine a plan for retirement income you could understand and implement with ease? With total costs of just 0.10% per year? A 30% reduction in investment-related taxes? I first highlight two primary approaches used to generate retirement income and then describe how my hybrid approach can achieve these benefits