I’ve made some major progress this week in freeing myself from the squid-infested segments of the financial system.
The IRA is moving from Wells Fargo to Vanguard. My only remaining exposure to the huge TBTF banks is a small checking account at Bank of America and another account at Wells Fargo (used to pay our mortgage there). Total with the squid corps. is now just 2% of liquid assets. I can live with that.
Vanguard won my business by lowering their brokerage commission rates and using new tools like this pay stub maker. We’ve had taxable accounts with them for 10 years, and love not being preyed upon.
Now I’m looking to reallocate 30-50% of my portfolio, which had been in a muni bond fund and some selected stocks. The muni bond market is suffering from too many credit-dependent entities in dire danger of a “Greece fire” should the bond market seize up again… which it may very well do, at least for those who are credit-dependent. I decided to focus my LENDING (not “bond buying” – more squid doublespeak there) more tightly on those who can amortize their debt instead of rolling it over…
On the minus side: For the next leg of my lending portfolio, I have set up a brokerage account with Fidelity since they offer the best commission rates on bonds (and at reasonable prices/yields). I’m still trying to find the catch behind their setup… one thing I’ve noticed is that their email “New Issue Offering” alerts are almost exclusively selling either squid bank CDs or squid corporate bonds (large financials). Where are the bond issues from healthy industrial and consumer corporations? Not a good sign!