I inherited what was to me a lot of money at the age of 16. The money was invested on my behalf in a mix of stocks and bonds in PlanMember Securities, a fee-based system wherein I was paired with a (shitty) advisor.Is there someone I can pay for a consultation that wouldn't have anything to do with my money? Figuring out fund-allocation stuff on my own seems pretty daunting, with a heightened possibility of making some kind of mistake. Juicy financial details inside.
Some initial facts:
+I'm 26 and my wife is 37.
+With the money I inherited ten years ago, I paid for half of my mom's home (valued at ~500K), paid for my BA at a fancy liberal arts college, and bought a new car, and paid for just about every trans-related surgery there is. Oh, and I made a few other stupid but minor spending decisions, the kind you make when you grew up poor, are 18, and have a million fucking dollars.
+I make 30-38K a year as a graduate student stipend at a R1. My wife makes ~40K a year as a self-employed voice over performer. That adds up to 70-80K a year. I'll finish my PhD program in 4 years, and I'll find a better-paying job in academia or industry:
+I'm studying acoustic phonetics and will finish with some background in NLP and statistical learning - I don't have a problem continue living in the Bay working as a junior developer somewhere. Even making a combined ~120K a year would allow us to invest a lot of money a year.
+We have a budget that we stick to, but:
+We currently outspend our income by ~1,000 a month. The reasons for this have to do with illness, supporting disabled parents, etc. Nothing we can change -- we aren't out shopping up a storm. We withdraw this 1K from our aforementioned investment account. So,
+We have ~300K in that account. I forget exactly what the average yield has been over the last 10 years, but be around 5%. So in an average year we withdraw a bit less than that.
Additionally, we have a few big expenses planned over the next four years:
1) Paying off my wife's student loans: 15,000
2) Paying for a dental implant, which our insurance doesn't cover: 4,000
3) Paying tuition for my wife to finish her BA: 20,000
I am guessing then, all things being equal, that by the time I graduate we'll have ~260-250K in the investment account. I'll have my PhD, and my wife will be working on getting her LMFT. So the question is, what to do with these funds? I figure the money will be either a sizable down-payment on a home wherever we end up, or it will be the seed money for our retirement funds.
I know very little about investing. I know we don't want to stay with our current financial advisor. He's an ass: he expresses judgment whenever we withdraw funds, and when I asked him as diplomatically as possible to cut it out, he stopped responding to my emails. We want to get out of the fee-based PlanMember entirely. I know there's Vanguard, Fidelity, etc., and I imagine we'd want to keep the funds in a joint non-retirement account for the time being (i.e. the next 4-10 years), until we decide whether to invest the money in an IRA or 401k.
Ideally I'd like to pay someone $X and have them tell us exactly where to put the money, in what mix of stocks and bonds, and in what index funds, etc. Does something like this exist? I have a hatred for commission-based advising at this point. Any suggestions on where to look would be welcome. We'd like to take care of our current shitty advisor situation ASAP, and moving the funds into something that isn't fee-based but with comparable risk/reward at the same time would be great. Thanks so much. |
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