For some time now, I've been following the occasional posts on pfblog.com. Though the number of posts have fallen off lately, I feel like I've gotten to know the author's goals and strategies, and I can see how his documentation has kept him on track.
In 2005, my father passed away and I had the priviledge of sorting through his financial documents. I don't know what I expected to find, but if there were any surprises they were mostly that he didn't leave much money behind. A small monthly pension that would continue paying out for the rest of my mother's life, a very small Roth IRA, a few dubious penny-stock certificates, fairly high credit card bills (all accumulating interest every month), and a whole bunch of unused check books.
My mother and I discussed having a financial advisor take over, but honestly there wasn't much to advise on at the time except for her 401k. However, she was her own boss on that front, and facing her own imminent retirement, she was going all in. In the two and a half years between Dad's passing and her last day at work, her retirement account went from (as I recall) $277k to $470k.
Her risky investment strategy had worked. Now it was time to think about how to maintain that money for the long term. I set up a rollover IRA and went about determining how best to allocate her three investment accounts: her brokerage, which had some stock she'd inherited and continued owning over the years in a DRIP progam; her Roth IRA, which was combined with Dad's but was still had a very modest balance; and her Rollover IRA. In all, the three accounts had just over $600,000 in them. Now the question was, how do we make it last?
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