Consolidating our portfolio

[disneysteve]

A couple of years ago, I made some moves to consolidate our portfolio. Not long after that I got the inheritance from my cousin and that made our portfolio more spread out than ever. Now I'm starting to prune it down again.

I just sold one stock in our taxable brokerage account. The capital gain is only about $1,200 so not a big tax hit from that. The problem with a lot of our other taxable holdings is the large unrealized gains so I'll have to work on selling those slowly over time. We also have a lot of tax-sheltered holdings (IRA and Roth) where I can focus my efforts to cut down the number of funds we hold. I'd like to gradually simplify the portfolio for ease of record keeping and especially to make things simpler for my wife if anything happens to me.

[kork13]

I'm not really certain, but how feasible is it to combine multiple IRAs (of the same type) into a single account? Could you take 5 different trad. IRAs, do probably a metric ton of paperwork, and move them all into your own primary trad. IRA? I've had that rollover IRAs (like from a 401k) generally end up in their own separate account vs. consolidated to a single account, even if it all lives at the same brokerage company.

[disneysteve]

I'm not really certain, but how feasible is it to combine multiple IRAs (of the same type) into a single account? Could you take 5 different trad. IRAs, do probably a metric ton of paperwork, and move them all into your own primary trad. IRA? I've had that rollover IRAs (like from a 401k) generally end up in their own separate account vs. consolidated to a single account, even if it all lives at the same brokerage company.

I believe you can combine accounts of similar type like if you have two traditional IRAs, but not if they’re different types. For example I can’t combine my traditional IRA and my SEP-IRA.

[disneysteve]

I made a second consolidation move tonight. In my inherited IRA, I held two different bond funds. One of them has a much better performance record than the other so I closed the position in the under-performing fund and moved the money into the other one. That gets one more line off of my spreadsheet (and likely a better return on about 26K worth of funds).

[LivingAlmostLarge]

Lots of paperwork for moving and consolidating accounts. Because of it DH has a main 401k and his new 401k. Mostly because we didn't expect to have one at the startup. But otherwise we've always rolled 401k to 401k so we can do the backdoor Roth IRA. We only have our Roth IRA and traditional IRA in Charles Schwab (what was TD ameritrade).

[kork13]

Slightly off-topic, but this thread reminded me of it.

I had a conversation with my father this weekend & he mentioned (again) that he's consolidated his TSP (federal 401k) as well ... 100% of his $1M+ account into the "G-Fund", which holds a type of special-issue Treasury bonds (averages ~4% returns).

We've talked about this before, and I tried to convince him otherwise at the time he did it, but I can see where he's coming from (largely unneeded due to his pension, and he wants to minimize growth to minimize future RMDs).

[disneysteve]

This isn’t consolidation but in the course of all of this I realized how much we have in the VBTLX total bond market index and how poorly that fund has done for years now. I realize that once rates stabilize and start to drop the fund will perform better but I decided to trim our holdings a bit. I sold 45K worth today and tomorrow or Monday when the funds are settled I’m buying a 4-year CD which should be around 4.75%. The fund has had a negative return for the past 5 years so locking in 4.75% for the next 4 years will be a big improvement.

[srblanco7]

We definitely have some consolidating to do. Have about $300k in a few funds that will be our first sales once we fully retire. Haven't sold them to date because I didn't want to pay tax on the cap gains at roughly 50% of the current value. This will also help to decrease our stock exposure which is currently at about 75%.

[LivingAlmostLarge]

I believe you can combine accounts of similar type like if you have two traditional IRAs, but not if they’re different types. For example I can’t combine my traditional IRA and my SEP-IRA.

https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-tege/rollover_chart.pdf

I think you can consolidate steve

[disneysteve]

https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-tege/rollover_chart.pdf

I think you can consolidate steve

That's really interesting. I will definitely look into that. One complicating factor is whether or not contributions to each account were deductible. You don't want to combine deductible and non-deductible accounts.

[disneysteve]

I just sold one of our individual stock holdings. It came to a little under 17K. One more line item off our spreadsheet.

[Atretes1]

I have 1 ROTH IRA, 1 457b, 1 HSA savings account and a taxable brokerage. I'm as simplified as I can be. My taxable account is all VTI and my retirement accounts have no more than 3 funds each.

[LivingAlmostLarge]

Excellent simplicity

[disneysteve]

Time to dump more stock, not so much to consolidate but to adjust the asset allocation.

As of market close on Friday, our portfolio topped $3.8 million for the first time. Our year to date gain topped $500,000 which is just crazy to me. The market run up has taken our stock allocation up to about 61.5%. My target has been 60% but every time I've sold off some stocks to rebalance, the market has just kept climbing. I think I've sold well over $100,000 worth this year but our allocation has barely changed because of the market performance. I'd like to inch it down to more like 55% which means selling about $250,000 worth of stock holdings. I may not go that big now but I'd like to knock it down at least 2-3%.

[james.hendrickson]

Time to dump more stock, not so much to consolidate but to adjust the asset allocation.

As of market close on Friday, our portfolio topped $3.8 million for the first time. Our year to date gain topped $500,000 which is just crazy to me. The market run up has taken our stock allocation up to about 61.5%. My target has been 60% but every time I've sold off some stocks to rebalance, the market has just kept climbing. I think I've sold well over $100,000 worth this year but our allocation has barely changed because of the market performance. I'd like to inch it down to more like 55% which means selling about $250,000 worth of stock holdings. I may not go that big now but I'd like to knock it down at least 2-3%.

Fantastic and inspirational work DisneySteve!!!!!!