The title says it all, and I have sinus issues because once again WV has gone from the 40’s to the 80’s. I’m so far behind on the news, I feel lethargic because I have been sitting in front of a monitor so much, and I have other things to bitch about but those will have to wait.
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bbleh
Well, here’s something REALLY important:
twitter.com/JacobRubashkin/status/1784632425508724938
Apparently there are THREE such ads.
I confess to being out of my depth here …
TaMara
Well, there are some cute kitty photos in the previous thread and I can always send you more if you need a mood boost. ❤️
TaMara
@bbleh: I think Maddow featured him on Monday (like John, I’m a little blurry about the day of the week right now) and I think we are all stumped. LOL
Bostondreams
The news is just depressing at this point. Hope you feel better.
WaterGirl
… is now a new rotating tag. Thanks, John!
bbleh
@TaMara: A cry for help? Branching out from overseeing coal-mine disasters into Dadaist performance art? SO many possibilities …
Baud
@bbleh:
West Virginia is still obsessed with BLM? How long ago was that now? Sounds like they’re still economically anxious.
bbleh
@Baud: target of convenience, distracts from the Black Lung Matters movement, which for some reason doesn’t get any funding and keeps having leaders resign unexpectedly.
Scout211
Is this the complaint thread because I have a whine right now. Or maybe a bitch.
My husband is a retired professor and a few weeks ago his former university announced they are moving all of their current and former employees’ 403b accounts from TIAA (where they have been for many decades) to another financial management company. Ack! We have to do all kinds of financial things and rollovers and conversions and transitions and he cannot understand or do any of it. So it’s all on me and I am over my head. 😬 Wish me luck. I’m going to need it.
VFX Lurker
Feel better soon, John. ❤️
@Scout211:
Ouch. If I may, I would like to recommend the Bogleheads finance and investing forum. They may be able to help.
Wishing you minimum hassles. ❤️
Ohio Mom
Blankenship’s monotone and flat affect are really weird. Is he always like that?
lowtechcyclist
@Baud:
Didn’t know there were a lot of BLM lands in WV.
;-)
Ohio Mom
@Scout211: Have you thought about calling TIAA and asking their advice? I thought they were the gold standard of retirement accounts, maybe there is a way you could keep at least some money with them.
I feel for you. I don’t like doing that sort of stuff either.
Brachiator
I feel you on the sinus issues. I’ve got the runny nose blues.
lowtechcyclist
@Scout211:
I’m confused – unless the university is still contributing money to his account, what gives them any say in the matter? What happens if he just doesn’t fill out the paperwork – wouldn’t the money just stay with TIAA and keep on working for him there?
My main thought is that if they had the power to switch him from TIAA to this new outfit, they’d just do it without any need for his signature.
But obviously, don’t take my word, talk to someone you can trust who knows this money shit better than people like us do.
Spanky
@Scout211: Call the other financial company and ask them to help you do a rollover. This should be a piece of cake for them, and they should be more than happy to do so for a new customer.
Eyeroller
@Scout211: Why on earth would they do that? It makes no sense. I have quite a bit in TIAA/CREF (mine plus my late husband’s that was rolled into my smaller account) so would be very disturbed if this happened to me.
MattF
@Scout211: In the contributions to my retirement, my employer switched from TIAA to Vanguard, so new money went to Vanguard— but all the old money stayed in accounts at TIAA. So now, I’m retired and have accounts at both Vanguard and TIAA. It’s a complication, but there was no need for rollovers.
Chet Murthy
@Scout211: Unless that other company is, like, Vanguard (or maybe Fidelity), I’d be suspicious. There are all sorts of shenanigans played with retirement funds, and I’d be worried I was about to get screwed. As others have said, TIAA/CREF is pretty much the gold standard. Why would I want to move off the gold standard? Gosh, lemme think about that for a sec …..
Seriously, unless you have *good* reason to think that this new finance company is the bee’s knees, I’d be callin’ up TIAA to see if I could stay with ’em, or moving my money to Vanguard.
[N.B. I have accounts at Vanguard (personal) and Fidelity (work 401k). Of the two, I would prefer Vanguard, simply b/c I agree with John Bogle’s investing philosophy, and to some extent Vanguard still preach it. Fidelity is “ok”, but I have my doubts, esp. since they’re publicly on-record as saying that “fiduciary duty gets in the way of doing the best for our client”. Which ….. haha, not so much, Fido.]
Scout211
@Ohio Mom: @lowtechcyclist:
Some of his funds will have to stay with TIAA but others will transition. There are changes happening with TIAA right now and we aren’t unhappy that most of the funds are moving to another company. I don’t know if they are merging with another company or what but most of their proprietary funds are being renamed.
First I have a zoom with an advisor from the company that the university hired originally to evaluate the retirement plans and they are helping those of us who need help with the process. Then we call TIAA to convert/rollover some funds so they can move to the new company.
I will get it done but I will bitch about it. It’s just another thing that I never expected to have to manage.
Scout211
It’s Fidelity.
And it hasn’t been TIAA-CREF for years, it’s just TIAA now. Yes, it used to be the gold standard.
Brachiator
@Scout211:
I don’t have hard advice for you, unfortunately. Often, the changes are administrative and you don’t have to do much of anything.
Hopefully, there is someone you can talk to at the university or the current plan administrators to explain and to help you with the options.
Geminid
@bbleh: Baby Dog:
“Tell Don I wanted him to know it was me.”
Chet Murthy
@Scout211: I have my work 401k at Fido, and they seem to be fine. I subscribe to Bogle’s theory of investing: actively managed funds are a waste of money, just invest in low-overhead passive indexes. So I’d make sure that that’s what I was getting. Otherwise, Fido seems fine: I use them for my checking account also, and that seems fine.
But I’d be very careful to make sure that my savings were invested properly, just in case.
cain
@Scout211: use chatgpt to help you ! Sometimes just being able to ask questions and get answers for follow up makes it a lot easier to handle.
Anne Laurie
@TaMara: I saw the Maddow video*, and IMO Blankenship is doing a dramatic “If they say I committed suicide, you’ll know I was MURDERED!” performance. He’s feeling very sorry for himself, and frankly he looks like a guy with one foot in the grave & the other on a banana peel, so this tagline at least gives him a preemptive glow of self-satisfaction just in case he doesn’t live till the election.
*(Maddow Blog tweet feed is an invaluable resource for those of us who don’t have time / patience for the uncut original show.)
🐾BillinGlendaleCA
@Brachiator: I’ve had a sinus problem for the past 3 days, it had been gradually getting better, but I need some drugs.
eclare
@Scout211:
Good luck! It might be worth it to pay a few hundred and get some professional advice. Some financial mistakes cannot be undone, this happened to someone I know. He still works in his mid-seventies, luckily he is healthy.
Anne Laurie
Cole, I don’t know if your allergist will let you go back to your neti pot, but I get *some* much-needed sinus relief from a $8 bottle of saline nasal spray. Especially when I come inside from the outdoors, and just before going to bed.
eclare
@Geminid:
Hahaha…
Colbert went over those weirdly specific ads a few days ago.
Anne Laurie
@Geminid: Great minds think alike! (and ours, too also.)
Josie
@Anne Laurie:
The saline spray is indeed helpful. A friend put me onto it when I was having sinus trouble about a month ago, and it really got results.
eclare
Cole, you can tell me to fuck off and that’s fine, but you have a lot of sinus issues. Have you seen an ENT Dr?
Kayla Rudbek
Cole, come sit by me and we can both complain about our brains being fried. (More details over at Dreamwidth). I’ve been doing training for work for most of the last month and I have had it with watching video lectures. At least the capstone session for the training course will be local to me and in person, and fairly soon I will getting a limited access badge so I can actually go onsite and work.
I really need to join an in-person knitting group or two, so that I can have some human interaction with someone else besides Mr. Rudbek and my sibling and godson.
Sister Golden Bear
@Brachiator: All week my sinuses have felt like there’s gonna be an xenomorph exploding out of them, a la the chest burster scene in Alien.
Brachiator
@🐾BillinGlendaleCA:
I think some neighborhood tree or flowers may be part of my sinus problems. I was fine during my recent vacation.
🐾BillinGlendaleCA
@Kayla Rudbek: And I thought our 98 minute annual corporate compliance video was bad. In the middle they tell us to “protect our signature” from those devious union folk. Remember unions are very bad!
🐾BillinGlendaleCA
@Brachiator: I had a cold last week and it seems to have gone to my sinuses.
Scout211
Thanks for all the advice and letting me bitch, jackals. 😉
Jill
@lowtechcyclist:
@lowtechcyclist: I recently had to transfer a T Rowe Price account over to my main retirement money manager and I had to sign, call my main manager—pain in the neck. There was no choice in it. T Rowe Price just told me it was going to happen. I’ve been retired for 9 years. Good luck
Brachiator
Scientists recently recreated the face of a 75,000 year old Neanderthal woman, found in a cave in Iraqi Kurdistan.
Looks like she had great sinuses.
Omnes Omnibus
@Brachiator: In contemporary clothing, hair style, and make up, she could walk down a modern street without comment.
KrackenJack
@Scout211: I’m all in on Vanguard. I’ve had accounts with them for 40 years. Gradually all of investments ended up there.
If you have to transfer funds, you might as well make a conscious choice. I’ve had several 401k’s in Fidelity. As soon as I changed employers, I swept them into Vanguard. They make the rollover process easy.
kiplinger.com/article/investing/t030-c009-s001-index-fund-war-fidelity-vs-vanguard.html
Fidelity has become cost-competitive with Vanguard because they had to. I’ll stick with the people who do the right thing voluntarily.
BTW: I wouldn’t use ChatGPT for any question I can’t evaluate myself. Basic finance articles written by LLMs have been notoriously wrong.
Scuffletuffle
Right there with you, boss…this allergy season is a stone cold bitch. One day I am fine, the next I can’t stay awake, and I just can’t any more with the post-nasal drip….
Brachiator
@Omnes Omnibus:
Yep. And I remember when Neanderthals were depicted as being stupid and physically brutish. And it is nice to see reconstructions of female Neanderthals. It helps give a more complete view of our hominid cousins.
Sure Lurkalot
I’m blessed not to have outdoor allergy issues beyond some ragweed sensitivity in the fall. I really don’t like antihistamines, they make me loopy and on edge.
Another bad thing about allergies…my DH thought his runny nose and sneezing was his seasonal reaction to the ubiquitous and multi varied juniper when it was Covid. So I didn’t stand a prayer to not catch it from him.
Scout211
@KrackenJack:
I will ask the advisor tomorrow about that but it sounded like we don’t have a choice, the funds in the retirement account move to Fidelity (after several are rolled over into other funds) and the funds in the annuity account have to stay with TIAA. So his 403b will be in two companies, which isn’t ideal for the RMD calculations but will have to do.
We have our trust account funds in Vanguard plus two IRAs there and I have been managing those accounts. Vanguard makes it so easy.
Hopefully I will get more information on what I need to do tomorrow and then when we call TIAA. I have until the end of May.
JoyceH
I like the NeilMed Sinus Rinse. It’s like a neti pot, in that the cup of fluid goes in one nostril and out the other, but it’s SO much faster! One quick swoosh on one side and one quick swoosh on the other side, and boom, you’re done.
As for allergies, a number of years ago, my primary care gave me a little basic battery of allergy tests, said I was allergic to various pollens and molds and with a “mild” cat allergy. (Of course I have two cats.) Just a few years ago, my sinuses were bothering me enough that I did go to an ENT and they gave me the full battery of tests – I had those little scratches up and down both arms AND on my back. And their conclusion was — I have no allergies. None. They did the images (MRI?) of my head, and basically said it was ‘chronic sinusitis’. Your sinuses bother you… just because. I’m supposed to do my sinus rinse with the medicated dose once a day but of course I’m bad about it.
And pollen season does still bother me. I think breathing in a fine yellow powder is going to bother a person, whether they’re allergic to it or not.
Kayla Rudbek
@🐾BillinGlendaleCA: I had twelve different classes about an hour each as required by the agency I’m contracted to, then a course from a state university which has generally been about an hour a day for the last seven weeks (this is the one with the in-person two-day capstone session later this month) then I have been doing continuing legal education classes (and summaries of these classes to pass along to the agency) and classes on artificial intelligence. When I write it all down, no wonder that my brain feels full and that I want to listen to music or play cat videos from Facebook when I’m done with work.
Gretchen
@Scout211: Do you have to move because the university is moving if they’re not contributing to the account any more? We have TIAA and have been dealing with them directly since my husband retired. The University may be involved somehow but I don’t think so.
Eyeroller
@Scout211: They dropped the CREF in 2016 though they still have the distinction between annuities and funds. I didn’t see anything about a “merger”–they bought a bank a while back and quickly divested it (seems like it was a dumb idea from the start). I am still surprised a university could force current retirees to divest–I know that they can drop funds for pre-retirement savings (my university dropped Fidelity and has greatly restricted the number of Vanguard funds that are permitted). I would assume that means they are also dropping TIAA for current employees.
Scout211
@Eyeroller: They are renaming many of their funds Nuveen, a company they acquired in 2015.
Quiltingfool
@Kayla Rudbek: I’m in a quilt guild, and I get the desire to be with a group of people who enjoy the same craft! The best part of the guild is sharing your work with everyone – and getting great ideas for a new project. In my town there’s a store called Flocks; they sell yarn, etc., and they have set aside space for yarn magicians to do their magic!
My hubby urged me to join the guild because he thought I needed to socialize with people (I guess the cat doesn’t count) but maybe he really didn’t want to hear about quilts. Heh.
NotMax
@eclare
A tree surgeon?
:)
dnfree
@Chet Murthy: my husband’s IRAs are at Fidelity and mine at Vanguard, converted from a 503b and 401krespectively. Three different years Fidelity has screwed up our tax returns one way or another. Vanguard has never screwed up our taxes. Just my anecdata.
Scout211
I don’t know but it sounded like (from the group zoom I attended) that we don’t have a choice. But I will ask him tomorrow at my zoom meeting.
🐾BillinGlendaleCA
@NotMax: For the willow?
ColoradoGuy
Fair warning: If you choose sinus surgery (which is a big deal), make sure to find the best surgeon in the state. This complicated procedure is often done wrong with poor results, requiring a revision a few years later. I tracked down one of the best surgeons in Washington State, and the results so far (20 years later) have been very good, with no complications, and no recurrence of the sinus infections. Choose your surgical team with care, and be willing to travel.
eclare
@ColoradoGuy:
Seconded. A bf’s mother had that surgery and developed toxic shock syndrome from the packing in her nose. She was admitted to the hospital with something like a 104 fever. This was about thirty years ago, hopefully things have improved.
WaterGirl
@Scout211: I see that all sorts of people weighed in before me, so I’ll just say:
Good luck!
eclare
@NotMax:
I am missing something…
Sister Golden Bear
@eclare: Lord of the Rings reference.
Scout211
@WaterGirl: Thanks.
I have a zoom meeting with someone tomorrow with the advisory group that the university hired to review their retirement plans and is now guiding them through the transition. He will help me understand the process and then when I know what I need to do, I will contact TIAA to help me do what I need to do with the funds so they can be moved.
It’s a little overwhelming but I’ll get it done
eclare
@Sister Golden Bear:
Ah…I would not get that. Thanks!
Quinerly
I should have been in NOLA Jazz Fest for Mick and the Boys. Looking at pics from friends who were there. I had a 20 year run at that fest. Sad tonight. Should have made an effort to go.
Love that Irma Thomas was up on stage with Mick doing “Time Is On My Side.’ She did it first. Keith has admitted that they stole it from here.
Mick still hot.
That is all.
sab
@TaMara: My dad’s funeral is Saturday, and I get to meet my RWNJ brother again. He will be so sad that Dad died, but where the fuck has he been since Mom died twelve years ago, leaving Dad alone and widowed and sad.
Ryan
The South sucks. Two years without snow, and now we get the gallram 80s in late April!
Princess
@Scout211: You may not see this but my husband and I are recently retired professors who had money in TIAA. It is my belief and understanding that once you are retired you can move your money from where your uni had it, or, conversely, keep it somewhere even if your former uni is moving their plans elsewhere. I do not believe you are required to follow your uni to Fidelity just because the uni is moving their employees there. If they tell you that you do, I would be very suspicious. That being said, if you choose to stay at TIAA, you may need to change/ rollover your accounts into something else. There would normally be zero tax consequences for this. In our case we chose to move our accounts away from TIAA on retirement, though the uni’s plans remain there. I am not an accountant and this advice is worth what you are paying for it but I would talk to both your uni people AND separately to TIAA before you make a decision, to learn what is genuinely required in your case and what is optional.
Chris T.
@Scout211: The two best big finance companies I know of, Vanguard and Fidelity, know how to do this for you.
(I prefer Vanguard for legacy reasons but my experience with both was good. I note that Vanguard is slowly getting a little more marketing-ish though, now that Bogle is long gone.)
Scout211
@Princess: @Chris T.:
Thank you to both of you for adding your advice.
And thanks to all who have responded to my post. It has definitely helped me to understand the questions that I need to ask the advisor this morning.