Report from the South Florida Bogleheads Local Chapter meeting (January 22, 2017)

Posted on January 24, 2017 by Administrator

The following entry is a guest article from Bogleheads® forum member LazyNihilist. Local Chapter meetings are listed on Upcoming events, and are discussed in Local Chapters and Bogleheads Community.

Aon Building , site for meeting

We had our South Florida Bogleheads Chapter meeting yesterday from noon to 2pm at the Aon Building (also called the Brickell Bay Office Tower). Below are some brief highlights from the meeting.

Group photo

Thanks to our chapter leader, “clevername”, for donating his time and beautiful office for our meeting. The meeting was held at Brickell Bay Drive and the view from the office, overlooking Fisher Island and Key Biscayne, was stunning. Miriam did a wonderful job for the preparations for the meeting. Arthur made sure Bogleheads could find the office and Taffy received us as we entered the office and gave us our name tags.

It was another wonderful meetup of Bogleheads. There were also a fair number of new Bogleheads who were at the chapter meeting for the first time.

We started with the main topic of discussion, and proceeded apace.

Taxes and tax efficient placement of funds

Clevername went over various changes from previous years to tax filing dates and filing requirements for individuals. While we discussed the current tax filing requirements, there was some discussion if it would be better to change asset allocation because of changes to tax policy from a new administration. Taylor Larimore wisely pointed out that the best policy would be to ‘Stay The Course’.

Miriam brought copies of notes for tax efficient placement of funds and distributed it among the attendees.

Bogleheads wiki

We discussed how the Bogleheads Wiki is one of the most up-to-date and detailed financial resources. Thanks to the administrators and many other Bogleheads for maintaining this wonderful resource.

Bogleheads history

We talked about the history of how Bogleheads was set up. We were fortunate to have with us Larry Auton, a founder of bogleheads.org. He told us how he and co-founder Alex Frakt were independently trying to make the Morningstar forums easier to read and then decided to join forces and set up Bogleheads. It was also decided that Bogleheads would be moderated to stop the trolling that usually goes on in internet forums. Thanks to our tireless moderators on Bogleheads, I feel we are one of the best forums, financial and non-financial, on the internet.

Bogleheads is currently receiving 2-4 million hits a day and sometimes there can be ‘micro-outages’. Larry is planning on moving the server from its current location to a colocation center for even better uptime.

Using Amazon affiliates for donations to bogleheads.org.

There was also a discussion on how using the Amazon affiliate link from the bogleheads.org home page sends a small percentage of the Amazon donation to help defray the costs of running this popular and well-loved website. The consensus was it would be easy if the Amazon link from bogleheads.org page was bookmarked by users on their desktop or smartphones- that way they need not go to the bogleheads.org page before visiting Amazon.