Thank you!

L1: Thank you!Thank you so much for this website. I terminated from our family business and became an hourly contractor and I did this knowing I could start 72t payments. I wanted to make a donation to the person who runs this website (forgive me, he emailed me and I did not retain the emails or his name) and he told me to make a donation to my favorite charity instead. So I did and because of the SEPP’s I will be able to make more donations for the next 10.5 years until I turn 59.5.I have one IRA. I put most of the money into a 5 year IRA CD bearing 4.82 percent interest which is paid quarterly. I kept about $10,000 in the IRA share account to make my first 3 months payments and to make up the difference between my higher SEPP’s and the lower interest amount I receive. So in 5 years when the CD matures I will have almost zero in the IRA share account and I will start over and recalculate the new amount needed in the IRA sharedepending on what CD rate I can get. My CD is $369,000 so I will have received almost $100,000 over the 5 years and my initial balance will have only gone down $10,000.00. So the interest makes almost my entire payments.I was very fortunate to make25% in my 401k in 2008. I admit it, I’m a gambler at heart and on two separate days in late 2008 I guessed the market might rally and I happened to hit the 1st and 3rd highest gaining days ever for the market. I was in for one other day that lost a small percent and netted over 21% for the three days. That combined with my 4% money market return made me 25%. I never lost anything in stocks as I had my money in the money market account for over six years. While I never reached the highs some people did I didn’t lose 50 to 60% as most people did. I made 45% if you take my past six years at 4% per year and the 21% I made in my three guessing days of 2008. Very lucky indeed.I am amazed at how many people do not know you don’t have to invest your 401k money in stocks and can put the money intoa money market like I did. I would say 95% of the people I talk to have no idea this is an option. Very sad.Thanks again for the website and all the useful information which helped me setup my SEPP plan. The money will be put to good use now. It was killing me not being able to get to it. I have other money for retirement as well so I want to spend this interestnow! The one risk I did take was to put all $380,000 in one IRA. So $130,000 is not insured. All my other money is insured and at multiple institutions so I could keep it all insured.Twag2009-02-13 07:51, By: Twag, IP: [98.202.17.164]
L2: Thank you!Regarding your last statement:”The one risk I did take was to put all $380,000 in one IRA. So $130,000 is not insured. All my other money is insured and at multiple institutions so I could keep it all insured.”It sounds like you have invested in CDs; correct?If so, each CD is insured up to 250K as long as they are issued by different banks. For example,if you hadone 100K CD form bank A, andanother 100K CD from bank B, and still a third 180K CD from bank C, the total 380K would be FDIC insured. It is not the IRA that is insured up to 250K, its each unique CD that is insured up to 250K as long as it is within the IRA envelope (outside of an IRA is still limited to 100K I think).Personally, I have over 900K invested in CDs in a single IRA and all are FDIC insured because none of the individual CDsexceeded the 250KIRA limit for FDIC coverage and… believe me , I know, because in the last 5 years, I had three banks fail and the FDIC reimbursed my IRA (with interest up to the day each bank defaulted).However, if you have invested all 380K in one bank, you are absolutely correct and in danger of losing a large sum of money down the road so if I were you I would rethink that strategy and fix it somehow.pagroundhog2009-02-13 08:40, By: pagroundhog, IP: [68.36.21.102]

L3: Thank you!I could not agree more about making sure that ALL of your CD money is FDIC insured. My step-Dad has several CDs. One of them was for $100k and was with Indy Mac bank. When it went under, he was concerned that he wouldonly get the principal and not theaccrued interest. He got the entire $105k back, so no problem. It took 3-4 weeks for FDIC to get everything straightened out but that does not seem an inordinate amount of time for such things.As to the FDIC insurance… When this was 1st changed from $100k to $250k per account, wasn’t there some kind of time limit placed on the higher amount? I thought that there was and that it was due to return to the $100k amount at some point. Can anyone clarify whether this change was permanent or temporary?2009-02-13 23:47, By: Ed_B, IP: [24.20.24.188]