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To: Tommaso who wrote (105239)	7/17/2008 1:54:27 PM
From: Schnullie	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 206351

Yo Tommaso - I followed you into COS some years ago after reading your posts - thanks for that - and have added every year. This is probably one of my 3 all-time winners. Why did you obtain the stock certificates? Does this mean that you receive the dividends directly from COS (w/o 15% Canadian withholding)?

To: Tommaso who wrote (105239)	7/17/2008 5:15:46 PM
From: chowder	Respond to of 206351

>>> The best thing I ever did was to move a big block out of an IRA, pay the income taxes, and then get a certificate issued and put it in a safe desposit box. It's worth maybe six or eight times what I paid for it and yields about 60% p. a. on the original investment. <<< OK, nice job of forward looking thinking. I gave your message a reco. Got to give credit where credit is due. "Especially" .... because I know how you feel about paying those damn taxes. Good job.

To: Tommaso who wrote (105239)	7/17/2008 5:26:25 PM
From: David Culver	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 206351

If pay outs keep at $1/unit my annual return is over 150 % on the original investment but who is counting. At the time i switched out of a 7 % bond to cos.un

To: Tommaso who wrote (105239)	7/17/2008 6:00:26 PM
From: Wyätt Gwyön	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 206351

move a big block out of an IRA, pay the income taxes i think the IRA is the best thing going for small investors. over the last decade, thanks to tech bubble, energy bull market, and subprime/commercial RE crashes, and lots of luck, my IRA assets are worth many times what i invested, and i have never paid a cent of tax on those profits (other than foreign withholding tax on dividends, which i have never recovered and doubt i ever will). i am still about several decades from mandatory withdrawal age (70 1/2). given taxes are probably as low now as we will see in our lifetimes, i thought about making a big withdrawal now, but i think there are too many unpredictables. we don't know what will happen to tax rates. also, govt has other veys of getting mahney besides income tax--they can tax consumption, assets, whatever the hell they want to. it may be that they eventually tax taxable account assets (some kind of "liquid assets tax") but leave IRAs alone. who the hell knows. all we really know for sure is that the goalposts will move, again and again. luckily the govt provides a way to make IRA withdrawals which are less extreme than one-time lump sum withdrawals, while avoiding early withdrawal penalties. there was a discussion of this before--i forget whether here or on another thread. one can google "series of substantially equal periodic payments". i prefer this approach over lump sum so as to avoid penalties (which effectively obviate today's low low tax rates) and because i can control the amount i withdraw (and hence the amount of taxable income from early distributions in each year). i feel i am doing a little bit to reduce IRA size, without making a huge bet on unknowable future tax policy. the other nice thing is i can add more such accts as needed. i set up my first such SOSEPP acct a little over 2yrs ago. since then, my IRA assets have approximately doubled again. so i could break off another chunk and start a new SOSEPP acct to return to the same overall withdrawal rate i had two yrs ago. the other thing i like about this is i can fill such accts with fixed income (BRL bonds yielding 12.5%, natch) and just be taxed on the withdrawals. so, from my perspective, it's just as tax-efficient as holding fixed income in a taxable acct.