Superbone Thank you for the kind words and for asking the pertinent and difficult questions. :) I was struggling to frame them. Let me try to answer them as best as I can.

1. I am not paying anything for my investment advisor. He is doing this as a favor, or more so in gratitude because my brother (and by extension me) helped him get through college and with his wealth management classes and training etc. This is his way of paying it back/giving it forward. My brother and I have checked out the portfolio, return streams, management and cash flow of his and he is doing pretty decently/well, if I may put it that way.  We get good returns because as a favor, our investment gets lumped into his portfolio that he manages for bigger clients etc. As for the book, will definitely read that. Thanks for the pointer.

2. My work retirement plan is alright, not too great. Problem is that I am in academia and my employer does not contribute to this retirement plan until I have two years under my belt. This is all and good, in any case, since they for the most part have decided to pause all employer contributions through this fiscal year 2020-21 due to COVID's financial hits. That is the better way to do things without cutting jobs. It does not affect me because they weren't paying for mine anyway, so. Now coming to the difference between my ROTH IRA and 457(b), the 457(b) is definitely more stable. The Roth lost a lot of money in the market drop recently, but since the 457(b) is for state employees, the investment was predominantly in stable money markets, so it was not affected at all. That is the reason I am hesitant to roll it over into something without fully understanding the implications in terms of the portfolio. I did not know or care about any of this as a grad student, so over 5-6 years, it was a forced saving that just grew and grew. I was kinda shocked when I discovered I had that much available when I finished up. 😂

3. Home purchase, I would say is maybe a year or two off at the most. I think this can be done after 3-4 months, since I would have freed up enough money after my FIL loan payment and investment portfolio funding completion.

4. Point taken. Will focus on income replacement before that. These are the things that I needed some clarity about. :)

5. Yes, that is what is currently happening. June is funded through with May's paycheck and so on and so forth. June is going to go to July. 

Thanks a ton once again for the suggestions. :) 

dakinemaui Yes, that makes a lot of sense. The home buying part is what I am very apprehensive about, for the lack of a better word. I am forever reminding myself that just because I have home buying power of X USD, does not mean I NEED a home that is in the ballpark of X USD. I have looked at some properties on and off on Zillow/Redfin and with some adjustment, like you said, I should be able to pay the monthly costs, insurance and taxes included. The problem is with the down-payment, since I recently started working and I don't have anything saved up. So it might take a while to saving up 20% like you said. 

Also, since we are on the topic, what are the downsides to a 10% or lesser than that downpayment, other than increased monthly costs, which I still may be able to absorb? Is there any effect of it on rates or such? I am extremely new to this, so sorry about silly questions. 

dakinemaui Thank you for that information. I read through the article and it was super helpful explaining things to a newbie. I am going to do some more reading up based on your points. Looks like I have a lot of information to digest from this thread. :) Your inputs are greatly appreciated. 

Superbone I have made some staggeringly bad decisions when I moved here for grad school initially in 2008, but for the most part, seeing some sensible people around me drilled a good bit of economic sense into my head. I am really grateful to be out in the world, without any major debt, CC, student loans and to have a car that is paid off (probably the one sensible decision I made as a Ph.D student, even if it meant monthly payments) 😂. If I had been smarter, I would not even have needed to borrow that money from my father-in-law, but well, hindsight is 20-20 and you learn from the school of hard knocks. 

Superbone Ah my bad. I misunderstood. I will read the book(s) you suggested and more importantly, look deeper into the investment options there. I just picked the default ones when I was signed up for it through work, since I did not have anything in it and did not know what portfolio to pick. To be honest, I was thinking along the lines that you suggested and did go with a "moderately aggressive" portfolio, since I was not too comfortable being fully aggressive with all my CC debt and other things (this is Oct 2019's story). Of course, the situation has changed now and I can look into it and re-allocate based on your suggestions. Thank you so much. :)

jenmas Oh no. I just made an observation about it. So the backstory to this Roth is that I worked for a year and a half in-between my Masters and my Ph.D, during which time I had an employer matched 401K (back in 2010-11). When I started grad school again, I decided to roll that 401K over into a Roth, since I would fall into the lower tax bracket as a student. The money in the Roth has been sitting like that ever since. :P (albeit a few thousand that I used to pay for my mandatory grad school fees over the years). That was always meant to be in for the long term. In any case, I am going to look into more options to rebalance like all of you have suggested. Thank you so much for all the advice. It has been sooooooo helpful. :) 

Superbone Hahaha, yes. Point taken. I am not putting all my eggs into that basket. From the snapshot I provided now, it looks that way, but the idea is to bring it down to your levels after a couple of months. Also, I provided some context for the decision of off-shore investments. 

Superbone Thank you. :)