Mutual Fund picks for Roth and Brokerage account

I recently made a Roth IRA contribution for my wife and myself. Over the past several years, all these contributions have gone to broad market mutual funds maintaining my asset allocation of 10% bonds, 90% stock (with stock being split between international, emerging market and US). However this time, I decided to get a little bit more adventurous. I purchased $4000 worth of KBE in my wife's Roth account. Banks have been hammered in the last several months and this ETF is yielding around 6% in dividends alone. Of course the situation could get worse but in the long term I think the banks are likely to rebound.
http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=KBE.

In my Roth IRA I continued building my holding in VASGX (Vanguard Life Strategy Growth Fund) http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=VASGX. This one is an asset allocation fund with investments in US, International, emerging stock market indices and 10% in bonds.

This time I also got a good amount of refund in taxes (need to adjust my tax withholding for 2008) and I also expect to get a check due to President Bush's stimulus package in May). A friend of mine told me about this Oakmark mutual fund that seems to have had spectacular performance since inception. OAKBX (http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=oakbx) has around 60% in equity and has performed well. I wanted to pick this up in my Roth account, however Oakmark allows new investors to invest in them only through them directly. I did not want to open a different Roth account. So my tax refund and the economic stimulus package check are going into that fund.

I also considering bolstering up the REITs (Real Estate Investment Trust). I have VGSIX http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=VGSIX in my portfolio that has also been hammered with the real estate prices dropping. However, I will wait a little bit before adding to REITs (I believe the real estate market might get impacted further with the financial crisis).

Tax software

You can usually get a discount on tax software such as turbo tax by going through financial institutions web sites. I know vanguard (www.vanguard.com) account holders can get a discount of 35% on the online version of Turbo Tax. Their premiere account holders can get turbo tax for free.

Bank of America used to have a similar discount last year but it looks like they have discontinued that.

Relocation and tax witholding.

A couple of years ago, I relocated from the east coast to the west coast of the US, to pursue a new opportunity. The company that I was joining paid for all the relocation costs. However a bunch of the relocation expenses are not tax deductible and show up in the W2 as taxable income. Although my company grossed up the amount (compensated me for the tax impact of these expenses), I ended up in a higher tax bracket that I had anticipated, had some deductions (like child tax credit) phased out. Overall I paid more taxes than I had anticipated.

When companies calculate the gross up amount, they look at the tax withholding rate of the employee. In hind site, when I relocated, to compensate for being pushed to a higher tax bracket and phased out deductions, I should have reduced the tax withholding on my W2 to reflect the higher tax bracket the relocation expenses paid by my company would put me into. While this would have reduced the cash that I got on hand, I would have received a more accurate (and higher) gross up on taxable relocation expenses from the employer which would have compensated somewhat for the higher tax rate that I found myself in.

If you end up with too much being withheld, you would get a refund back in the 1040 next year.