Category: Investing
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10 Retirement Pitfalls: Investing Too Aggressively
The other side of #9 Investing Too Conservatively is this last pitfall, being too aggressive with your portfolio. 100% in foreign small cap stocks is probably too high for anyone, while you do have the potential for high returns, you also have the potential for high losses. While it is advocated that younger investors take…
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10 Retirement Pitfalls: Investing Too Conservatively
The general rule is that you should be aggressive when you’re younger and conservative when you’re older. Being too conservative when you’re young doesn’t take advantage of the one asset you are slowly losing, time; by being aggressive, you try to get the high returns while risking some losses. If you are young and your…
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10 Retirement Pitfalls: Not Using IRAs
I would’ve listed this particular pitfall higher up on the list, probably behind Not Getting 401K Match, since it’s similar to that pitfall; but this one involves not taking advantage of the various IRAs that may be available to you. Roth IRAs allow you to do some tax-free investing and other IRAs allow you do…
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Not All Index Funds Are Equal
I just wrote up a post on Blueprint for Financial Prosperity about the differing performance returns of index funds, specifically a Vanguard and a Fidelity S&P index fund, that may be of interest to folks who invest in index funds as a component of their retirement investing strategy. The jist of it was that not…
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Starting Late: Save More, Risk Less
If you’re getting close to retirement and are a little slim on the retirement funds, do not try to compensate by ratcheting up your risk in an attempt to catch an up-swing as a means of catching up. First, don’t worry, you are hardly alone if you’re a little behind in your latter years. Second,…
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Ten Things Your 401K Provider Won’t Tell You, Part 1
I love Smart Money’s series, Ten Things Your [Insert Someone Here] Won’t Tell You, because it really opens your eyes to some of the shady practices of some operations you may otherwise think are being honest and above board. In the latest installment, Smart Money takes a look at 401K’s and the little things that…
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Save This Much to Retire a Millionaire
Need to know how much to save in order to retire a millionaire at the age of 65? Kiplingers has a whole slew of numbers to give you some confidence that you’re either on the right track or not that far away. The only assumptions they make are that you earn 8% annually on your…
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Diversify Your Tax Profile
Taxes change, just like investments do, and in order to be prepared for whatever comes through the chambers of Congress, you have to diversify your tax profile. Simplistically, this just means that you need to have good mix of investments that are both tax-deferred and tax-free. For example, a Roth IRA is a tax-free investment…
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Why You Should Rebalance Your Portfolio
What is rebalancing? Rebalancing is when you re-assess your investment portfolio and adjust your holdings such that you return to the percentage allocations you planned for when you started the year. So, if you started the year 80% stocks, 20% bonds and, through the course of gains and losses, you find yourself at 75% stocks…