Category: Mutual Funds
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Start Saving with Low Minimum Investment Mutual Funds
I’m a big fan of Vanguard’s low cost mutual funds but they aren’t particularly friendly to the young and new investor because they often have decently sized minimum investments. Most require $3,000 to start, though their STAR Fund requires a mere $1,000, which is a lot when you consider most people are looking to save…
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Strata of Mutual Fund Expense Ratios
One of the most important characteristics about a mutual fund is its expense ratio. The expense ratio is the cost of running the fund and is charged to cover the expenses of running that fund, usually represented by a percentage of assets. Some of the things the expense ratio covers include, but are not limited…
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Cut Those Fund Expenses
When it comes to investing, cutting expenses is just as good as, if not better than, increasing your rates of return. When you cut expenses, it’s a guaranteed 100% increase to your bottom line. The only way to potentially increase your rate of return is to increase your risk and even then the rate of…
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Tax Inefficient Mutual Funds are Good in IRAs
Some mutual funds are very tax efficient. They realize very little in the way of realized capital gains, they pay out very little in dividends, and they have protocols in place to reduce how much buying and selling occurs so those events don’t happen. Some mutual funds, on the other hand, are not very tax…
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Flaws of Target Retirement and Lifecycle Mutual Funds
I’m a huge fan of target retirement and lifecycle funds, those mutual funds that rebalance based on your age, but a recent article put out by MarketWatch identifies a few critical flaws with these types of mutual funds – flaws that I agree exist but nonetheless do not affect my admiration for these types of…
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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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Target Retirement Is Meant As Solo Offering
The purpose of a target retirement is that you can put your investments on autopilot and have the fund manager handle it all for you – you can go do something else while someone is analyzing your investment mix and rebalancing. The latest question to Walter Updegrave’s column on whether a near retiree has the…
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Watch Your Mutual Fund Fees
Next time you have a few spare minutes, check out how much your mutual funds are charging you for investing your money. It’s not uncommon for an actively managed mutual fund to be pushing over 1.5% in terms of fees and if that fund isn’t beating the market average each year by at least 1%,…
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10 Rules: Watch the Watcher’s Prices
A mutual fund usually has an expense ratio, that is, a percentage of its assets that it collects for administrative fees and “expertise.” The actively managed funds generally have higher fees because you’re paying the manager to be good at his job. Passively managed funds generally have lower fees because you’re basically paying for the…