My Retirement Blog
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Target Retirement Funds May Not Be Better
Conventional wisdom states that you should take risks when you’re younger, become more conservative when you’re older, and your finances will be better off for it. This is embodied in the typical advice for asset allocation – take 120, subtract your age, and you should have that value, as a percent, allocated towards equities in…
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Retirement Account Catch-Up Rules
Catching up is hard to do, unless you’re talking retirement savings and you have the power of the US Government behind you. The contribution limits for various retirement accounts are increased if you are over the age of 50 and you can use them to your advantage if you didn’t contribute as much in your…
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Ask Your Company to Match 401(k) Contributions
If your company doesn’t match 401(k) contributions, email them. Email them, write a letter, collect signatures for a petition, do whatever you want but contact them and let them know that it’s important to you and other people in your company for the match to be offered. This is especially true if you don’t have…
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How To Analyze 401(k) Fund Offerings
If you just opened your 401(k) or are investigating where you should be invested, my advice to you is to keep things as simple as possible. If it’s your first 401(k), or your first time looking at it with this company, it can be a little overwhelming to figure out what you should be doing.…
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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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TradeKing.com IRA Review
TradeKing.com is one of the leaders in the online discount broker business with their $4.95 market and limit equity trades and $4.95 option trades (+65 cents per contract). It was named Smart Money #1 Discount Broker in both 2006 and 2007 and likely will win for 2008 as well. It is comforting to know that…
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AARP Financial Guide to Working With Older Clients
Consumerist offered this gem up the other day, a forty-page document released by the AARP called “A Financial Professional’s Guide to Working With Older Clients” (PDF). The first 18 pages were written for financial professionals and you can probably skip them. As a potential client, on the service provider-client side of the relationship, you could…
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Investing in Wine, Art, Collectibles
I always thought of investing in collectibles such as wine, scotch, or art, as something the fantastically wealthy did as they played polo on their front lawn and retired to their private libraries to smoke their fancy cigars. That got me thinking for a moment and wondering if investing in collectibles is something that the…
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What Is A Self-Directed IRA?
A self-directed IRA is a type of Traditional or Roth IRA in which you’re allowed to invest in things other than stocks, bonds, or mutual funds – such as investing directly in a hot new biotechnology or traditional technology startup. In fact, it’s the only way you’d be able to invest your IRA dollars into…
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