My Retirement Blog
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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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Ranking of 401K Investing Committees
By law, every single 401k plan should have in place an investment committee that decides which mutual funds to offer and which mutual funds to pull (after they’ve been offered). In fact, the criteria they use to make that decision should also be written down on paper as well so that employees are aware of…
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Eleven Types of IRAs
You’ve probably heard of the Roth IRA and the Traditional IRA, but did you know there are eleven varieties of IRAs? Yeah… there are a combined total of eleven types of IRAs and most of them are variations of the traditional or Roth IRA. For your reading pleasure, the eleven IRA types (and their descriptions)…
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Diversification and Covariance
The idea behind diversification is a simple one – spread your investments out to a bunch of different industries such that if a downturn hits one, you aren’t entirely exposed. That’s the simple explanation and it’s trying to distill a more complex topic that requires a bit of explanation to fully understand. This post will…
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Contributing To Nonworking Spouse’s Roth IRA
If you are working and your spouse is not, you are permitted to contribute to your spouse’s Roth IRA as long as you still satisfy the rules for the Roth IRA. Even though the IRA is for the individual, you are still allowed to contribute to the Roth IRA as long as your income doesn’t…
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7 Retirement Tax Haven States
I love it when publications like Forbes.com publish articles where they give you a nice broad national look at a particular subject, in this case the best tax haven states, but I hate it when they force you to wade through prose or a slideshow just to get to the meat of the piece. I…
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Beware Scam Artists
Even though the article is the date, the information in this Kiplinger’s article is still relevant because it touches on a very important topic – how to avoid con artists and prevent them from stealing your nest egg. The interesting part about the article isn’t so much that someone fell for a Ponzi scheme but…
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Have You Created A Safety Net?
This is the fourth and final question in the Money Magazine “Get on track for retirement” series and it’s a nice closer. Did you know that 70% of workers think they have enough for retirement but only 43% have actually done the math to prove it? That’s according to a 2007 Employee Confidence survey by…
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5 Common 401K Mistakes
It wouldn’t be a full week if a major newspaper or magazine didn’t put out a X Common 401k Mistakes post and this week it’s USA Today’s turn. Their 5 common mistakes aren’t that mind-blowing and you’ve probably seen them before… they are: Rejecting free money: i.e. Not participating. Duh. Participate in your 401k, especially…
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