My Retirement Blog
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Invest Aggressively While Young
Do you know why the experts recommend that young investors should be aggressive while older investors should be more conservative? It comes down to the fact that in the long run the stock market, and investments in general, appreciate but in the short run they can be entirely random and extremely volatile, so if you…
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Don’t Invest In Your Employer
If you have a choice, as many people do, of where to put your retirement assets, I recommend not investing it at all with your employer. Other places may recommend that you don’t put all of your retirement eggs in your employer’s basket, but I go one step further and say that you shouldn’t put…
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Are You Saving Too Much?
With so many articles lately talking about the savings rate of Americans being negative (and they are), it’s somewhat interesting to see an article written from the other perspective, are you saving too much? They contend that it may be better for some people, especially if they’ve been good savers in their earlier years, to…
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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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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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No Employer 401K Match? Still Contribute
If your employer offer a 401K match of some kind, it doesn’t take a brain surgeon to know that you should probably take advantage of free money and sock away a little bit for retirement. However, what if your employer doesn’t offer any sort of match, should you still contribute or should you consider other…
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Take Advantage of Catch-Up Contributions
If you’re over 50 by the end of the calendar year, you’re eligible to make catch-up contributions to accounts like your 401k and IRAs. For 401ks in 2007, that means each year you can contribute up to $20,500, $5k more than under 50 folks. For IRAs in 2007, that means each year you can contribute…
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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…
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