Monitoring your Retirement Assets
Recently I had lunch with a close friend. During our meeting we discussed my blog site and some of the things I talk about. At the end of our lunch I sensed my friend’s attitude regarding managing retirement assets was similar to the attitude I notice with many other people my age (i.e., over 50 years old). These people try to save as much money as they can, but don’t seem to have the time to monitor their retirement assets. This attitude of “being too busy” to monitor your investments can be very costly to your retirement.
Post #24 – Summary of Retirement Planning Simplified
Thus far this blog has concentrated on general retirement planning ideas and concepts. To date the blog posts have been numbered because they are presented in a logical order for someone who does not have much experience in the area of retirement planning. In this post I will highlight the main retirement planning ideas and concepts that I have discussed in the previous 23 posts.
Post #23 – Portfolios For the Lazy Investor
In my last post, Post #22, I discussed how to construct a simple portfolio that is easy for anyone to implement and maintain. This post will be a short follow-on to my previous post to provide a resource for people who are so lazy they do not want to take the time to construct their own simple portfolio. For these lazy investors there is a solution.
Post #22 – Constructing a Simple Portfolio
In my last post, Post #21, I provided some thoughts for choosing your investment vehicle for holding your retirement assets. The main point of that post was, when choosing investment funds, it is best for the average retail investor to pick funds with the lowest fees (i.e., lowest management expense ratio). After choosing your family of funds for parking your retirement assets, the next step is to construct a simple portfolio.
Post #21 – Investment Vehicle Choices
In recent posts I have spent a lot of time discussing the importance of an investor’s equity allocation percentage. These posts have caused the question to be asked, “in what fund vehicle should one actually invest their retirement assets?” In this post I will give you my thoughts on this subject and some guidance.
Post #20 – The 2 Biggest Investment Mistakes Made by People over 50
This will be a short post on the 2 biggest investment mistakes that people over 50 make. I have touched on these areas briefly in previous blogs, but I felt they are important enough that I wanted to address them more directly.
Post #19 – The 2 Biggest Retirement Planning Mistakes Made by People over 50
There are many investment/retirement mistakes people over 50 make in planning for their retirement. In my experience there are 2 retirement planning mistakes and 2 investment planning mistakes that are the most common. In this post I will discuss the retirement planning mistakes.
Post #18 – The 3 biggest Retirement Planning Mistakes Made by Young People
I thought I would take a break from tedious investing concepts and write a lighter post. So instead, I give you my opinion on what, I think, are the three biggest mistakes that people in their 20s, 30s, and 40s make when it comes to retirement planning. There are undoubtedly many financial/retirement planning mistakes people make early in their working lives, but these three are the most common ones I see and are the most costly. Two of the missteps are actually financial choices regarding saving and the third is a simple investment choice that is easy to change.
Post #17 Financial Planning Made Simple
I just finished a very good book called Your Money Ratios: 8 Simple Tools for Financial Security
Post #16 – How the Financial Crisis Moved Our Retirement Date Forward by 2 Years
My last post discussed the importance of periodically “Re-balancing” your portfolio as a practice that everyone should incorporate into the management of their retirement assets. I practiced this method throughout the recent financial crisis and the results worked out so well that we moved our retirement date forward by 2 years. In this post I will share with you the exact “Re-balancing” moves I made during the 2008-2009 financial crisis and my thought process when making those moves.