Posts tagged as:

risk reward

The Changing Face of Your 401(k)

March 18, 2010

2008 will simply not go away.  It’s unfortunate really and although I have suggested over the years that our long-term memory could stand an upgrade, the reasons for what occured in the financial markets is unlikely to happen for another five years (although the potential fallout in 2012 in the bond markets is definitely troublesome).  [...]

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Target Date Funds: When Losing Gains Praise

March 16, 2010

These days, retirement investing is beginning to resemble a game of horseshoes.  Close enough is often considered good if the distance to where you want to be and where your investments are is not too far off.  But horseshoes, when played by yourself, is just practice.  And when you think close enough is good enough, [...]

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Inflection Point: The Recovered 401(k)

December 3, 2009

If you are young(er), if your company continued to match your 401(k) contributions, if you kept your contributions intact, your defined contribution plan has now begun to look as it did before this whole unraveling mess began in 2008.  Over the past week, both Fidelity (who suggested that the one-year rate of return of its [...]

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Retirement Survival

October 20, 2009

It was bound to happen. Most of us have been predicting it for years. Retirement. That long awaited event which bridges the days of wealth accumulation with the moment of wealth draw down. All of your hard work, your scrimping and saving, your investing and financial wrangling all come down to this moment. And as [...]

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Downside Investing

October 15, 2009

Most of us now realize that our mutual fund investments, particularly those in our retirement accounts, can go down, often dramatically. Until recently, we paid little attention to how bad a fund can perform, focusing instead on how well it can do. We make random estimates of how much money will be in the account [...]

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How to Look at Investments

October 12, 2009

It Should be Easier There are numerous obstacles that keep us from building enough wealth in our 401(k) plans. The first is as simple as beginning to invest in your retirement future. This is stressed frequently and with good reason. The earlier you begin investing, the better situated you will be for retirement in the [...]

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Risk: Investment Science

October 10, 2009

Last week, on the radio show I appear on as a regular guest, I suggested that instead of trying to determine what your risk tolerance was, you should instead think about what makes you anxious. This anxiety tolerance takes a more introspective view of who you are rather than what your investments might be doing. [...]

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Safe Harbor Investing

October 5, 2009

There is no easy answer for how much risk is too much risk or too little. In the aftermath of this past year, plan sponsors are looking for a way to insure that those close to retirement have the money they invested over their careers there when they need it. The key word is insure. [...]

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The Risk of Not Knowing

October 3, 2009

We speak often about transparency, how your 401(k) should be easy to understand, how the mutual funds in the plan should be up to the task of providing you with good options that cost as little as possible and how knowing these things will grow your investments. It is all about disclosure. And your retirement [...]

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The Risk of Too Little Risk

September 29, 2009

As Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve Chairman testifies before Congress, we will come to the conclusion that there is risk, we should do something about it and we still have no idea exactly what. Referring to the problem as systemic risk, both in the creation of firms seeking to reach, through acquisition, the “to-big-to-fail” status [...]

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