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A look at some of the market movers from the week:
Most of us can remember a time when our parents had to use every trick in the book to get us to eat a balanced meal. When we were young we didn’t concern ourselves with proper nutrition or a balanced diet, we just wanted to eat what tasted good. The saying: “save room for dessert” was my favorite and when I was younger, I liked to save a lot of room… for dessert.
The lessons we learned at the dinner table about eating a balanced meal help to illustrate the proper use and importance of asset allocation in your retirement account.
The following is a guest post from David Bakke of Money Crashers Personal Finance
After recently reviewing several top 10 lists regarding setting resolutions and goals, I noticed that very few of them relate to improving personal finances. While it’s always a good idea to lose weight, quit smoking or become more organized, you should also look for ways to improve yourself financially.
If financial goals didn’t make your own list, now is a great time to investigate how you can make improvements to your money management – and bumping up the contributions you make to your 401k plan is a great place to start.
This post is part of Smart401k CEO Scott Hollsopple’s contribution to the U.S. News & World Report Smarter Investor blog series. To view the original article, click here. Original post date February 14, 2012.
If you’re caught in a no-man’s land somewhere between Roth and traditional contributions trying to figure out whether to pay taxes now or later, you’re not alone.
The Roth versus traditional discussion is happening on talk shows and in news columns, magazine articles, blogs, and message boards.
Gathering information and engaging in your retirement planning is a healthy and helpful exercise, but don’t listen to the one-size-fits-all pundits. Roth isn’t categorically better, and neither is the traditional option. Everything depends on your personal situation. And sometimes a combined approach may work out best.
A look at some of the market movers from the week:
The housing market has been a hot topic during the past several years, with mortgages and home valuation at the forefront of the conversation. Most recently, the media has focused on a structure available for homeowners who still have home equity. This structure is intended to boost retirement savings using that equity while gaining a tax break at the same time. I’m not talking about a reverse mortgage or downsizing to a less expensive home. Both of those strategies are most applicable at or near retirement age. There’s a strategy that could allow more immediate action under the right circumstances.
This post is part of Smart401k CEO Scott Hollsopple’s contribution to the U.S. News & World Report Smarter Investor blog series. To view the original article, click here. Original post date January 31, 2012.
New regulations require greater fee and expense transparency from employer-sponsored retirement plans such as 401(k)s. As a result, we may see more plans experiment with lower-expense investments such as ETFs (exchange-traded funds). Though they’re already featured in some plans, ETFs could increasingly become part of the retirement plan conversation.
A look at some of the market movers from the week:
You can hardly turn on the news or open the newspaper without seeing some story about the debt issues in Greece and the rest of the Eurozone. The economic issues facing these countries caused quite a bit of investor fear in 2011 and helped lead many international mutual funds to experience losses of 10% or more.
With so much focus on Europe, it’s not surprising that many of the conversations we are having with our members are at least partially centered on their exposure to international markets and the risks involved with those investments. While we agree that international markets do face risks, we believe that international exposure is still an important part of many portfolios and we are confident that experienced fund managers can successfully navigate these difficult waters over the long term.
This week is America Saves Week and in honor of this great week, we offer up some useful tools, sites, posts and graphs to inspire you and others you know to make a savings goal and set up a plan to achieve it.
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