Time to Tune Up the Portfolio.
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So much of our financial lives requires regular maintenance — whether it’s updating who’s going to inherit what, checking that you’re not paying too much for car insurance or making sure your investments, particularly your retirements savings, are still working for you.
As the markets ebb and flow, the mix of investments that you originally put into place will probably change shape over time. And if you let your portfolio roam free for too long, your long-term plan can be thrown off kilter. Your retirement savings could become too heavily invested in stocks, potentially magnifying your losses when the market takes its next dive. Or your savings could become too conservative, and that’s a problem, too.
You can solve all of this, though, by regularly rebalancing, the industry’s term for putting your investments back in the proportions you originally set. But unless you hand off the reins of your portfolio to a financial planner, you need to make the time to do this yourself (ditto for investors who periodically hire a professional and want to carry out the advice themselves).
So, in theory, the task should be as simple and as automated as possible. Otherwise, you probably won’t find the time to do it. And really, most of the time, you just need to do a little maintenance.
Going through the exercise should be as easy as it is at TIAA-CREF, the financial services organization. When I recently set up a new 403(b) there for a family member — 403(b)s are essentially another flavor of 401(k) plans — I was pleasantly surprised by one of the options presented: Would you like to rebalance your portfolio back to your original allocations on your birthday?
That’s genius, I thought, and so incredibly simple. Why doesn’t my 401(k) plan offer this? Why doesn’t everyone’s plan offer this? And what online brokerages offer similar types of automated services?
As it turns out, automatic rebalancing is a standard option in many, but not all, 401(k) plans. But it should be. There’s little downside as long as you’ve already set up the proper investment mix. It shouldn’t cost you anything, there are no tax implications and you’re simply keeping your risk level intact. Aon Hewitt, a giant retirement plan administrator, said that more than half the companies in its database that offer 401(k) plans — covering more than 12 million workers — offered employees the ability to rebalance last year. That’s a large increase from a decade earlier, when less than 15 percent offered the feature.
For more information, please visit: http://www.nytimes.com/
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