You were getting close to retirement, and you’d thought you’d saved enough.
And then the market tanked.
So, you decided to stick it out and try to regain what you’d lost. Other changes to your portfolio structure or your investing strategy could wait.
Following my recent post on 401(k) loans, a number of you asked for more detail on the rules around taxes on plan loans and repayments. So I thought I’d delve deeper into the topic of being (or not being) taxed twice.
Nearly 20 years ago, I helped a group of friends start an investment club.
We were regulars at a friendly poker game, so we named our venture the Busted Flush Investment Club. My hope was that I could interest these guys—they were all guys—in learning more about investing. The idea of investment clubs has been around for many decades, and some individual clubs have kept going for years.
Steve Utkus, one of my fellow bloggers, wrote recently about the dubious value of a local radio station’s early-morning reports on where the S&P 500 and Nasdaq markets are likely to open the day, based on futures trading. He labeled it “junk news.”
Since this is a “summer of sequels” at the cinema, I’d like to add my own sequel to Steve’s blog post.
Criticism of target-date funds is heating up in the aftermath of hearings by the SEC and the Department of Labor. But rather than illuminating the retirement investing problem, the discussion has only highlighted a yawning deficit in the public debate.
The first criticism of target-date funds is that they are too risky, particularly the 2010 funds for those approaching retirement, which fell sharply in the 2008–2009 market meltdown. Policymakers and commentators complain that the risks were too large. The Federal Thrift Savings Plan for federal employees is sometimes held up as a better model for the private sector. It had a 2010 fund that declined by a small amount.
