Watching my 401k and how very uninformed and ignorant I am... sigh

[LJ3]

The older I get, the more attention I pay to my 401k and what it does. My shit is all over the place. I have no idea what drives these rates. I am close to completely ignorant. Seems like it could be much worse. I wish I had more money in this account. I think I'ma have to rent a room in Bucky's basement when I come of retirement age.

Does this trend with what you guys who have 401k accounts are seeing?


Q1 2013
Rate of Return
This Period -8.00%

Q4 2012
Rate of Return
This Period 1.73%
Year-to-Date 15.55%

Q3 2012
Rate of Return
This Period 5.58%
Year-to-Date 12.52%

Q2 2012
Rate of Return
This Period -3.96%
Year-to-Date 6.65%

Q1 2012
Rate of Return
This Period 11.77%
Year-to-Date 11.77%

Q4 2011
Rate of Return
This Period 8.30%
Year-to-Date -3.12%

[BarryBobPosthole]

Man, those rates of return are pretty dang good for 2012. Not sure why your Q1 of 2013 is -8% though. You should be really banging it during that period. Did you change something?
Here's another question: does the 'rate of return' on your statement include only how your investments have performed or is it just how much your balance has grown? Your balance also includes whatever you're putting in there plus whatever your company match is. So I like to look at mine as just the rate of return on what my investments have performed at. Confusing enough?

Honestly, if I get a solid 10% per year return on my 401K in this economy I'm a happy camper. Mine's done better than that, but it's kind of my threshold for looking to see if I need to change anything.

The question I have to find an answer to, is once I retire what changes, if any, do I need to make to the type of investments I have in it?

BKB

[LJ3]

That was a typo, this quarter is +8.00.

And yes, that's the rate of return on the spread of my investments. Most are in the + side, a couple are in the - side.

One fund I have has done really well over the last 16 months. If I knew more about it, I'd shift all my junk over there for a while. But I don't, so I won't :) Seems like if I don't mess with it, it does OK.

I just wish I had been stuffing as much money as I could since I got my first real job almost 30 years ago. I've lost almost all of it twice between now and then. If I had kept plugging away at it, I would be sitting pretty dang good right about now.

Live and learn. Nothing wrong with living in a box. Some of them are pretty dang sturdy!

[Buckrub]

401k's have fewer options........sometimes you can't get a great Mutual Fund, cause it ain't available.

Just to ask........who is yours with? And can you choose FASIX or MXXVX funds???

[BarryBobPosthole]

Len, that's why I harp on that issue with my kids all the time. Start investing in it NOW when you're in your 20's and 30's and DON'T TOUCH IT. That's the biggest mistake I see people make is borrowing from theirs.

Ours have lived through the ups and downs too. Its why I usually just read the quarterly statements to make sure its tracking and try to forget about it other than that. I might be tempted....and that's when I usually screw things up.

BKB

[Buckrub]

Diversify..........the Fed is making sure bonds are doing well right now. Inflation will kill them, though. Be ever vigilant. Some stocks are going full guns. I didn't buy FBIOX at $110 a share the week after Christmas, too many kids/activity/chaos in the house for me to think...........but I almost did. Now it's $128 and climbing, in 3 months.

Take some fake money and play.........keep a log.........buy XXXXX today and write down what it costs. Then chart it. See if you can trust yourself to make good choices. If so, start making them.

I didn't get to work for a company with a 401k but for 14 years. I put 16% in. First few years, we starved. But I did. I have very little comparatively now, but I have something. It's not nothing. It's going to make the difference of me living on the edge and living nine inches back from the edge!! :lmao

I'll say this............in the last 20 years, the 'conservative funds' have been the ones that have done best, believe it or not. The Hot Ones do well for a year, here and there........but over 20 years, the conservative ones have done best. You're at a cusp. If you are going to live long, then choke that 401k for all it's worth. If I were you, I'd ALSO get an IRA on the side, there are 4,000 options in an IRA. Heck, get a Roth IRA, use it to try and grow by making slightly more risky investments, move them around some........but stick money in it!!......that will beat your 401k I betcha.

[LJ3]

I hear ya BBP. I'm a great example of why you should NOT screw with your 401k.

Bucky, I have MassMutual. I don't see any of those funds as options.

These are my current allocations as I understand them :
Prm Core Bond (Babson)
Select PIMCO Total Return
RetireSMART Moderate Growth _ This one kicks the most ass, by a huge margin. No idea what it is or what it does :)
Sel Fundmentl Val (Wellington)
MM S&P 500 Index(Northrn Trst)
Sel Blue Chip Growth (TRP)
NFJ Small Cap Val (AllianzGI)
Sel Md Cp Gr II (TRP/Frontier)
Premier Global (OFI)
Int'l New Discovery (MFS)
Fundamental Value (Pioneer)
Value (Thornburg)
New Horizons (T. Rowe Price)
Prem Discipl Grth (Babson)

[Buckrub]

http://www.bloomberg.com/quote/MOGAX:US

It's doing fine......decent annual return, and doing decent so far this year.

It'd take me hours to investigate all those, though. How many total choices do you have?

[LJ3]

Way too many! Its overwhelming to me. Looks like over 100.

[BarryBobPosthole]

I love it when Bucky's on a mission.

Give him something to keep him busy, Len!

BKB

[LJ3]

I just realized I was getting ready to ask Bucky for investment advice despite his warning years ago that the best strategy is to do the opposite of what he does :)

That being said, the boy seems pretty plugged in to what's what! That link is WAY more data than I can pull from the mass mutual site, no question.

[Buckrub]

http://www.marketwatch.com/investing/fund/MRSSX

Here's a better one that tells the Lipper performance last few years. This is a good fund.

You need to A) find the FUND SYMBOL for each of those that you invest in........and B) go plug those into this website and check their 1 and 3 year performance (remember 2008, everyone took a bath).....

[LJ3]

So, how the hell am I supposed to know which one of these moderate growth funds I have?

http://www.bloomberg.com/markets/funds/a-z/m/16/

[LJ3]

Thanks Bucky!

[Buckrub]

Those are "Target Funds". They were a hot idea some time back. They are Overall or Basket funds that are geared to change without your intervention. You tell it the year you are going to retire, and invest in that fund..... So, if you are going to retire in, say, 2045, you'd theoretically invest in the 2045 target date fund. (Of course, nothing says you have to....you could invest in any of them, or some money in all of them, but the idea is to get one fund that does it all). The idea is that that fund then changes over time.........depending on how much time you have.....to get more and more conservative as you approach retirement age in 2045...........so you do nothing, and it starts off more risky, and automatically changes its funds to get more conservative.....

Those were Hot Items for a while, and I have about $10,000 in one of 'em. FFFCX. Some investment guys have derided them because they have not lived up to expectations. But mine has done just fine, and at my age is quite conservative. It's a blanket fund that has as its make up a bunch of other funds. But as to being the SOLE investment product that you need, nope. Doesn't look like you have that though. You should be able to look at your individual statements and see the exact fund symbol that you have.

[LJ3]

Cool. I know have a watch list with all my investment accounts on Bloomberg. When trying to find the trading symbols, it became very clear that Mass Mutual did NOT want to make that easily accessible information for me.

Why would they not want me to know? Do they want me confined to their kingdom for all my retirement investment decisions? Took me 7 minutes to build a custom watchlist on Bloomberg so I can see how each investment is doing daily, if I wanted to.

What I DON'T know, is what other funds I could watch thru Bloomberg or other invesment site to know what my options would be for moving money from one fund to another.

Why the hell would they make this difficult?

I'm sure cutting in to their profit is the ultimate answer so I guess it winds up being a rhetorical question.

Sigh

[Buckrub]

No, they just have a LOT of choices..........and your specific 401k guys at XYZ Corp where you work, have probably decided to only offer funds 12, 19, and 45 or something. I don't know. But somewhere your exact fund symbol is listed, probably on your statements.

And here are the TWO answers to your question:

1) If you are discussing your 401k, then your choices are limited to their choices. Most of them have 20 or at most 50 choices. That's it. Period. That's not many. So the funds you would want to chart would be the ones that are available for you to invest in. If your 401k has 40 funds available, make a chart of all 40 and you can see which is which, and which ones do best. As an employee, we had that info available at Fidelity inside our account, but don't know if you do. But it is available.

2) If you are not discussing 401k, then it's an IRA. (You can, and SHOULD, convert your 401k to an Individual IRA, at age 59 1/2....even though you are continuing to work and contribute to a 401k....you should convert all that they will let you convert at that time----mine was 80% at that age...the reason is that you have 5,000 funds to choose from. And even before 401k, you SHOULD have an IRA at any company you want (fidelity, a bank, schwab, etc) that you invest with after tax money on your own). Well, that's good and bad!!! The good is that you have 5,000 funds to choose from. The bad is that you have 5,000 funds to choose from!!! ........ I've spent years trying this and that strategy, all because I had SO little money that I tried hard to maximize it. I've learned what is risky and what is not, etc. And you can either throw darts at a board, figure it out yourself, or spend (waste) 2% of your fund every year to have the company (Fidelity, Schwab, whoever) do it for you.