asset allocation

Not free to be poor

Posted 1 week 6 days ago by Philip Brewer

Personal Finance, Lifestyle

Bench in herb garden

Nobody wants to be poor. It's a dangerous and constrained position to be in. But there are people out there (me, for instance) who are relatively happy to live at a fairly low standard of living. Choosing to live at a low standard of living means you don't need to earn as much money--which opens up a huge range of possibilities that ordinary people don't have. The way society is organized now, though, that's not a safe option.

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Best asset allocation for your portfolio

Posted 36 weeks 4 days ago by Philip Brewer

Investment

Eagle sculpture on a civil-war monument

This is the first Wise Bread post that I've been afraid to write. I've thought about it many times, but haven't even gotten as far as making notes until today, when I finally figured out why it was so tough: It's going to be wrong. Five years from now, there's going to be one investment that did better than any other. Every asset allocation, besides 100% that investment, will turn out to have been wrong. In the face of that, how should we go ahead and allocate our investment dollars?

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Your 401(k) is not an investment

Posted 48 weeks 4 days ago by Philip Brewer

Investment

Your 401(k) is not an investment. Neither is your IRA. Those are legal compartments for holding investments. Your investments are the mutual funds, stocks, bonds, and so on that you've bought. The compartments are where you keep your investments. The distinction makes a difference. When you decide where to invest your money--what investments to buy--you should ignore the compartments. Deciding what compartment to use for each individual investment should come later.

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