Yeah, if you already have money, you can make more.
Where do I put, “Pay off towering mountain of student loans” in?
This advice is basically: Avoid fees, and put away as much money as possible.
If you, like at least 99% of the world, are a worker, and don’t have enough wealth to live off of interests and dividends alone, you are buying into your own exploitation when you own stock via a 401k or mutual fund. The bankers and traders managing those funds invest them in such a way that companies that bust unions, outsource jobs to the most exploitative regions, pollute the air and water, etc get the most money, because those are all ways of externalizing costs from capital onto labor.
Fuck this petite-bourgeoisie nonsense. If you know what’s good for you and your class, save your money to buy guns, explosives, a hidden cash and prepaid credit card stash to fund strikes and insurgencies, etc. Invest in the tools needed to rise up and destroy your bosses.
I’d change mutual Fund to ETF. Lower cost, easier to trade in and out of. Covers same ground as mutual funds.
I’m glad they were smart enough to fit that last one in. Caring for the ones who may eventually care for you is the best insurance of all.
What does it matter if an actively-managed fund has fees if it ultimately provides a better return than a fund that isn’t actively managed?
I bought into the 401k idea until I was in my mid 30’s, my husband was out of work for an extended period of time, and we had to live off our 401k. Obviously, it was not what we had planned to do with it, but it sure bit like the Dickens when we had to tap into our “savings” at a 20% hit right when we could least handle it.
I am contributing again because I have a good employer match where I’m at, but I am really questioning who makes money on the things and how they ended up replacing pension plans.
Technically it wouldn’t assuming you did your research and made sure it was returning a high enough difference to compensate for the managed cost. However I suspect a lot of people might not go that far and just end up putting money there because it has a good rate of return.
Because historically every fund tends to sink to the same rate; it’s pretty nigh to impossible to consistently beat the market.
Easy - as the company you not longer continue to pay an employee is who no longer working for you for the next 20+ years. Technically a pension “fund” should work in the same was as a personal 401k or other retirement accounts, however the risk and overhead has been moved from the company to you. Ultimately the company saves money because they needed to invest a lot more in their pension than they would ever give you in a 401k match.
Step 0: Acquire a job that allows you to save +$17k for your 401k/retirement plus an additional 20% of your paycheck.
I have known quite a few professional money managers, and I do not think they understood that last point very well.
Yeah, but ETFs only make sense once you have enough to make the transaction costs worth it, plus it’s much harder to set up a preauthorized purchase plan, so you have to remember to do your contributions. I don’t know what it’s like abroad, but here in Canada conventional wisdom says ETFs make sense once you hit a portfolio of around $100K. For people with less, check out the ING Streetwise Balanced Growth fund or the TD e-series funds.
I think Klein covered this in the last paragraph.
Don’t try. Historically investors who go for a portfolio of indexes with low management costs do better than most active investors. I highly recommend checking out the “Couch Potato” strategy.
Step 0 : get a cat.
For a brief moment, I thought this was a list of investment tips by Jackson Pollock. When I realized my mistake, I was significantly less interested.
Ding Ding Ding Ding Ding!
