My Financial Journey

Seeing as how the Roth 401k has only been around for a little over a year and a half, there isn’t a lot of information out there about rolling these things over. I have a Roth 401k at a previous employer and while the fees and funds are very acceptable at the previous employer I just want total control over my choice of investments and want to consolidate some of my accounts, so I will be rolling over my Roth 401k into my existing Roth IRA.

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As you may have noticed I run some advertising on my site. I try to keep the obnoxious factor to a minimum and generally only accept sponsors from sites that won’t offend me or my readers. Well this last week I received a sponsorship offer from a website that is all up in arms about Argentina defaulting on a bunch of it’s loans to the international community. They have an online petition and are selling it as Argentina is stealing from teacher’s retirement funds. I ended up turning down the sponsorship offer and here’s why.
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Got a kick out of a recent dilbert. It’s hilarious because it’s so true, although I’ve got this nagging feeling that 90% of the Dilbert audience doesn’t truly get the joke. The reason is because the average person probably doesn’t even know what a managed stock fund is, what high churn means, or even what front-load means. So let me break the cartoon down for you.
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This is one tip that I think that is especially hard to follow, especially for new investors.  It can be fun to check your stock, investment, retirement portfolio every day or every hour to see how much money you “made” or “loss” that day.  While it can be fun, it can start playing with your emotions and your judgment.  When you buy an investment it should be for the long term and you should accept the fact that in the short-term (especially if you invest in stocks and mutual funds) that your investment will go up and down for no good reason (sometimes significantly).

“In the short run, the market is a voting machine but in the long run it is a weighing machine.”
- Benjamin Graham

The problem with watching daily fluctuations or reading daily media reports on your company is that you start thinking that these fluctuations are actually nonsensical and that you should take some action on these fluctuations to make or save yourself some money.  This will eventually result in you making rash decisions to possibly sell an investment or run up a bunch of commissions because you are trying to play the market.

I personally think you should be investing for the long-term so my personal train of thought is that if you don’t plan on holding onto an investment for at least 10 years you probably shouldn’t be buying it in the first place.

“If the job has been correctly done when a common stock is purchased, the time to sell it is almost never.”
- Philip Fisher

So save yourself the trouble and just rely on your monthly investment statements to keep track of your portfolio and even then don’t get too worked up if a single investment or your entire portfolio rose or fell by 20%.

Step 1: Rack up some debt on your high interest credit cards

Step 2: Start paying your credit cards off.

Ok I know what a lame post, but to be honest if you have credit card debt and (more…)

I recently had a reader who wanted me to write an article on whether it’s better to pay down debt or invest. Seeing as how I was recently profiled over at No Credit Needed I figured now was as good as anytime to tackle this subject.

What’s better, paying off debt or investing?
My theory is that I’d rather have less debt because I don’t like owing money even if the interest on debt is less than the return on the investment.

Regards,
John

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If you’ve been following my blog lately you’ve been noticing that I’ve been questioning why one would ever have any money in bonds in the long-term due to their sub-par performance vs. stocks. I’ve had tons of great comments and I thought I even summarized things pretty good, but in the end I don’t know that I really had it nailed down. I was still able to shoot my mouth off somewhat about how in the long-term stocks are still the best investment and I really kind of wanted someone to stick my foot in my mouth, well maybe not that harsh but there are two great posts about why bonds are a vital part of an investment portfolio.

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