Quote:
Originally Posted by jkp41
I have been watching this thread for around 3 years. It is what got me into investing and paying attention to my retirement. Any ideas that I have were heavily influenced by what I read here. I feel like I'm on a much better retirement path than I was a few years ago. I really appreciate the wealth of knowledge that has been shared here.
1) Personally I think you're too young and 23 yrs out at least is too long to even worry about bonds in my opinion. T pays more than most bonds just in it's dividend.
That's what I was thinking, but I thought I'd double check. As I said, this is much more money than I am used to managing by myself.
2) See answer 1 but I would favor strong companies you are comfortable with that have taken a dip based more on overall market conditions than their own individual fundamentals. Scaling in, or "dollar cost averaging" is never a bad idea. Also, read this article: http://www.marketwatch.com/story/how...rly-2016-01-25
So how many positions would you look at in total with this amount of money to get a good diversification? I was thinking 10-15 positions total, but it definitely isn't set in stone.
And for scaling in, do you typically start with purchasing half of the position that you'd like and going from there?
3) Personally, I've learned to always have some cash on hand for when we have these sudden dips that really aren't based on much of anything concrete. I don't use it but HYG is a popular bond ETF for storing cash, it's not the most conservative though nor without risk. On the conservative side, T-Bills may or may not do much for you, depending on how much cash you are parking, to even be worth the trouble, but they are safe.
With the relatively low interest rates in bonds, would it be worth keeping money there or in cash over the month or months as I am putting the money into stocks.
4) Max out any free money company match 1st, then max out Roth contributions, then go back to 403b and max that out (like most plans, it probably doesn't have very many or very good choices).
That's what I was thinking.
BTW, changing jobs is a perfect opportunity to swap out of a limited set of poor choices in a 401k and into a Rollover IRA with unlimited choices without paying a penalty. That was a great move and most people don't even know they can do this. My company was sold and I didn't change jobs but it allowed me to do this too!
You're just fine tuning at this point so don't lose any sleep, you're doing it right! Good luck! |
It's not as much about the number of positions but what percentage of your total you have in each one and what your comfortable with. Look at what happened to Hain Celestial today. I like the rule of never having more than 5-10% of your total in any one name, but keep in mind that the market is basically run by ETF's now, the individual investor doesn't buy enough to have any significant impact really on stock prices compared to ETFs. What that means is that when things go down, most of everything usually goes down at least in a given sector, the good with the bad (temporarily). Your job is to find and separate the good companies from the bad ones and buy at these times if possible.
Another thing to remember is you should be reading earnings reports, listening to conference calls, etc when they come out, gets to be too much if you have too many names.
While it's a generally considered good idea I don't typically scale in personally. If I like something and it's a bit down I'll buy some. With things at all time highs right now I'm not sure this is the time to buy but what do I know, could go much higher from here or crash tomorrow. I do think it's a very good sign we are finally above the highs of 1999-2000 at a much lower P/E.
I don't know enough about bonds to really comment. All I can say is Money magazine has something called the Money 50. Their 50 best stock and bond funds/ETFs. Here are a few from their bond list that I recognize and you can research:
DODIX
FTBFX
VFSTX
VWITX (tax exempt)