No it isn't it's...

<––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––-thataway.

"nope its the failure BRILLIANT SUCCESS of labor unions, the public sector, and government, to safe guard STEAL our future."

Couldn't help fixing this for ya!



Of course all this couldn't have happened without an incredible amount of inattention, greed, complacency, addiction to TV and all sorts of stuff, not staying informed politically, being dumbed down and brainwashed, etc, by us suckers.

We can watch as our living standard collapses and we have NO ONE to blame but ourselves.

Just so you understand, i'm totally oblivious when it comes to savings plans, confuses the hell out of me. I'm not dumb intellectually, but I am dumb when I try to understand this stuff.

YOU are responsible for YOUR future. blaming the world around you is not an effective strategy. no one is "safeguarding" YOU, except YOU. are you really expecting to be coddled and supported for your entire life by "the system"? i think this is the very definition of "entitlement mentality". news flash for you: the world is a cruel, unforgiving place. life is tough, so get a helmet –– then work hard and work smart.


this makes no sense. the fact that you use the term "big business" is a clue where your principles are aligned.


primary education schools are real estate tax-supported. they don't go bankrupt. what are you going on about here? moreover, hospitals operate as businesses, and as you are well aware businesses occasionally fail and go out of business. economic Darwinism in action.


and what has "the average 401k" gained back since then? derp –– did you really just pick a single data point to make an argument against 401k's? really?


you CLEARLY have no idea how a 401k works. stop trying to make an argument, at least until you understand what you are talking about. and "helping people" –– you mean like providing equity to companies large and small, which in turn allows them to expand their business and hire employees? for example, say, GM or Ford, or Chrysler –– you know those large companies that pay wages to hundreds of thousands of union employees?

according to current data, GM is 35.5% owned by institutional investors. do you know where a lot of that institutional money came from, and continues to come from?
http://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/gm/institutional-holdings


who is the "public"? who else should pay? perhaps the fat cat bankers and lawyers and CEO's can pay "more of their fair share" to help out the middle class? is that one possible solution?


you obviously know this is going to happen. so move on. change your situation. educate yourself. learn a different skill which provides more stable employment and/or pays better. reduce your costs of living. save more. prepare. <–– note that all of these things are actions YOU take, and not something that someone is going to do for you.


people have been saying that since the Roman empire was in full swing.


i would opine that 6 months to 12 months is a better gap fill.


that was the outcome of the individuals who choose to take the risk of home ownership. see, the "system" is not at fault here. you can't blame everyone else all the time. there are risks everywhere, and there is no such thing as "risk-free" approach... read on.


as i just noted, there is no "risk-free" approach. above, you say "keep your money liquid" –– but holding cash can be just as risky as holding real estate. hang onto your dollars during a highly inflationary period (e.g., late 1970's/early 1980's) and let me know how it works out for you.


a 401k is just ONE ELEMENT in a complete retirement strategy. there are others, depending on your employment situation. giving up on the tax advantages of a 401k "because i'll never have a million dollars in it like nmichlig said i should have" is really stupid.


1) cash in the bank is paying nothing right now.
2) commodities are in a short term downward trend, and long term no one knows.
3) and property –– didn't you just warn us about keeping your money liquid? now you suggest property?

these "smart investments" –– don't you think that a lot of prior "smart investments" went sideways for the investors? what makes your "smart investments" smarter?

earlier in this thread i suggested a text, "All about asset allocation", by Ferri. you should read it sometime.


your example does not scale, at all.

ar-jedi

who is the "public"? who else should pay? perhaps the fat cat bankers and lawyers and CEO's can pay "more of their fair share" to help out the middle class? is that one possible solution?

I don't see how people can't get by on that type of money. I know lots of people who make $50k with kids and do just fine. They even save for retirement. It is all about priorities.


that was the outcome of the individuals who choose to take the risk of home ownership. see, the "system" is not at fault here. you can't blame everyone else all the time. there are risks everywhere, and there is no such thing as "risk-free" approach... read on.

A home should never have been thought of as an investment anyway...... It can however be looked at as a long term savings, or future-proofing for yourself. Buying the amount of home you can barely afford is very, very stupid. Buying what you need is a great way to get a bargain and have something that can be paid for in a relatively short time. Middle class people who walk in to retirement with a house payment really amaze me....


a 401k is just ONE ELEMENT in a complete retirement strategy. there are others, depending on your employment situation. giving up on the tax advantages of a 401k "because i'll never have a million dollars in it like nmichlig said i should have" is really stupid.

If you start at 22, and save 6K per year at an average growth rate of 6%, you end up with $873,000 at 60 years old. That is not at all out of reach for most people with even decent jobs out there. Almost a cool mil plus a pension or even SS - and no big loans should easily get you through your retirement. You probably won't be yachting but there is no shame in keeping the bills paid, relaxing, and drinking all the local gun shops coffee.

ar-jedi
[/quote]

Bull crap. The S&P 500 gained 22% during 2009 (close of 903 12/31/08, close 1115 12/31/09) Accordign to fidelity, their average 401k ballance was 75k in March of 2011, up 12% from the previous year.

It is impossable that across the market, the average 401(k) lost 30%, while the broad market gained 24%. When you hear the term instutional investor, thats pretty much 401(k) and IRAs, mutual funds, pension plans and insurance companies.

And please explain how "Big Bussiness" "usurped" Social Security and medicare? Do you understand what the word means? Esentially to take by force. How is big bussiness take pensions by force. Ask the left, right or middle, and they will at best tell you big bussiness is tryign to un-usurp pensions- In other words they don't want to run pension plans any more. They want to make a 401(k) matching contribution and be done with it.

An addition to Big Bussiness, Big Government (the one headed by Mr Obama, though I think Mr Regan started it), also went the 401(k) route (technically called defined contributons vs defined benefits) as well as many local governments and charities. The real winner is employees of small companies, who have access to the tax advantage retirement plans previosuly only affordable to larger bussinesses.

did you find out EXACTLY what you you are involved in?

ar-jedi

ok, that's good info.


hmmmm.

prior in this thread, you wrote:

recall that an IRA is a type of tax advantaged account, and not an investment per se. it's what is INSIDE the IRA that determines performance –– not where you have the IRA, not anything else, but only the contents of the IRA.

to continue, IRA's hold publicly-traded securities –– one example is individual stocks (such as AT&T, which is well known by it's ticker symbol "T"), and another example is mutual funds (which are also known by their trading symbols –– same situation for equity funds and bond funds). the contents of your IRA are defined by YOU or someone you delegate that authority to, such as an investment adviser.

so, what securities are currently in your traditional IRA? this information should be on your account statement. if you provide the symbols i can take it from there.

ar-jedi

Epic Win, followed by Epic Fail.

The yin & yang of arfcom.

your IRA evidently holds a single mutual fund, administered by Franklin Templeton Investments, called "Franklin Templeton Growth Allocation A". the trading symbol is FGTIX.

i don't know if i am telling you something you already know here ... but a mutual fund is a "pooled" collection of stocks which are chosen either by a fund manager [actively managed fund], or by basing the holdings on an synthetic index [passively managed fund, sometimes called an "index fund"]. the whole idea of owning a mutual fund is diversification within a modest sized portfolio. if you only purchased three individual stocks, for example, you may be incurring significant risk –– if one of those companies spills oil into the Gulf of Mexico, you could lose a very high percentage of your portfolio in an afternoon. hence, a mutual fund is a vehicle that allows you to own tens or hundreds of stocks, without the overhead of having to buy/sell them all individually.

what you have above is an actively managed fund. in an actively managed fund, the manager buys and sells stocks, within the constraints of the fund's prospectus, in hopes of maximizing the overall return of the mutual fund. he/she may or may not succeed in this goal of course.

backing up a bit, the fund's prospectus instructs you, the mutual fund holder, on what rules the manager is constrained by. for example, there may be no rules –– the fund manager can buy whatever he feels like will outperform. in other cases, there are constraints that are put in place to allow you to make a properly balanced portfolio and get sufficient diversification. an example might be a "large cap" mutual fund; in this case the manager is buying primarily stocks of companies with large market capitalization (like Johnson and Johnson, Walmart, AT&T, and so on). another example would be an "international" mutual fund, which purchases stocks on foreign exchanges (like BMW, Vodafone, and so on). there is yet another way to segment this out –– stocks which would be termed "growth" and others which would be called "value" –– the former are companies that are "pricey" but are expected to continue to outperform (like Apple). the latter value companies are perhaps in a "distressed" situation but can be expected to recover once the economy or other factors turn in their favor (homebuilders are currently in this situation). note that companies may migrate from "growth" to "value" and back again; for example, 6 or 7 years ago you might have said that homebuilders were growth stocks –– now, not so much.

the composition of a mutual fund determines it's risk, obviously –– but also it's potential reward. from 1996->1999, mutual funds with the word "internet" or "technology" in their names were loaded with companies such as Netscape and AOL and Pets.com and WebVan and so on, and were returning eye-popping numbers –– in some cases more than 100% per year!!! then in 2000->2003 the wheels fell off these constituent dotcom stocks and mutual funds which were heavily laden with them suffered accordingly. somewhere along the line folks should have recalled the "don't put all your eggs in one basket" parable, but greed can be blinding in cases. nevertheless, there is a lesson here for you: diversification is important, and that also means properly diversifying across mutual funds.

repeating myself, your IRA evidently holds a single mutual fund, administered by Franklin Templeton Investments, called "Franklin Templeton Growth Allocation A". the trading symbol is FGTIX.

Franklin Templeton, in the investor's short form prospectus for FGTIX, describes the objectives of this mutual fund:

note bold text above. Also note that this mutual fund is actually a "fund of funds" –– it is an overlay fund which provides inherent diversification (to the holdings denoted above) by holding other mutual funds which have different objectives.

also note the manager's view in the investor's short form prospectus of FGTIX,


click here for an overview of this mutual fund by a market tracking company called Morningstar,
http://quote.morningstar.com/fund/f.aspx?t=FGTIX

one of the things that Morningstar does with respect to mutual funds is provide an indication of how a given fund is doing relative to the average fund in the category (with a category being defined by some of the terms mentioned previously –– such as Large Cap, or International, or Growth, etc). in other words, how is a given fund doing against other funds that are using the same objectives?

you can see some of this type of analysis in action here,
http://performance.morningstar.com/fund/ratings-risk.action?t=FGTIX

are you following this? what are your thoughts at this point?
what type of information from the short form prospectus catches your eye?
what type of information on the various Morningstar pages catches your eye?


ps
prior in this thread, you wrote:

how did you calculate this?
have the holdings in your IRA changed during the last 18 months?





ar-jedi

well, i was trying to ease into this topic...

there are two ways to look at it:
1) spilled milk.
2) educational cost.

in any case, it's done. learn, move on, greener pastures.

ar-jedi

you must not be looking very hard –– bond returns for the last couple of years have been stratospheric.


did you ever arrive at a party really late and wonder whether it's winding down?


there are 87,000 "gold/silver" threads on ARFCOM –– in GD, in the investing forum, and here in SF. but this isn't a "gold/silver" thread –– it's about 401k's, which typically limit holdings to a variety of investment funds –– and not physically-held nor paper-proxied precious metals.

ar-jedi