I'm just getting my feet wet with some options and admittedly am only familiar with the tip of the iceberg when it comes to retirement savings. I've been doing some research and speaking with a variety of people as to the numerous options out there. Does anyone care to share what their set up is? If able to, I'd like to see percentages of what people do with their money related to retirement (no dollar amounts necessary of course unless you feel like it's pertinent to the discussion). My goal over the next few years is to set up a portfolio and contribute  X-% into each account monthly or yearly. Am I missing any categories for diversification of funds?

401K/IRA contribution (please discuss stocks, bonds, mutual funds, ETFs)
Roth/Backdoor Roth
Savings/Emergency Fund
Real Estate/Rental Property
Foreign stocks/investments
Precious Metals (as an insurance/hedge)

I'm hoping this leads to a friendly discussion that a lot of us can benefit from.

It depends on how close to retirement and how resilient to risk and market fluctuations you are.

The usual recommendation is to start moving from high-risk higher gains to a more stable portfolio the closer to retirement we are.


However, if we are well funded (have at least a couple millions) in your retirement I personally believe we can keep a portion in the higher gains portfolio.

If your Real Estate/Rental can give you a decent monthly income that percentage can be higher.  In my case, I'm counting on it.

I do not have metals since it's too much speculative and unless I would have the physical stuff in my hands I would not count on paper if the intention is SHTF.

As far as stocks and funds I also like to keep as diversified as possible with a good foreign mix since things are always changing.  I also so not hold individual companies' stocks wince I do not have time to track them.  I prefer the funds and let their portfolio managers take care of that.

Just my 2c.



Also curious to see others' opinions.

Loose change in the couch cushions and the ashtray.

I'm 59 and have both 401k and taxable accounts that include mutual funds and 25 or so individual stocks :

- 10% in bond funds,
- 15% individual stocks,
- 12% cash,
- 63% in small / mid / large cap growth funds (largest is vanguard growth index admiral VIGAX)

no international
no rental prop, own my house outright
no PMs

i plan to retire in 3 years

Good information so far. I'm blessed working for a corporation that takes retirement very seriously. My hourly rate is slightly lower than surrounding employers for my profession, but our biggest perk is that our group puts an additional 20.6% for every dollar earned into a 401k managed by an independent investment firm. Many retirees have come to visit and say how blessed they were that the corporation did that for them. My goal is to put an additional 20% of my take home pay into miscellaneous savings/investment accounts.

That's great your company does that.  If possible max out your 401k $18k.  Then contribute to a IRA Roth or traditional for $5500 each year.  After that you could open a taxable account.  If you plan to use it all for retirement remember to treat them all as one for diversification purposes.

Not significantly invested in the company or corporation that you work for.

If they go under, you lose both your job and your retirement.

Well, that could be said for any investment.  You diversify so the drop in any one doesn't harm you.

I agree. I think when job choosing it would be wise to consider this in your decision. I'm fully vested in my 401k once I reach 5 years of employment, meaning if I leave, all the money (both mine and the employer's contribution) come with me.

As Gordon Gekko says in the movie Wall Street, "I own."

A great well diversified portfolio is nice but the big money comes from larger risks. I don't have any rental residential properties but I do own commercial property, a restaurant and a radio station. All three business streams provide promotion and support for each other.

The restaurant and radio station take 50% of the commercial property and the other 50% is rented out to other outside strong businesses. The radio station does promotions for the restaurant. The restaurant does catering for the radio studio events.

The equity I have in the three businesses allows me to get financing on my next project where I want to restore a tank.

It means that you meet a certain criteria of return vs risk while the assets do not have correlation to each other.

That's true diversity.

I hold bitcoin as an inflationary hedge against the dollar.

Majority of my funds are in low cost index funds available through my 401k plan.  On the Roth side I will be primarily using VTI and VOO as broadly diversified index ETF's that only cost .04%.

For a low cost fire and forget investment plan, look at the Vanguard target retirement funds.  Expenses of .13% and they manage the percentage of foreign stock/US stock/Bonds in accordance with your age/time to retirement.

https://investor.vanguard.com/mutual-funds/target-retirement/#/

That's a great set up you have going. I certainly think it's worthwhile investing in a business of some kind as a means of diversification. It's honestly something I had not put too much thought into until now.

Great link, thank you. You'll have to forgive my lack of knowledge here: the Vangard account you linked is something that is post-tax and would require capital gains to be paid on growth?

The linked page is about Vanguards target retirement mutual funds.  The funds could be purchased pre-tax with some types of IRA's, post tax with a Roth IRA or post tax with a brokerage account.  If your 401k was managed by Vanguard, they would probably be an option in the 401k.


If you setup an account at Vanguard, they charge $20/yr until you get $10k in the account.  Once your account value is over $10k there is no more yearly fees.  For managing the funds, Vanguard takes .13%/yr = $130 for every $100,000 in the mutual fund.

One of the benefits of managing asset allocation yourself - like purchasing their ETF's VTI and VOO - they only charge .04% = $40 per $100,000 invested.  Their foreign stock ETF's have a higher charge though.

VTI is vanguards whole market Exchange Traded Fund.  VOO is their S&P 500 ETF. 

I'm 31, married, 3 kids

15% of salary to 401k (company does 10 of that, me 5). Wife does around 6% of hers, but she's part time and a much smaller % of household income.

6 months of savings in place - I'll be buying a 10 pay whole life insurance policy soon to move all that into as it's a much better IRR than savings accounts (last 10 years has been ~6% through this particular company).
Also maintain a disability income policy which costs about 2.3% of salary, but it's damn good insurance that I'm fairly likely to use. I consider this an important part of my plan.

Still owe on house and have 3 other loans to repay (1 car, 2 student) which are all being aggressively snowballed, should be debt free in ~8 years. After those are gone I'll be socking away close to 50% of my gross in one way or another.

I don't do individual stocks/bonds. I'll either be adding rental houses or farm income in the next couple of years.

I'm no Arfcom millionaire, but my situation has improved significantly over the last 4.5 years.

you should post that illustration before you drop all of that cash in a big policy.

This.

I own farmground, a couple small businesses, and rentals with family partners. I also have some whole life.

In hindsight, the whole life policy that i have wasnt a terrible deal but i would not do it again. Way too compicated for what it returns. I can put that money in 30 different places to be more useful.

Not only that but we need to know how they calculated the returns, and what your actual cash value is projected to be and if they are trying to put you in a LIRP etc.

That's what i don't like.  I'm a very data driven person. I thought i understood it,  I've gotten the info from them several times and still can't conjure the math it takes to get the same result they do.

the reason it's hard to understand is because the returns they illustrate aren't the guaranteed returns. They may have a 1-2% or there about guaranteed return but they show you a different IRR because you normally the surrender cash value is is low in the beginning. I mean they aren't going to take your 100k and then let you have it back next year if they are going to pay you 6%.

That and they can really put together anything they want.

You really need to see the illustration and then see the products brochure and then call into the home office of the insurance company and start to ask questions in order to get a real legit answer.

I’ve been retired for 8 years.  Since I’m a retired military officer and my wife’s a retired teacher, we have enough (with our Social Security) that we don’t have to be concerned with the normal monthly bills.  Therefore, we can take a more aggressive approach after retirement than many people would be comfortable with.
That being said, there are a few general rules that I use.
1.  Never take investment advice from someone who will make a commission if you take his advice.  An advisor or broker will always put his boat payments ahead of your financial wellbeing.  There are no exceptions to this rule.
2.  Live below your means and invest every penny you can.  
3.  Until you retire, be aggressive with your investments.  Once you have your pile, you can concentrate on protecting your assets.  
4.  Don’t try to pick individual stocks.  Don’t let your broker sell you individual stocks.  After I retired from the service, I was a stockbroker for a couple of years.  One thing I learned was that your broker will always lie to you.  He may think he’s telling you the truth, but somewhere down the line, someone has lied in order to promote the stock.  You will never be in a position to know the real story, so don’t try.  Buy no-load mutual funds and get your guidance from a fee-only newsletter like https://mutualfundinvestorguide.com/category/investor-guide-to-fidelity-funds/ .  I can highly recommend them.  Buy direct from the source – Fidelity, Vanguard, etc.
5.  Never buy a variable annuity.  Not ever.  Certain fixed annuities can be suitable.  
6.  Diversify by buying a variety of funds.  The funds themselves provide diversity and the more funds you have the better.  I currently have 28 different funds.

Good luck.

Oh, and get out of debt.  Don't let debt mess up your ability to retire and play all the time.

Did you read that op?

Midcap knows a thing or two.

Not saying don't do it,  but follow his advice first.

For what i paid for mine, i could have bought a dozen rentals over the next decade,  made 17 points on my cash, and saved on taxes.

What's your risk adjusted return for 1,3,5 year periods?

I bet your 28 funds have a correlation above 70%

Yes..most brokers are salesman that have no clue who developed the theory they are allocating into and what it means.

Thanks.

Insurance salesman are the most well honed sales people that are out there. They can sell central heat to the devil.

I've learned all the sales tricks, tips, skills. I refuse to use a single one of those misleading tactics. It's lying. I refuse to do it.

Midcap,

My investment philosophy, which has benefited me greatly over the last 40 years, is to buy aggressive-growth no-load funds and ride out bear markets.  When the market goes south, those funds go down, but always come back and reach new highs.
Of course, it’s not that simple.  I do some adjusting as the market changes, but in general, I don’t sweat the bears.
Now that I’m in my 70s, I’ve gone into more stable stuff, but I still keep lots of money in the aggressive stuff.  I’m in excellent health and don’t need to tap into my investments for cash, so if things get ugly for a while, I can wait.
Not everyone is suited for this approach.  When you lose $50,000 in a month, it gets scary.  I take the long view.  There's always a new high coming if you can wait for it.

In a real crash like 2008 they ALL go down. These days, it's more a broker gimmick to make one feel good. ymmv

There is really no reason to ride out bear markets or take a whipping that bad. I just never understood the mindset that loosing that much % is ok because it will come back.

I am not saying there is anything wrong with your strategy, don't think I am trying to poo poo on it. If you like it, that's awesome.

While sure the fancy new advisory account your broker wants to put you in may be the "allstar team of funds" you really need to see it's correlation matrix. More than likely, they are just setting the allocation, which my 4 year old can do. Sure they screen the funds (for how much money they share in revenue, J/K) but at the end of the day most brokers are indeed full of crap and really know  very little about anything outside of pressing the buttons and doing a risk tolerance questionnaire.

I am not saying they don't add value. They do, but they go about explaining how they add value all the wrong way.

As I said, it’s not that simple and I do make adjustments.
In general, does it work?  Well, we turned dead-broke-due-to-a-family-illness into $1,280,000 in 16 years, so yeah; I like it.

See and everyone says the american dream is gone.

congrats on the success.

I knew as soon as I posted about Whole Life that the Dave Ramsey listeners would come out. I understand how the product works, I used to sell them for several years. The company I bought from (MassMutual) has been in business since before the Civil War and has been paying policy dividends like clockwork the entire time, they maintain a very healthy balance sheet. It's a mutual company, not a stock owned company, so the board and officers are responsible to the policy holders, not investors. This is a very important point, as it removes a lot outside influence in the investment companies investment choices, and it gives more of the gains back to policy holders.

I misquoted the IRR, it's closer to 5.6% between the end of my payment period and the time I'm 70 based on their current estimated dividends. Of course the contract minimum is closer to what you suggested, around 2.4%, which I would agree is dismal. But, this is a small, conservative portion of my portfolio and meant to exist as fairly liquid cash account with a much better return rate than other vehicles. Right now, even 2.4% womps on bank savings and money market accounts. The company has demonstrated in the past that they will increase dividends to stay competitive with other conservative vehicles, so I'm not worried about falling behind on changing markets either.

I'm considering having my wife and I each take a policy and putting $14,000 in each over the next 10 years. I might bump mine up to $36,000 over 10, but haven't decided yet. This would be our emergency fund, 6 months of living expenses (the $14k each). If I do the extra it will be so that I can borrow from my policy to finance the next vehicle, a land purchase, home improvements, etc. without having to get a loan from a bank. In that way, I would end up paying myself back with interest, rather than some other entity. There's a great book out called "becoming your own banker" by R Nelson Nash that explains this idea in detail, very neat concept.

I know a lot of people will poo poo the idea saying I could get a much greater return elsewhere, yada yada yada. I know I could, but that's not the point. A well rounded financial plan will be flexible, with options for short/mid/long term growth/access needs, access to cash, disaster planning (insurance), life goal planning, tax planning, etc. If every single investment was chasing the highest return at all times, where would I be when a 2008 eventually comes along in my life and I lose a job and need cash? I don't want to sell depressed shares from my retirement accounts to cover such a need, or have to fire sale a rental unit, etc, and that's one of the best parts: I can borrow from that cash at any time, no questions asked, even in a down economy or if I don't have a job, and the insurance company is on the hook for the risk of the underlying investments, once I get a statement showing my cash balance, it can never go down from there. My only real risk is the whole company going tits up, which I don't think is very likely given their track record. And if I borrow $10k and die the next day, the company pays a death benefit to my family of whatever the insurance value is, minus the $10k. No loss there.

This is the way traditional whole life (not universal life, avoid that product) works when it's bought from a rock solid, top shelf company. If you buy from Podunk Life Insurance Company, yeah you might end up with problems Dave R warns about.