Retirement Planning: Mutual Funds are a Risk But Not a Risk

Are mutual funds a systemically important financial risk? It seems that so far, the answer is no. To explain what this dreaded SIFI label actually means, the NYU Stern School of Business has developed a risk indicator and alist of the top banks and CEOs capable of bringing the whole system down should their activities run into problems.

Senator Chris Dodd and Rep. Barney Frank, authors of the Dodd-Frank comprehensive financial reform law began identifying which institutions could be the most troublesome for the economy as a whole should they fail. It was one thing suggesting that all banks with $50 billion plus in assets be labeled as SIFI. But other institutions could also create risk and in the time since the creation of the reform law, other large entities have scrambled to get out of the way. Ideally, the right balance, not too many and not too few, something the Brookings Institute suggests as a Goldilocks problem, is what the law is aiming to create.

At a recent conference held in February, Doug Elliot asked the question: "So, if you’re going to define systemically important financial institutions you have to have some concept of what systemic risk is.  And you have to have some way of measuring it, at least in some subjective manner.  And are then setting a threshold to say where does something go from having too little systemic risk to worry about to enough that it should be treated separately here?" Mr. Elliot is well known as a former investment banker, former head and founder of COFFI, his own think tank, and a very prolific and insightful writer on financial reform issues with a book soon to be published titled "Uncle Sam in Pinstripes".

The biggest fear is what is known as a domino effect. Essentially, if a number of SIFI act in unison or a number of institutions engage in the same financial activities with an SIFI labeled entity, failure would knock one, then the next over, creating a systematic breakdown. But identifying who is at the greatest risk is a lot tougher than it sounds. Mr. Elliot points out that both irrational panic, such as a run on a bank creates, and rational panic, such as identifying the problem but making a wrongheaded assumption that whatever the problem is, it isn't really that bad, can both add to the systematic tumbling of one institution, and then another.

The recent crisis had a component about it that it turns out isn't all that unusual. In fact, most of the problems in the recent history all possess the same problems: assets that were overvalued and folks knew it and leverage that was chasing it, even if it knew it was overvalued. This embracing of risk is what causes systems to break and in some cases, have the potential for bringing the whole of the economy down with it.

Given their size, mutual funds were considered as well in the discussion (which can be found here). They are not directly leveraged nor are they intermediaries (such as insurers and re-insurers) or affiliates of larger financial institutions. In fact, mutual funds are generally referred to as pass-through entities. But some funds have worried regulators based on their size. But that size is not threatening if it isn't used as leverage.

The one exception Mr. Elliot pointed out was the money market mutual fund, an entity that many believe is, or should I say, was, as a safe as a bank - at least in the mind of the average investor. A buck, they thought was always a buck, until one moment during the financial crisis, when a MMF declared ti wasn't. Investors were told that there was risk. But with this sort of situation having never occurred, the risk was set aside for most investors.

While mutual funds may have escaped the scrutiny of those studying these financial risks, hedge funds, institutional investors (pensions) and some investment firms have not. Just because some funds fit some of the criteria, of which six are listed, doesn't mean that the Frank-Dodd regulations would necessarily miss this group altogether. They do have size but because of the number of funds available, they provide numerous substitutes for the services and products they provide investors.

There is an adequate degree of separation from other financial firms, an borrowing that they may do (leverage) is clearly stated by most funds in their charter. While many of the largest funds do face some liquidity risk if investors lose faith in the ability of the fund to perform, it usually occurs as a dribble of discontent rather than a one day sell-off. Mutual funds tend to keep a limited amount of cash on hand so a sell-off would be something that whole of the marketplace would be experiencing rather than just a handful of large funds (which all tend to be indexed to the market and not actively managed entities. In truth, funds that become too large, tend to lumber when attempting to move in either direction.

Those large index funds are passive. But some large bond funds may not be but their size keeps any sort of maturity mismatch from occurring. And the existing level of regulatory oversight provided by the SEC is seen as adequate to protect the overall system from any imminent problems.

Although MMF aren't necessarily problematic, as the Investment Company Institute, the lobby arm of the industry points out: "a liquidity backstop could provide reassurance to investors and thereby limit the risk that liquidity concerns in a single fund might spur in-creased redemptions".  There is a possibility that hedge funds might see this as an opportunity to roll what they do into into mutual funds. But the regulations provided by the SEC make this not as attractive.

It may be too soon for the mutual fund industry to breath a sigh of relief. While one or more of the 243 rules and 59 studies commissioned by Dodd-Frank may still find mutual funds in the crosshairs of the reform law, the industry believes that this will not happen.

Retirement Planning: The Answer is Yes

Yes, you can retire to which you answer: "how?" All of the pundits from every corner of the planet suggest that this is simply not possible, you continue adding that the retirement you envision will simply not be possible. And I listen intently looking for signs of your willingness to compromise. Oddly, you don't mention anything of the sort despite having accustomed yourself to years of doing just that.

Granted, the compromises you made throughout your life were, at best minor ones. You may have come to grips with numerous economic realities that gave way to great stories at the Christmas dinner table or perhaps among friends and family that shared those experiences. Many of these financial tales do not begin with 'remember when we had money' but more like 'no one knew how poor we were'. That's because pulled by the bootstraps stories are far more interesting to the listener and the teller of the tale when there is some drama, some obstacle to overcome.

So we are beginning to tell a tale of woe long before the story is finished. The vast majority of us did not begin our financial journey with money. We may have been given a little bit of a boost by parents who spent their hard-earned money, money they probably could ill-afford to spend, to help us. But the quest for more money would become the only job many of us will have ever had. What we did should have been the great modifier of how far that quest could have taken us. But access to credit sort of screwed that dynamic up; not permanently.


So when I hear forty-year olds tell me that they know they will never retire, adding to the chorus of those who really have a problem as the approach sixty, I wonder whether they aren't telling the tale too soon. And if that is the case, are they listening to the story they are telling?

Here is the problem and the solution in three steps:

One: You probably have the resources available to live on less. I'm not suggesting you go frugal by any stretch - that would probably take some sort of intervention. Instead, understand what your money is going for and how long it took for you to get it. In the good old days, folks saved for the things they wanted. Suppose you approached each item over one hundred dollars with the same thought. Suppose you work 2000 hours in a  given year and you net about $50,000. That's about $25 an hour. So each purchase in excess of a hundred dollars would cost you four hours of labor.


In all likelihood, you throw out about one-fifth of the food you buy either as leftovers or simply because you failed to consume it. You may have worked about an hour or two for nothing, depending on your grocery bill. Each month, you probably work ten hours to pay for your cable (TV, internet, phone), a possibly ten to fifteen to pay for utilities. And that is based on $25 an hour for your work, which is above the national pay-per-hour median and mean average salary reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Now the answer to this dilemma resides in imagining you earn less. The rich do this quite often and bank the difference. It is often called a cushion, such as when there is more money being brought in but less dollars relegated to the budget, more or less forcing more austere measures on the household.

Two: The what-to-do-with-the-extra-cash basically solves the retirement puzzle. But only in part. Most of us have access to retirement plans but the quality and the cost of those plans varies widely or should I say wildly from one plan to the next. If you are married and don't work for the same employer, you have the ability to pick and choose the better of the two plans.


While many 401(k) plans have been making strides in reducing the cost of the funds being offered in their plans, they have turned around and raised their administrative costs. If you are married, fully funding the best of the two and picking and choosing with the second best plan. This is good couple time and a chance to review how your tale is beng written.

If you are single, the choices are more narrow but not without benefits. You have no co-author for your story and therefore, you are the sole writer of the ending. Even if you have never written a word, you probably have read. Good writers give you several subplots, characters you want to know and a conclusion that both satisfies and amazes.

Your subplots are already in place (kid perhaps, college debt, etc.) and how you handled each one developed your characters (were they handled well or are they going to be redeemed) and as you head towards your conclusion, will the person reading your financial life empathize, sympathize or simply suggest that had you done this or that along the way, the story could have been better.

Three: You are your own critic. Churchill once said: "Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfils the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things.” being critical of your work thus far is essential in negating the pain and getting to healthy. Once you resign yourself to hear only the downside of possibilities, you entertain no hope of redemption. If you were reading your life, would you be thinking that this particular tome is not worth the time or effort.


Good writers seed this despair with hope. If you suggest that retirement is simply not possible, for instance, what is the ending going to look like? Are you the reader anxious to read further? Probably not. So you think about the positive endings that could take place, list them out and how plausible they might be and choose one. You have all of the information to finish this book by the half-way mark of your working life. You can look at your parents and grandparents and project the potential for your own life expectancy. You can look at how far you've come and know how far you need to go. All that's left is the plan to get to the end.


Yes you can retire. Yes you should retire. Yes, you have the money. This is the ending, you the reader wants.

The Weight of Indexing

Even simple is no longer so. And when it comes to index funds, that often suggested answer for everything an investor should do but doesn't, the boringly mundane investment that tracks rather than participates, the it-beats-actively-managed-funds choice of the passively prone, there are now choices. There have been for years in the form of exchange traded funds (ETFs) sold as shares of stock on the open market. But this might be different in ways that deceive rather than simply suggest there are nuances.

Index funds rely on the ability to price securities efficiently. Unfortunately, the markets are not as efficient as they should be with investors often making decisions that make little sense when it comes to determining what a security is worth. And when those bad decisions are made, other investors follow. But that flaw can be overlooked in favor of the low fees (no trading means no costs unless the index changes), low turnover (no trading means the portfolio stays intact) and good diversification (spread out across a wide swath of the market).

Yet if it were only that simple. Those low fees can vary wildly over various index funds and those same index funds may appear to be the same. Buy an S&P 500 index fund you so often hear experts suggest and although they make no effort to hide the average-ness of this investment, in fact, heralding its mundaneness as the very reason you should buy it, that isn't enough.

Traditional index fund are market weighted. This simply means that these funds have holdings that are based on the amount of investor dollars each holds or the company's capitalization. The top 10 companies in an index fund often make up the lion's share of the invested index (20%). So if a market swing like the one that happened in 2008 occur, the whole index stumbles, brought down by the behemoths at the top. That can be problem and it can impact the investor's interpretation of average.

So enter the revamped index fund. The "alternate-index" fund hopes to realign the weighting in these funds to equal, offering the investor an equal share of every stock in the top 500. That means that the largest stock would only get 0.2% of the invested dollar while the stock on the cusp, the one that barely has a presence in the weighted index, would also have 0.2%.

These funds hope to keep the image of low cost and low turnover (considered a tax advantage) in place. By equally weighting the fund, the goal is to outperform the weighted index. There are other entrants to the index world, all hoping to take advantage of what is seen as flaws. That's right, in order to sell the idea that one ndex fund is different than the other, you must point out why.

The alternate index fund arena has spawned other types of funds that offer indexed stocks based on the dividends they pay or even the earnings they post, sometimes even as a combination. The chase to out-perform might seem like a worthwhile idea, but the reality is quite different. When you begin to slice these indexes in different fashions, you expose different opportunities for volatility. And keep in mind, this is the stock market we are talking about.

Unlike their weighted brethren, many of the alternative-index funds rebalance more often due to shifts in stock prices. They also benefit over traditional index funds when the marketplace favors the mid-sized and small-cap companies in the index. if the investor is seeing opportunity in smaller more nimble members of the index, the index does better. Quarterly rebalancing shifts the index back to its 0.2% of each strategy but in doing so, sells winners (losing the tax advantage somewhat and increasing turnover during incredibly volatile times).

Are these worth a look? Possibly if you believe the value will remain in the smaller and mid-sized members of the index. If you are anticipating a large-cap rally, the the traditional index fund will prevail. The question is: do downturns such as the most recent one favor one or the other? In terms of raw numbers, yes. When the markets stumble in tandem, the alternative-index funds tend to do worse, even with a mostly short-term record. But even though the fall is equally as difficult to stomach, it is the recovery that most investors focus on. And during a recovery, the alternative-index fund tends to do better.

Just when you thought the index fund was your friend, it turns out that it has a split personality. Does this mean you should avoid index funds? Not at all. In fact, if you do want to own them, I suggest (which is different than advise) you do so in a Roth IRA rather than in a 401(k) type of account. Their tax efficiency is not worth the trouble in a tax-deferred account as long as capital gains taxes remain low.

Boomers: As you turned 60, Your 401(k) turned 30

It seemed like a good idea. But you have to consider where we were in terms of retirement when the line in the tax code was uncovered. We had pensions and companies didn't much like the idea. These defined benefit plans were designed to keep employees in one job over an entire career and add to that, they were costly and unpredictable. For the employee, the time needed to vest was often long, sometimes as much as ten-years, and the pension once vested, although it was yours, could not be brought with you should you find a better job somewhere else.

The pension also represented the ability to increase your retirement income as your pay increased. This trade-off from human capital in the first years of employment to retirement capital in the later years, made the company liable for the investments and the guarantees that the money would be there. Higher paid workers, often in much higher tax brackets than we have today, were allowed to also save money after those taxes.

When Ted Benna found this line in the tax code (section 401(k) 30 years ago, he realized that this was the answer to what his higher paid clients were looking for: the ability to put money away on a pre-tax basis and if the company so chose to do, it could match those dollars. Business saw this as a way to shed those obligations of managing their pensions and shift the obligation of retirement to the employee.

Sure, the company said, we'll help. We'll hire some experts to set up a plan, we'll load it with a bunch of investments and we'll act as fiduciaries. Heck, they said, we'll even provide the incentive of a match - even though these companies would lace it would all sorts of caveats much like the vesting period of the pension. Yet it would, in their minds, be the answer to a question they had not asked but possibly should have.

Even better, these new plans would be portable. You could take the money you had put aside with you when you left. Once again, this was more a win for the company than the employee, who often left before they got the fully vested match and was forced to roll the money into their own IRA. The fully vested match is often something that happens over time, sometimes as long as ten-years, more commonly over five years.

It can work in a number of ways and this information is part of the Investment Policy Statement that every plan has and few people read. During your first year, you might get the company match - in theory - but if you were to leave, it would not go with you; only the money you had invested would be yours. Perhaps by year two, the company would allow you to take 25% of the company match, and each successive year, a little more. Some companies give the full 100% after five years. So consider the employee who finds a new and better job opportunity and decides to quit a week before the five year waiting period is up. They would lose five years of company matching funds simply because they didn't wait.

This line in the tax code also created a multi-layer business to accommodate this plan, from mutual fund houses to insurance companies to brokers at the investment level to third party administrators and lawyers to help with the legalities. This line in the tax code also created some huge problems for the worker.

Now they needed to find investments in those plans to give them the best retirement. They needed to participate beginning as early as possible and stay involved as long as possible. They needed to get historic returns and be disciplined in an endeavor they had little or no knowledge about prior to this shift. It was a great social experiment in self-help that has failed many people. It also helped a great many people who might not have had much otherwise.

But the plan has problems that have never been suitably addressed, in part because of the belief that people wouldn't allow these provisions. One problem that should have been better adressed was the portability part of the plan. Mr. Benna in a recent interview with the Baltimore Sun bemoaned this ability to "take the money with you". He knew that our natures would get in the way of the right choice. Too many people would cash the plan out, pay the penalties and the taxes and squander the early start that these plans depend on. He thinks that the employee would be better served being forced to leave the money at the old employer.

He also knew that if the 401(k) allowed for a borrowing provision, people would use it. Mr. Benna's redesign of the 401(k) would include auto-enrollment and auto-deductions that would begin at 4% and increase until they reached 10%. He also admits to the problems in target date funds (which we have discussed here in previous essays) but thinks the idea is right. People make emotional choices with their investments and target date funds are designed to take that emotion out of your hands.

Of course you could opt-out but history has shown that few people do. He also suggested that this plan should be, in a perfect world, a supplement to a pension plan. But he was quick to point out that companies still have problems with the predictability of pension costs. Much the same way 401(k) investors have difficulty with investment risks.

In either case and even if you are fortunate enough to have both types of plans, the responsibility of your retirement is still with you. Arriving as close to it debt free is still the best approach to retirement. Investing as much as you can and then more, perhaps twice what you think you can afford, is a better plan. Think of retirement as a storm that is approaching. You wouldn't gather enough supplies to last for a day or two. You would get more than you need. Most folks have not filled their retirement pantries with much more than a loaf of bread and a jar of peanut butter. How prepared are you for a storm that is likely to last for thirty years?

Paul Petillo is the managing editor of Target2025.com/BlueCollarDollar.com

The DOL asks the Tough Questions about Your 401K

Hearings began concerning your 401(k) and the Department of Labor proposal to change the rules that currently apply to brokers. Now it’s okay to not know that there were hearings taking place at the DOL. It’s even okay that you may not have known that the DOL is even concerned with brokers. And if you didn’t know the role brokers play in your retirement plan – thinking of course that they were only traders of securities on an individual level – that’s fine too. But what the DOL is proposing is both significant and insignificant and worth noting nonetheless.

So I thought I’d give you a brief overview of what is happening, why some are enthusiastic about the change and others much less so. The DOL wants brokers and investmentconsultants to comply with the fiduciary standard of care as outlined in ERISA. This standard of care is worth noting and probably something you thought was already part of the whole package in your plan. For the vast majority of us, the 401(k) is benign tool, important but so nuanced in so many ways as to be opaque. We use it and hope for the best. (Not saying that’s the right approach but for most of us, it’s true.)

But there are people like me and institutions like the DOL who think that you should know otherwise. So we encourage you to listen to the background noise. This noise, currently being conducted as hearings has had a steady stream of industry professionals testify that they like the proposed rule changes and that they don’t.

The rules that the DOL would like to enact consist of the following: offering ERISA covered advice. This sounds simple enough but the reasons so many firms are fighting the rule changes is in large part due to the cost, which many have claimed would be passed on to the clients and then to the end-user of the plans, us.

Along with disclosure of conflicts of interest, Helen Kearney of Reuters reported recently “The standard would limit brokers’ ability to recommend their firms’ proprietary investment products to employers and prohibit them from collecting commissions from product sponsors.” Those objecting most vehemently to the rules are the smaller firms that do not offer compliance departments as part of the services they provide. And it is also quite possible that their clients don’t want to pay for that extra level of protection.

To offer fiduciary care comes with a cost. To act as such, the investment adviser/broker essentially stands with the company should their be any problems with the plan. The proposal would require that these brokers tell the company upfront that there may be conflicts of interest and the products they are selling them are the products their firm has instructed them to sell. This might not be the best analogy to use, but it is similar to buying a store brand which tends to be cheaper and a national brand, which tends to cost more. The product itself might be the same in many respects, but the differences, albeit small are there.

The biggest fear these firms have is rejection. If clients walk away, then what? That might be more ghost in the machine thinking but for some brokers who peddle in-house products, believe in commissions and don’t necessarily want to shout this fact from the mountain tops, they are balking at the notion.

Small companies usually deal with smaller brokerage houses in their 401(k). In these cases, the fees they receive are smaller than a Wells Fargo or Merrill Lynch might charge its clients. Those smaller brokers would be jeopardizing their fee base, received in addition to their charges for services are as part of the products they recommend, even if those products are the right ones for the client. So they might be forced in light of the DOL  rules to increase the fees they charge to these small businesses.

But these folks shouldn’t fear the worst. If they are doing their jobs and that, by definition is tailoring their products to the client, suggesting that if they include them in their plans, they will more likely than not, increase plan participation, they should have no worries about losing clients. And that, after all of the dust settles, is what they are supposed to be doing.

Smaller companies often use third party administrators to help with the heavy lifting and the legal issues. They can in many instances help the client choose which funds might be best.

So many brokers do not, under the proposed DOL rules, need to accept the fiduciary standard of care to stay in business. But you can bet that this will be the selling point the largest firms will begin advertising they have to offer.

According to Brian Graff, executive director and CEO of the American Society of Pension Professionals & Actuaries: “players in the retirement industry who are more formally regulated with extensive compliance departments will comply with the rules, and those less formally regulated who know there is no practical enforcement of the rules, will choose not to comply.” It looks as if it boils down to your plan’s decision over whether to buy the store brand or the national brand. Do get the same thing or do you get what you pay for?

Retirement Planning: On Being Too Old

Baby Boomers face all sorts of challenges when it comes to retirement. Are we ignoring the most obvious of those challenges when we refuse to think that we will one day be old - not just older, but old old.

It is a relatively well known phenomenon amongst the soon-to-be retired. You are jettisoned from your 401(k) with a large chunk of money, a lifetimes' worth of hard earned cash. You are forced to make a decision about what to do with it. Kept in its present form would require you pay taxes on it as it is. Rolled into an IRA allows you to hold off on distributions, possibly until you are 70 or begin to take money out. But some folks fall into the annuity trap.

This choice, the annuity, in whatever flavor you are sold by the insurance company is often picked when the newly retired person does so in the midst of what would be a bear market. 

For those not versed in that term, this a period of lower stock prices; the reverse of which would be a bull market. Most folks fall back on the same logic, perhaps not fully tested or vetted, that retiring in a down market is hardest on your retirement account because you have far less than you might have has had you retired when the market was on the upswing.

On paper it might look bad. But the bear market might be your friend, especially if you are the counterintuitive type not prone to believe the conventional wisdom. What is the conventional wisdom? To be upfront, something I disagree with in most cases in large part, because I don't think pat formulas work. We evolve and so does our thinking. Why, if that is true of us and we are the markets, do we insist on being harnessed by stringent parameters?

Because they provide comfort, a point of reference, a goal. No matter what name you assign them, they are prevalent and with so many personal finance and retirement "gurus" saying the same thing, you tend to fall lockstep into the same thinking. Withdraw 4% you chant and you will never run out of money.

I've disputed this notion in the past as not very wise or thoughtful. Two things helped me arrive at this conclusion. Long before Susan Jacoby wrote her new book about old age (Never Say Die: The Myth and Marketing of the New Old Age, Pantheon Books), which provides a no-hold-barred look at the distinct, perhaps inevitable slide the human body takes on its path to death, I was suggesting that we might live longer but what will living longer mean. Oh, we may live to 85, but our arrival signals the end of cognitive independence for more than half of us.

She blames the baby boomer, the reinventor of what life is as the culprit in this thinking. We may have changed the way our youth unfolded and we may have upset the norm throughout our working careers. But when it comes to old age, it doesn't matter whether you have some sort of can-do attitude, you won't be able to change what is going to happen to you. You may envision a life of vigor and vitality, volunteerism and travel. We all need something to keep us moving forward. But Jacoby says we are ignoring the hard facts of life. We'll still get old. And with age comes the maladies of that time. Still there and still the same unsolvable mysteries.

So we will reach a point somewhere in the future - and the odds are in favor of this thinking - when you will no longer be the person you are right now. The years that you believed would be full and vital are now gone and you are collecting in the form of equal - possibly inflation adjusted - income that you can't spend. You scrimped in the early years of your retirement, downsized, even counted every penny. And then later in life, it doesn't matter. My suggestion was to start out big and taper back. Perhaps gradually easing back from a 6-7% withdrawal rate in the first ten years of retirement to a paltry 2-3% by the time you are 80 years old.

The result would be more or less the same with you using the money in the early years to do what you thought you could do and scaling back as your new sedentary lifestyle takes hold, an inevitability we can't avoid. "Young old" is easy to imagine. "Old old", not so much.

But the choices we make right at the moment of retirement may have a greater impact on how well that retirement is financed than we may have previously thought. Those bear market retirees, the ones who graviate towards annuities more so than their cohorts who retire in the midst of a bull market, may end up doing better over a longer period than their more optimistic cohorts.

I am of course referring to the studies done by Wade Pfau, an associate professor at the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies in Tokyo who has suggested that retiring during a bear market is actually the best case scenario. His thinking is that a bear market provides more upside potential than a bull market would. On this point, he may be right. Our penchant to follow the herd during a bull market gives the impression that markets will always go up.

And there is some proof that for a time, they will. There is also proof that if you retire during a robust bull market, you will be more inclined to believe that you possess some sort of powerful ability to manage your money better. But bull markets fall and this causes confusion among those who may have deluded themselves into thinking they were more skilled than they were.

Professor Pfau thinks that a 60/40 stock split is optimal and if you invest over the course of 30 years at a rate that is close to 17% of your pre-tax income, you will be able to have 50% of your pre-retirement income, inflation adjusted, throughout your retirement. Staring earlier will mean less needed to get to the same mark. And of course this excludes any other money you might receive in retirement.

You are probably saying to yourself, 'that's a lot of income to sock away' and you'd be right. But this is one thing that hasn't changed: if you think you haven't been putting enough away, you are probably right. If you think old age is something that will resemble the first day of retirement for the next 30 years, you would be wrong.

Baby Boomers should be thinking about spending more when they are healthiest. Because 'old old' doesn't give you the chance to revise your planned 'young old' retirement.

Paul Petillo is the managing editor of Target2025.com/BlueCollarDollar.com