The importance of a mutual fund portfolio

There are three things to consider when building a mutual fund portfolio. First, the most respected investors in history believe in what a mutual fund portfolio provides the small investor. Second, the most respected investors in history may never advocate for a mutual fund only portfolio. And lastly... You can read the full article here.

The Plight of the Rational (Investor)

For those of you who may not know what rational choice theory is, the behavior of picking what is right for you when it comes to your retirement plan creates what many are seeing as the greatest hurdle. The leap between what is right and what is most cost-effective, is the result of how we compare one move to another. This thinking which gave rise to behavioral studies that made Daniel Kahneman famous has proven to be less reliable than economists previously thought.

Consider the annuity. There is no doubt in anyone's mind that the concept of a steady stream of reliable income in retirement is what we all want and stive for. Knowing what we can expect gives us the much needed push to place a single monthly amount as the focal point in our plans for a post-work life. From a rational point of view, knowing what we can live on should drive us to pick this sort of product over any other method. But this is where rational choice theory fails.

If you knew you could determine the amount of income a certain investment could provide the logical (rational) choice would be to gravitate towards that choice. But those that do buy annuities are not governed by that thinking. And those who don't choose annuities for even a portion of their retirement investments seem to be ignoring what would be considered the most rational choice.

Perhaps we should first look back on the way we used to think. There was a time when pensions dominated the landscape. This sort of plan, referred to as the defined benefit plan had its drawbacks: it wasn't portable (you couldn't take it with you if you decided to change jobs) and it was at its most beneficial in the last years of employment (essentially a trade-off for years of sweat equity which became capital equity at retirement). The introduction of plans such as the 401(k) or defined contribution plan changed that thinking giving workers greater mobility (you could take your contributions and any matching employer contributions with you when left provided you worked for a certain amount of time called the vesting period) and of course the much advertised ability to self-direct your investments according to who you are.

These pre-401(k) days also saw a focus amongst workers of paying down mortgage debt in order to gain home equity. While this is still a good idea, it has fallen out of favor over the last three-to-four years for what could be called obvious reasons. Economic troubles aside, we view the pension as prohibitive and full ownership of our homes as all but unattainable.

Three decades later, after numerous bull markets and more bear markets than we feel should have occurred, we are back to thinking that this pre-retirement knowledge of how much we will actually have at when we stop working is not such a bad idea. And while paying down your mortgage hasn't gained the same attention, our thinking about retirement income is gradually shifting.

This shift is based on knowing how much you will actually receive rather than continually trying to calculate how much you can withdraw. But does the annuity provide the best offset between worrying about drawing down your retirement savings too fast and potentially outliving your "nest egg" or learning to live within the confines of a set amount paid to you year-over-year. Some of the decision is based on the ability to adjust spending while you are working, usually with the adoption of a "spend what you make" thinking which upon retirement become a "spend what you can [afford]". Neither work well.

While we are working, our spending increases to meet our income. That option disappears once you are retired replaced by spending that adjusts to you ability to optimize your portfolio to meet the needs you might have. You have no way of knowing what those needs are when you are working and only a slightly better idea what they are once you retire.

According to a recent paper titled "Annuitization Puzzles" Schlomo Bernartzi, Alessandro Previtero and Richard H. Thaler, the the conceptually difficult question of how much is available to spend is answered with the annuitization of retirement savings. In other words, annuities take the calculations out of the mix. Studies have revealed a certain type of withdraw (or drawdown mentality) that many attribute to two basic ideas: fear of health costs and the wish to bequest. These 401(k) retirees focus not so much on how much they will need to spend but how much they will have left to spend should something happen medically and if that doesn't occur, how much they will leave to their estate once they are gone.

The paper makes it clear that conservative withdrawal rates at retirement are usually attributed to wealthier retirees and quicker drawdown rates that are mostly done by poorer retirees are not the problem: it is the calculation of how much is enough. The bequest motive, the authors point out is confusing considering most of those who focus on leaving money behind live on less to leave more for children who quite possibly don't need it and in more instances than not, are more affluent than their parents. Poorer retirees entertain the bequest motive as well but usually find that they need the money in greater quantities sooner than they anticipated.

Can annuities fix this "hard" calculation? Possibly but there are some psychological hurdles. One is the focus on retirement at 65. The less educated you are, the more you focus on this age even if you know that by waiting you will gain even more spendable income in retirement. But also ironically, the better educated retiree is more focused on leaving something to their heirs and in doing so, underspend.

While the choice of annuitizing is difficult, in part because our biases are so strong, the benefits of knowing should come to the forefront. Researchers suggest that if annuities were part of your retirement options in a 401(k), we would use them. Research has also pointed to the pivot point, when we retire and how the markets are doing at that point, as playing a role in the decision. If markets are robust, we don't buy annuities. When we feel less confident in the markets, we tend to purchase annuities.

Annuities do have cost hurdles with a great many people suggesting the fees and expenses as a reason to look the other way. Perhaps the best way to beat these biases is to plan with an annuity long before you make the decision to retire and having the choice inside your retirement plan at an early age could make your future plan more clear. It is no easy choice and it certainly shouldn't be your only choice, but for a portion of your retirement savings it could be the single easiest idea to take the worry out of retirement. Knowing also by default, focuses your savings as well.

Learn more. You can even get approved for no credit loans.

Is it Time to Rebalance Your Portfolio?

We are all familiar with the most popular stories from “The Tales of a Thousand and One Nights”. But what you may not know is that this expansive collection of stories has no named author or authors, no dates or places of composition and no single national tradition. In Marina Warner’s new book “Stranger Magic” she offers this guideline to the stories: “I think,” she writes, “that the reader should enrich what he is reading. He should misunderstand the text; he should change it into something else.” She believes that the reality of magic resides at two poles: one the poetic truth and the other bound in inquiry and speculation.

We as investors are guilty of wishing for, even trying to conjure magic for our investments and the portfolios in which they are nested. We attempt to make the leap from the known to the unknown, to embrace the magical thinking of a thousand different storytellers. And like this tale, there is always another story left incomplete at dawn.

So I thought today on the Financial Impact Factor Radio with Paul Petillo, Dave Kittredge and Neil Plein we’d discuss the magical thinking around the portfolio rebalance. We have watched with great amazement, our investments rebound and take on new life in 2012. Markets are up and this is one of those rare feel-good moments. Unfortunately, feeling good isn’t something you relax with when it comes to how you are invested. In fact, the maintenance these portfolios require is often counterintuitive. If your car, for instance is running and performing as it should, we are not inclined to look under the hood for potential problems. Rebalancing a portfolio however requires you to do just that: look for a problem where you might not have thought one exists. As I mentioned earlier, there are a thousand and one ways to do this. So let’s start there.

A quick glance at your statement might reveal a strong move to the upside. Why should we do anything?

How do we know when to do this and I have asked numerous guests who come on the show how do we pick our risk level, which is essential in the rebalancing?

How do we get beyond the concept of funding our losing positions and selling off our winning ones in an effort to adjust our portfolios?

Listen to Financial Impact Factor Radio with your hosts:
Paul Petillo of Target2025.com and BlueCollarDollar.com,
Dave Kittredge of FinancialFootprint.com and Neil Plein of InvestnRetire.com

How Free is Free when it comes to Retirement Planning Advice?

Fear has become a big business in the world of retirement planning. If you're a Baby Boomer, this fear is heading towards a feverish pitch as you begin to worry that you won't have enough saved money to retire. So offers like the one we are about to from a reputable investment company will give you pause to consider whether this is right for you. After all, these are reputable companies offering what appears to be free retirement planning advice. But how free is free when it comes to retirement advice?

Vanguard has begun to offer you the opportunity to speak with a Certified Financial Planner. Based on what they refer to as extensive research supporting the need for contacting a professional, their new service focuses on those who are 55 years old or older. This is a worrisome group of late and the focus of a great deal of media attention. Being close to retirement is troublesome enough; close to retirement and worried that you will live longer than the previous generation (even if those stats rely on some very broad statistical factors) is even worse.

Being 55 years-old - which qualifies you for Boomer status - is close to retirement. But 10 years - by old school standards of retirement at 65 - is still a good amount of time to fix some problems, but not all. Vanguard studies have uncovered research that this group may be too overexposed to bonds (about 11% are totally into this fixed income investment) or too over exposed to equities (14% are 100% invested in stocks via mutual funds). This is not the idea behind asset allocation, a concept that keeps your money in a wide variety of investments in order to avoid sudden downturns that take the whole of your portfolio down in one quick swipe. Too much in stocks, as many investors were in 2008, resulted in a devastating blow to those portfolios. Too much in fixed income, some worry, could bring a similar event to these investors in 2011.

Asset allocation spreads the risk among different mutual funds within the retirement plan. For some, this suggests that you simply buy a target date fund with your retirement age goal and sit back and ride it out. But in many instances, the simplicity of this sort of investment suggests that you are not as focused (read: worried) as Vanguard would like you to be.

Target date funds are not everything they are sold to be. They can be expensive. They can be at the mercy of the basket of funds that make of the fund itself. they have managers who have never done this sort of seasonal readjustment over ten, twenty or thirty years. And not all target date funds do the same thing at the same time.

Vanguard's answer: your own personal financial planner. And Vanguard's solution to get you to use one: tell you its free. Trouble is, nothing is free including the advice, the readjustment to your portfolio or the ability of Vanguard to right decades of wrongs. the questions that this new programs suggests they will answer for you include some of the nagging questions they assume you have been asking yourself:

• When can I afford to retire?
• Will I have enough saved by retirement?
• How much can I spend in retirement?
• Which investments are best for me?

These are all good questions but basically all the same. A CFP can, according to Vanguard divine an answer following an online questionnaire  that is followed by a 45minute phone call from a CFP where they will examine who and what you are. By the time you finish filling out the form, you will know exactly how much trouble you are in and why. You haven't contributed enough, you havent taken enough risk and you will have to work longer, hope for a robust marketplace and continued low fees and taxes and a hefty dose of good fortune along the way (i.e. good health).

The problem here is that for the vast majority of Vanguard clients, the advice is far from free. In fact, it can be quite expensive in a number of ways. Up front, the cost is free fro those who are considered Flagship or Voyager Select clients. To be considered on of these investors, Vanguard ranks your use of their services in the following way: "Membership is based on total household assets held at Vanguard, with a minimum $500,000 for Vanguard Voyager Select Services®, and $1 million for Vanguard Flagship Services®." And for that you get free advice.

The client with a membership in Vanguard Voyager Services® would need a minimum of $50,000 to qualify for the advice but the cost is $250. If you are like the vast majority of 401(k) investors, both with Vanguard and without, the service will cost you $1,000. And then, the decision is still up to you.

In a recent press release, they described the service and how it could be implimented: "After you review your plan's strategy with the planner, you can implement it on your own, ask us to help you get started, or simply use the plan as a second opinion for your current investment strategy. The ultimate direction—and the investment decisions—are completely up to you." There is no fee schedule should you decide to have them help you.

So here is some basic advice that seems based in common sense but still widely ignored: contribute more. You may have your asset allocation out of whack, you may be invested in target date funds, you may be paying too much in fees for what you have. But the bottom line is you still haven't made the toughest choice of all: allocating more of your paycheck to the problem.

Once you decide to sacrifice on the real life side of the equation, I firmly believe that you will take a more nuanced interest in the retirement side. No one makes sacrifices, particularly the monetary ones that your retirement plan demands without getting involved. The more money you invest; the more you will get involved in those investments.

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

Using Mutual Funds in 2011 for Investment Success

Everyone wants investment success. And everyone has the tools at their disposal to do so. If that is the case, why aren't our retirement plans doing far better than they are?

You have mutual funds if you have a 401(k). Individual Retirement Accounts (IRAs)hold mutual funds as the primary investment and despite their use throughout the world of investment and retirement planning, too few people have a positive attitude about what this tool can do for them. Most of the negative propaganda comes in spite of the ease of use, often lower expenses than any other investment tool, accessibility, better transparency (or well on the way to providing better insight) and often, tax efficiency. Some do this with great effort; others revamp their portfolio only when an index is restructured.

So what are mutual funds and how can they improve your life in 2011? There are only two types: actively managed or those indexed to a specific grouping of investments. From there, it gets complicated but getting from there is where the whole traffic jam of ideas begins. It makes no matter, which school of thought you ascribe to if you do at all: everyone needs and actively managed group of mutual funds and a passive group if you expect to do anything worthwhile in 2011.

In the coming year, one which is predicted to be quite good despite my doubts, which I will put forth in couple of days with my year-end look at 2011, diversity will deliver more than simply chasing one ideology of the other. The "indexers believe that these sorts of funds are all you need to succeed in any year. Offset by relatively low costs, these funds make up for hoping that that through diversity they can achieve better than average returns for those who invest in them.

As a group, index investors are a fervent bunch. They espouse this investment as the be-all-to-end-all tool and in doing so, give those who chose the other camp - the actively invested mutual fund - to wonder if they may be right. There are reams of research that indexers point to as the reason why they believe this approach. But passively sitting back and letting the market determine your investment outcome is not for everyone.

Actively managed mutual funds are structured in the same way as index funds: a portfolio of investments (stocks, bonds or both), a manager (be it one, more than one or a computer), disclosure and regulatory rules that they must abide by, and performing as billed, if not better. The difference in who picks what is in the fund. Index funds are determined by an index published by such notables as Standard and Poors or Russell or Wilshire. Actively managed funds contain investments picked by management.

Both bring like-minded investors together to pool their money and in doing so, offset the risk and cost of having to build a similar portfolio on your own. Actively managed funds try and outperform their index counterparts in large part because it is these indexes, right or wrong, in which their performance is gauged and graded. If they do better than an index, investors notice, add their money and create increased opportunities for the fund manager to increase those returns with additional acquisitions.

It doesn't always work and some comparisons are unjust (how can you compare a fund with fewer than 100 holdings to one where 500 are held?) and do not paint a true picture of performance. But in tandem, they might work for different reasons for everyone interested in a more profitable 2011.

In times of turmoil, everyone feels pain. When the whole of the marketplace dropped precipitously in 2008, no investor escaped. Some were damaged more than others but as a group, we all felt pain in some form almost at the same time. Investors who simply plowed money into a 401(k) or loaded up on their own company's stock and thought that investing was a world of do-no-wrong, were given a rude awakening. Those that traded actively on their own and were beginning to feel some invincibility creep into their results were caught unaware as well.

And in the past year, investors in US stock funds did what they had done in the previous three, withdrew more than they invested, Called outflows, they impact mutual funds harder than the selling of shares from your own portfolio. These outflowing funds are produced with the sales of a portion of the portfolio. And every such move impacts the remaining shareholders in the mutual fund.

Inflows, or your money pouring into a mutual fund comes automatically in a 401(k), through deductions into an IRA and self-deposited by individual investors. Yet only a handful of people I speak with everyday likes the idea of a mutual fund as an investment and if last year was any indication, think fund focused on the US stock market alone is not the path to financial success.

Why? We want simple things to work extraordinarily well. Nothing does but we expect it of mutual funds. We want low fees, we want moderate risk and we want to know that our money is safe from market interruptions and taxes. And at the same time, we want growth, to retire early and to have our investments perform without hiccup for decades. Only mutual funds can do this - even if we dislike the idea.

Low fees, moderate risk, safety and tax efficiency is a tall order with three of the four fitting the index fund bill. Safety is subjective and safer, even more so. But no equity index fund alone can do this. No bond index fund alone can do it either. Target date funds, hybrids of other equity and bond funds (and often a basket of such funds from the fund family) promise all of the above but have yet to prove they can deliver.

Yet three out of four isn't bad. Put this type of fund in a Roth IRA and put as much as you can in it, consistently over 2011 and you will do as well as this year has done (which looks to be two back-to-back years of double digit gains for the S&P500 index). Even if you do half as well as the 20% plus gain in 2009, you'll be way ahead of where you'd be otherwise.

In the other group, looking for growth, outsized returns and freedom from hiccups, look to your 401(k) where your employer may be retuning to offering a match in 2011. If they do, this is not so much free money as hedged money. A 6% match added to your 6% contribution gives you a lot more room to assume risk that you probably are. Retiring early is a dream even as we acquiesce to work longer. But it can be closer to a reality if two things happen: you invest more and use actively managed funds in your 401(k) to get there and the market corrects a little in the first half of the year. This means buying more for less and positioning yourself for a good 2011. Not 2010, but close.

Whatever your outlook for 2011, a tandem approach to investing - using index funds and actively managed mutual funds might be the best approach in the next year. Be cautious of only two things: this isn't advise and be careful you don't over-expose yourself in any one sector.

Next up, my predictions for 2011.

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

Retirement Planning: Learning to Internalize the Good News

It's easy to find bad news. Retirement planning is built around the notion that we should expect the worst and plan accordingly. few of us do. But the idea is what drives this industry. 

There is good news out there however. But according to a survey done by Mercer, a company who promotes itself as a global leader for trusted HR and related financial advice, products and services, we have yet to internalize this information. We are still cautious, anxious and worried, more than we should be about the continued level of unemployment. These fears are showing up in our approach to retirement, how we treat the investments in our defined contribution plans, and the expectations we have for those accounts.

It's really not much of a surprise that, according to the survey "these fears are amplified among older workers, most of whom realize they are running out of time." The question is: should this be the case in a time of what appears to be economic growth, job stabilization and in spite of the volatility attached to the stock market, improvements worth noting?

This survey reflects on past results suggesting that when the economy does well, the people they surveyed usually express the same feelings. Not so much this time around and the survey suggested this anomaly was unexpected. 

Corporate profits are doing well and compared to a similar survey done last year, the outlook for the economy has improved dramatically. The improvement (21% did not think the economy was doing so hot last year at this time compared to 77% this year) puts the positive outlook at at pre-Great Recession levels.

And despite that, they found some remarkable trends still in place. People still think of retirement the same way - even if they predict they will work longer to get there. They still contribute to their 401(k) type plans - seeing them as the primary source of their income in retirement followed by Social Security and account held outside of the company sponsored plans such as IRAs.

The anxiety reaches much higher levels when it comes to confidence in replacing current income. Most don't feel as though they are doing enough or worse, are capable of doing more. The expectations of replaced income, once at 80% has fallen somewhat as workers have watched the continual erosion of the remaining private sector pensions. Keep in mind, companies have been steadily jettisoning pensions over the last several decades in favor of 401(k) type plans. What was once the promise of a retirement income they could calculate and the employee loyalty needed to get to that point shifted to a plan that was portable and could be used to lure prospective talent.

But those that still have these sorts of defined benefit plans have given their employees the impression that counting on these long awaited benefits may not be the smartest thing to do. In fact, only 19% actually expect the promise to be fulfilled, their companies to remain profitable enough to fund what are widely expected to be shortfalls, or worse, even still be around to keep those promises.

So why do only six out of ten workers suggest that they are not putting enough money away for a retirement they still idolize, even anticipate? They lament the late start. Fifty-seven percent think that they will be able to catch-up. Older workers are now leaning on Social Security as a more important source of income, with some even suggesting that their defined contribution plan will only contribute 26% of their retirement income.

And according to the survey, we are contributing less, across all age groups including the 50-plus worker, than we did in prior years. If we cite this worry about having enough to retire on as the primary reason we lose sleep, it would seem the answer would be obvious - contribute more. But we don't. This may have to do with lackluster company matches or company matches that fly in the face of good advice, such as matching only when the employee buys company stock or a prolonged vesting period that does not actually give the match until the worker has been in the plan for as long as five years.

There have been marginal drops in the amount contributed and participation. Add that to a more cautious approach and you have a retirement recipe for disaster - not just for the worker but for the companies who sponsor these plans. Andrew Yerre, Mercer’s U.S. business leader, says the findings “should cause concern for any plan sponsor who offers a pension plan.”

Are there simple fixes for all of these age groups? Possibly. Ignoring the requirement for matching contributions, even if there is none, should not stop you from embracing the plan and attempting to put as much as is financially possible into it. Understanding that this is not a test, and your retirement is in your hands, more so than it has ever been, should be enough of a catalyst. There needs to be an improved level of aggressive investment among younger workers and some added to older worker's portfolios.

Paul Petillo is the Managing Editor of Target2025.com/BlueCollarDollar.com

Retirement Planning for the Next Generation

Most of us are barely able to accumulate enough wealth for own retirement let alone thinking about providing for generations far removed from the event.  But if you could, would you?

The assumptions you make about how much money you will need in retirement are probably the most difficult exercise in the whole of retirement planning. The unknowns are so numerous that simply thinking too much about it gives many people the incentive to simply ignore the question. Taxes and inflation play a role in how much money we will need along with the condition of our health, our portfolios and our living arrangements. Who could possibly guess with any accuracy what those costs will be?

Yet, some of us can with certain investments. If you can wait until you are 70 1/2 years-old to begin taking your distributions from an IRA, and you take only the minimum amount needed, you may be in a position to make that IRA last much longer, across generations. Called a Stretch IRA, the sort of planning can create untold wealth for a child or grandchild.

More on the Stretch IRA from Paul Petillo, managing editor of Target 2025.com

A Change in Municipal Bond Ratings

This article previously appeared as a new feature at Target2025.com: Repercussion- A Retirement Review.

We are far from free of the clutches of the Great Recession.  The hold that the recent economic downturn has had on numerous types of investment portfolios will continue, even if, one the surface, it seems to abated somewhat in the equities markets.  The recent decision by Fitch, a bond ratings company, to revisit their grading strategies of municipal bonds may be simply cloaking the possible maturity wall facing bond investors.

Municipal bonds have historically been rated slightly lower when compared to corporate bond issues.  While the default rate for munis is much lower (0.7% compared to 2.1% default by corporate bonds) these debt securities used for public financing of roads, water, sewer and other public projects have often received a slightly lower rating.  This despite what appears to be a robust fiscal balance which includes increasing tax revenue, the ability to enforce revenue collection, control over expenses gives the municipality better flexibility, and the right of local communities  to tap reserves when needed.

The question is simple: will this change in ratings by Fitch (following a recent change initiated by Moodys), often moving munis up a grading notch provide better transparency or simply complicate the ability for buyers of these bonds to tell the difference?  This is of particular concern for those close to retirement looking to exert more stable control over their accumulated assets, fixing their projected returns and protecting capital.

It is our belief that munis will be approaching the same "bubble status" as mortgage backed securities attained just two years ago.  While Fitch claims to be looking at the long-term ("The aspiration is for Fitch’s ratings to demonstrate broadly comparable levels of default patterns over long periods") they may be looking at more historical data on the sector rather than the possibilities that in the near future, these securities might be facing the same trouble as the rest of the bond market might face in the coming years.

The "Maturity Wall", a point in the future when a great deal of corporate and Treasury bond issues mature and demand for debt might be overwhelmed by too many choices, often at higher prices and lower yields. Seeing that possibility will force investors to flock to munis if they feel as though they are immune.  They may well be in just as much trouble if the projects they are undertaking fall short of funding from the federal government.

More from Dan Seymour writing in BondBuyer

The Index Fund Conundrum Inside Your 401(k)

I do a popular radio show every Friday morning with Gina and Kat on MomsMakingaMillion. Each week, the topic progresses a little closer to a full understanding about your 401(k) – if that could ever fully happen!

This week, the ladies asked me: You talked about the risk of too little risk last week. This week I understand you want to take a look inside a 401(k) plan. A friend of yours was having a problem.

Yes we did discuss risk and the risk of too little risk. But the real risk might be lurking not in how you invest but in where you put your money in your 401(k). In fact, what your plan offers may be so limited that your choices boil down to good and not-so-good.

Let’s start with this: Most common, garden variety 401(k) plans offer index funds, lifecycle funds and if you are fortunate, actively managed funds. Plans can be big and small with thousands of options or just a few.

Life cycle funds represent a group of offerings focused on a particular target year that you would like to retire. These are essentially actively managed funds that shift, at least in theory, from aggressive to conservative investments over the course of your career.

Actively managed funds tend to pick a sector, such as large-cap stocks, and focus their investment prowess to the best possible return.

Index funds are designed to track an index of stocks (or bonds), ranging from the top 500 companies to indexes that track the smallest.

But before I tell you about how index funds can differ (which might seem odd, considering an index fund essentially attempts to mimic the published index) I want to talk about a person who wrote me last week. Although her email sounded panicked, she knew that there was little she could do about what her 401(k) plan was doing to her portfolio.

She told me she had chosen four funds in her 410(k) to invest in, the bulk of which was directed towards a small cap index and a mid-cap index run by Merrill Lynch. She believed, and rightly so, that this would be where the recovery would take place. These funds had always done well she told me, and when the markets turned sour and her funds were brutally beaten down, she kept her investment dollars streaming in.

Because markets do recover and her investments remained consistent, her portfolio value is now within a couple of thousand dollars of her year end balance in 2007.

Her concern was a change her plan sponsor was making in those funds, switching to another group of funds offered by Northern Trust. The reason according to a notice she received from her plan sponsor was the cost of fees.

Focused on Fees
In general, index fees should be as low as possible and here is why.
The idea is simple:
1.There is no trading to be done between the time the index is set and the next time it is adjusted;
2.There are no research fees;
3.And inside your 401(k), there should be no 12b-1 fees (the cost of advertising for new investors paid for by the current investors);
4. And lastly, because the company, in her case it was Kroger, the fiduciary responsibility (what a plan sponsor does is based on the assumption that it is best for the employee's future) demands the best deal.

That would be in a perfect world. Not to pick on her company's plan, but it doesn't fair very well when they are searched for using BrightScope, a retirement plan quantifier (information about their invaluable service can be found here) and this had her worried. Just because she has a plan, doesn't make it the best of all worlds, simply the one she has to live with.

Her plan was shifting her small cap index fund (with an expense ratio of 0.15%) to one that offered to track the same index but at 0.06%. At first glimpse, this seems like a good move. Lower fees are always good. Second glances however show how poorly the new fund offering has done compared to what she had before. Her new fund has a year-to-date performance of 12.52%; her old fund had chalked up a 29.83% return. Year-to-date, the Russell 2000 index of small cap stocks has racked up an impressive 22.43%.

Why would they do this, she asked? Other than being able to suggest that they are trying to do all they should for you, substituting one index for another based simply on fees, there seemed to be no clear answer. It is troublesome to be sure but not uncommon. It is also evidence that not all indexes are created equal or cost the same.

Index funds are subject to all sorts of influences. Fees run the gamut from absurdly low to ridiculously high. There is also the pesky probability of tracking error, a problem some fund managers get into as they try to outperform the benchmark. This tends to increase the expense ratio by forcing more trades and increased research. But it might also allow the index to outperform.

Keep in mind, your index fund does not buy every stock being benchmarked. An S&P 500 index generally has only about 75% of the stocks on the list in the portfolio. How much of each is often the reason for the disparity in returns. A Russell 2000 index fund has only about a third of the companies listed.

Most people think of Vanguard Group when they think of index funds. But their much-touted S&P 500 index fund carries an expense ratio of 0.15%. My friend’s small-cap index fund, the one that did so well, charged her the same as this less risky S&P 500 index fund cost.

Add to that, there is relatively poor information available to her even through her plan. A great many of the funds offered inside your plan are not offered to individual investors making information gathering difficult. Plan information is improving but comparisons are still hard to make. She was more upset that no one asked her if she would like to switch.

Not All Plans are Created Equal
Looking inside your 401(k) is never easy. For Boomers (and anyone focused on retirement), it can be especially difficult. You are torn in many cases between necessary risk and the fear of that risk. Your portfolio may not have recovered as quickly as my friend's did but consider the option of too little risk as one not worth taking.

There are basically only two ways of achieving the goals you may have set. You could increase your risk and/or increase your contribution. If you do the later, you can use the additional funds to purchase something more conservative while leaving your original contributions, the funds directed towards more risk, intact.

You should remember that if your plan offers only index funds and lifecycle funds (target-date funds), chose the index offerings. If your plan offers choices beyond index funds, choose the actively managed funds across a range of disciplines (large-cap, mid-cap, small-cap and international). In some cases, the fees might even be as competitive as the index fund that tracks them.

In the end, my friend did nothing. She had one of those not-so-good plans. Her only option was to increase her contribution to make up for the unrealized returns.

Paul Petillo
Managing Editor/BlueCollarDollar.com

Retirement Planning: Estimated Recovery of Your 401(k)

We all suffered losses in our retirement plans. We all saw the account balances in our 401(k) drop significantly from their lofty heights in January 2008. The biggest problem with the stock market crisis was not who lost the most - according to the Employee Benefits Research Institute it was those with the highest account balances - but why.

Had you been in your employers plan for less than five years, your account balance did drop, by almost 50% in some instances. But because this group generally made much more in contributions than they received in actual returns, their balances did not fail below zero. Even older workers who began to use these plans at age 55, still have positive balances in their accounts.

Folks who had the largest account balances, generally those in the study group aged 55-64 years old were seriously impacted by the downturn, losing on average 17%. According to EBRI, this median number and losses associated with it were due in large part to an overexposure to equities.

Despite all of the cries to diversify, to protect assets from just this kind of market correction, and the attraction to those gains offered by staying in equities far beyond when it would be considered wise, older retirement plan investors felt the pain to a much greater degree than younger investors/co-workers.

So what should you do if you are aged 55 or older? What should you do if you are younger, aged 20-34 or if you fall in-between those ages?

The older investor, had they stayed put in their original investments, continued to contribute and withdrew no monies from the plan either with loans or withdrawals of cash, will see their portfolios - and this is an estimate - recover in two to five years based on a modest market recovery of 5%. If you made moves to diversify after the fact, such as moving assets into safer investments such as lifestyle/target-dated type funds or simply moved into investments with less equity exposure, the recovery time could be twice what it would have been had you done nothing.

According to the EBRI: "Estimates from the EBRI/ICI 401(k) database show that many participants near retirement had exceptionally high exposure to equities: Nearly 1 in 4 between ages 56–65 had more than 90 percent of their account balances in equities at year-end 2007, and more than 2 in 5 had more than 70 per-cent."

There is a tendency for investors is to concentrate on the short-term rather than long-term performance. This is especially true of younger investors who realized outsized gains in their portfolios during the last four years. They were better suited to risk and were more likely to see those gains as justification to continue to channel money into their plans. Older investors, who may have been good contributors as well, felt larger losses in their portfolios because they had amassed larger balances.

In this type of market downturn, buy and hold may have been the best method of retaining long-term growth - but only for younger investors. Older investors had to learn the lesson of diversification the hard way. But either group, if they have the time and a modest market recovery, should see their balances return in less than a decade.

Why Investors Do What They Do: Diversification

In his classic book "Portfolio Selection" co-Nobel prize winner Harry Markowitz describes his topic as something other than securities selection. He suggests that a "good portfolio is more than a long list of good stocks and bonds. It is a balanced whole, providing the investor with protections and opportunities with respect to a wide range of contingencies."

Diversification often involves numerous human emotions and misuse of it is often the result of some of the topics we have already discussed (loss aversion, narrow framing, anchoring and mental accounting with herding, regret, the impact of the media and optimism all as yet discussed). But diversification is a way to avoid being wrong. It is a way to avoid regret. And when you are wrong, you tend to be really wrong.

These feelings of "wrong-ness" are often the result of events beyond our control. Non-economic influences can derail the best efforts of an investor along with weather, military actions, even the health of the President. As Markowitz suggests: "Uncertainty is a salient feature of security investing".

In order to avoid too many economically obscure references to diversity we will boil the discussion down to two theories: the expected utility theory and the case-based decision theory. The first theory suggests that if the investor is indifferent to an investment, in other words they are so similar that she/he doesn't care either way, that this actually becomes a form of risk aversion and hardly ever produces good long-term satisfaction with those choices.

In the instance of Case-based decision theory, Mohammed Abdellaoui offers the following from his book "Uncertainty and Risk": "it is assumed the decision-maker can only learn from experience, by evaluating as act based on its past performance and on the performance of acts similar to it." This leads to chance decisions.

But what is often overlooked is that not only do you decrease your chances of being wrong, you by default increase your chances of being right. Diversification will spread the risk and as a result of that, may allow you to miss the next hot stock or mutual fund. Because it is impossible to pick the future based on the past - recall the reminder that past performance might not play a role in future results - diversification makes the chances of getting some of the hot property but not all of it.

Consider this simple question: if Rome is located between 41°54' North Latitude, which American city lies at a similar latitude - Boston, Atlanta or Miami? Most folks when asked this question go with either Miami or Atlanta and do so with more than reasonable assurance that they are correct. But Boston, with 42° 21' 29" N is actually the closest by comparison.

Unfortunately, as Robert Hagin author of "Investment Management" points out that people when people make investment mistakes - something that can afflict both professionals and non-professionals, they fail the old adage of "a problem is not what up don't know; it is what you do know."

The most difficult part of investing is removing guesswork and the wishful thinking you may have for the act. Not easy by any means. But much easier if you don't overthink the act of spreading your risk.

Next up: Herding

Why Investors Do What They Do: Mental Accounting

Many of us can rattle off the balance in our set-aside accounts, the small stashes of money we allot for some special purpose. These accounts, whether they be for a down payment on a house or a vacation have been designated for something and when you mentally account for this money, you put a barrier around your access to it.

These are essentially illiquid accounts - at least in your mind. This type of thinking and the ability to strictly categorize is a special talent that many of us have and some of us need to work on. If you are able to keep even so much as a general budget of your household, you are probably using this kind of separation technique to make sure ends meet and the other accounts you have set-aside do not become victims of a small loan.

Retirement accounts, even those with restrictions on how you may access the principal amount you have contributed (penalties for early withdrawal, tax consequences) are good examples of this kind of behavior. Setting aside money to grow and adding to it on a regular basis is mental accounting. These kinds of accounts are often of the traditional 401(k) and IRA variety. It should be noted that one of the major selling points of the Roth IRA and Roth 401(k) is the access you have to your principal.

Mental accounting really becomes a problem, almost without noticing it has, is when you separate different elements of an investment. Some are willing to pay higher fund expenses in return for a riskier fund that has done well in the past. This is a cost trade-off that you make using this type of accounting error. Another example might be a bond fund that entices investors with a high yield but the underlying investment is losing capital.

(This last example is why there may be a flaw in the thinking that we overload a portfolio with dividend paying investments at the end of our careers. Once we begin drawing down the underlying investments, the dividends will also fall and this will lead to a quicker drain on the account.)

Much of this has to do with our love affair with our investment picks. Only the most hardened among us can engage in the cold-calculations that stock pickers really employ. Listen for the insincerity when a talking head on television begins a conversation about an investment with "we really like this stock...". That is, until something changes.

Mental accountants ignore these warning calls and often miss selling winners when they are winners and even worse, selling losers when they are losers. This throws the whole diversification within a portfolio out of whack. While we are still working, it pays to focus how we bracket our investments. Keep in mind that studies have proven beyond a doubt, bets on long shots increase as the last race approaches.

If you find evidence that an investment has changed, and some suggest that loss aversion plays a role in this type of mental reasoning, you need to reposition your portfolio. This is not as hard as it seems nor does it require as much time as you might think.

It does however require you open your statements when they come each quarter or look at them online once a month. Set-up a Google alert for each underlying investment (a good retirement account should have no more than eight mutual funds and as little stock as possible) or build a sample portfolio at anyone of the sites that provide the free service. At the first hint of doubt, investigate and make a decision on what you should do with the whole of the portfolio as the benchmark, not the performance of the individual holding.

Next up: Diversification

Retirement Planning and the Financial Professional

What do you do when, according to a recent post by Harriet Brackey of the Sun-Sentinel Tribune, professional advisers gather and one “thinks he can pick outstanding companies and beat the market” while another, “uses many studies to show that no one beats the market for long and so he favors index investments” and another offers an, “in the middle, putting the bulk of his clients’ money into an index-like investment, yet playing around the edges with active stock or bond picking, hoping to goose up the overall return of the portfolio”?

Why does this confusion seem shocking yet at the same time, not so much?

It seems that this group of professionals does not have a unified game plan for their clients for three good reasons.

There is money to made in confusion. If you can keep the theories shifting, the folks who pay for these services believe that they are doing better than their peers - and that brings me to my second point.

We spend far too much time creating benchmarks based on another person's idea of successful investing and retirement planning. Financial planners know this and try to "tailor" your investments accordingly, making them seem so personal.

The guy who suggests his client index should do exactly that. Perhaps a growth index (mid-cap or small-cap) a value index (large-cap) and emerging market and an international index would suit just about every investor's needs. Which makes the financial planner obsolete. Not only will that client save money in fees for the financial planner, they will also be paying less for the funds.