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Content Highlights A
Financial Warm-up |
Savings
Fitness:
Saving For Retirement Once you've reduced unnecessary debt and created a workable spending plan that frees up money, you're ready to begin saving toward retirement. You may do this through a company retirement plan or on your own-options that are covered in more detail later in this booklet. First, however, let's look at a few of the places where you might put your money for retirement.
Choosing where to put your money. How do you decide where to put your money? Look back at the short-term goals you wrote down earlier -a family vacation, perhaps, or the down payment for a home. Remember, you should always be saving for retirement. But, for goals you want to happen soon - say within a year - its best to put your money into one or more of the cash equivalents- a bank account or CD, for example. You'll earn a little interest and the money will be there when you need it. For goals that are at least 5 years in the future, however, such as retirement, you may want to put some of your money into stocks, bonds, real estate, foreign investments, mutual funds, or other assets. Unlike savings accounts or bank CDs, these types of investments typically are not insured by the federal government. There is the risk that you can lose some of your money. How much risk depends on the type of investment. Generally, the longer you have until retirement and the greater your other sources of income, the more risk you can afford. For those who will be retiring soon and who will depend on their investment for income during their retirement years, a low-risk investment strategy is more prudent. Only you can decide how much risk to take. Why take any risk at all? Because the greater the risk, the greater the potential reward. By investing carefully in such things as stocks and bonds, you are likely to earn significantly more money than by keeping all of your retirement money in a savings account, for example. The differences in the average annual returns of various types of investments over time is dramatic. Since 1926, the average annual return of short-term U.S. Treasury bills, which roughly equals the return of other cash equivalents such as savings accounts, has been 3.8 percent. The annual return of long-term government bonds over the same period has been 5.3 percent. Large-company stocks, on the other hand, while riskier in the short term, have averaged an annual return of 11.2 percent. Lets put that into dollars. If you had invested $1 in Treasury bills in 1926, that $1 would have grown to approximately $15 today. However, inflation, at an annual average of 3.1 percent, would have eaten $9 of that gain. If the $1 had been invested in government bonds, it would have grown to $44. But invested in large-company stocks, it would have grown to over $2,300. None of these rates of returns is guaranteed in the future, but they clearly show the relationship between risk and potential reward. Many financial experts feel it is important to save at least a portion of your retirement money in higher risk-but potentially higher returningassets. These higher risk assets can help you stay ahead of inflation, which eats away at your nest egg over time. Which assets you want to invest in, of course, is your decision. Never invest in anything you don't thoroughly understand or don't feel comfortable about. Reducing investment risk. There are two main ways to reduce risk. First, diversify within each category of investment. You can do this by investing in pooled arrangements, such as mutual funds, index funds, and bank products offered by reliable professionals. These investments typically give you a small share of different individual investments and will allow you to spread your money among many stocks, bonds, and other financial instruments, even if you don't have a lot of money to invest. Your risk of losing money is less than if you buy shares in only a few individual companies. Distributing your investments in this way is called diversification. Second, you can reduce risk by investing among categories of investments. Generally speaking, you should put some of your money in cash, some in bonds, some in stocks, and some in other investment vehicles. Studies have shown that once you have diversified your investments within each category, the choices you make about how much to put in these major categories is the most important decision you will make and should define your investment strategy. Why diversify? Because at any given time one investment or type of investment might do better than another. Diversification lets you manage your risk in a particular investment or category of investments and decreases your chances of losing money. In fact, the factors that can cause one investment to do poorly may cause another to do well. Bond prices, for example, often go down when stock prices are up. When stock prices go down, bonds have often increased in value. Over a long time -the time you probably have to save for retirement-the risk of losing money or earning less than you would in a savings account tends to decline. By diversifying into different types of assets, you are more likely to reduce risk, and actually improve return, than by putting all of your money into one investment or one type of investment. The familiar adage "Don't put all your eggs in one basket" definitely applies to investing. Deciding on an investment mix. How you diversifythat is, how much you decide to put into each type of investment-is called asset allocation. For example, if you decide to invest in stocks, how much of your retirement nest egg should you put into stocks: 10 percent ... 30 percent ... 75 percent? How much into bonds and cash? Your decision will depend on many factors: how much time you have until retirement, your life expectancy, the size of your current nest egg, other sources of retirement income, how much risk you are willing to take, and how healthy your current financial picture is, among others. Your asset allocation also may change over time. When you are younger, you might invest more heavily in stocks than bonds and cash. As you get older and enter retirement, you may reduce your exposure to stocks and hold more in bonds and cash. You also might change your asset allocation because your goals, risk tolerance, or financial circumstances have changed. Rebalancing your portfolio. Once you've decided on your investment mix and invested your money, over time some of your investments will go up and others will go down. If this continues, you may eventually have a different investment mix than you intended. Reassessing your mix, or rebalancing as it is commonly called, brings your portfolio back to your original plan. Rebalancing also helps you to make logical, not emotional, investment decisions. For instance, instead of selling investments in a sector that is declining, you would sell an investment that has made gains and, with that money, purchase more in the declining investment sector. This way, you rebalance your portfolio mix, lessen your risk of loss, and increase you chance for greater returns in the long run. Here's how rebalancing works: let's say your original investment called for 10 percent in U. S. small company stocks. Because of a stock market decline, they now represent 6 percent of your portfolio. You would sell assets that had increased and purchase enough U. S. small company stocks so they again represent 10 percent of your portfolio. How do you know when to rebalance? There are two methods of rebalancing: calendar and conditional. Calendar rebalancing means that once a quarter or once a year you will reduce the investments that have gone up and will add to investments that have gone down. Conditional rebalancing is done whenever an asset class goes up or down more than some percentage, such as 25 percent. This method lets the markets tell you when it is time to rebalance. |
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