30-day challenges
We are pleased to continue our 30-day challenge series. Past challenges can be found here.
This month's 30-day challenge is to Review your investment asset allocation! Some suggestions on how to do this:
- Gather data on your fund selections in each investment account that you have. Include any investment account: IRAs, 401(k) plans, 403(b) plans, 457 plans, TSP accounts, taxable brokerage accounts, and so on.
- Figure out what percentage of your overall allocation accross accounts is allocated to each of: Bonds, Domestic stocks, and International stocks.
- You can do this by looking up each fund at Morningstar, viewing the fund information on the company website, or just search for the fund name or ticker symbol plus the word "prospectus". An even easier way to do this is by using Morningstar X-Ray. There, you can plug in all of your investments and it will return your overall allocation.
- Don't panic! Whatever the result is, the last thing you want to do is change your allocation without doing additional research, reading, and figuring out what you want your overall allocation to be.
The goal of this exercise is to ensure that you're invested the way you want to be invested. For example, if you want a 20% bond allocation, is that what you have? If you want 35% of your stock investments to be international, are you reasonably close to that? (These are just examples, not recommendations.)
For more information on allocations, here are some recommended readings:
- From our Investing Wiki: Can you just recommend something extreme specific to get me started?
- From our Investing Wiki: What bond percentage should I have?
- From our wiki: 401(k) fund selection guide
- Boglehead background reading on asset allocation
Use the comments to discuss your allocation, any questions you might have, or if you're wondering what you can do about them.
Challenge success criteria
You've successfully completed this challenge once you've done two or more of the following things:
- Complete all 4 recommended readings from above.
- Finish your allocation review.
- Take steps towards researching and changing your allocation if desired.
Alternate success criterion
If you don't have investments yet, you may consider this challenge a success after you read the "How to handle $" steps up to your current step plus at least one step beyond that (bonus points for doing the recommended reading).
Submitted June 01, 2017 at 11:50AM by AutoModerator http://ift.tt/2rYl0gK
