The Sun's Financial Diary

If you’re a retirement plan investor or just someone who’s looking to sock a little money away for a later time, you may have already found out that target date mutual funds are rapidly gaining in popularity.  Target date funds, also known as life-cycle funds, are investments that are managed with a specific time frame [...]

Retirement income fund is a relatively new product the mutual fund industry offers investors who want to maintain a steady stream of income when in retirement. Generally, retirement income funds, sometime also call managed payout funds, are actively managed mutual fund portfolios that consists of many individual mutual funds that can be either passive/index funds [...]

Last weekend, I received a letter from Vanguard, informing me that one or more of my Vanguard funds held in IRA account with the company now qualify to be promoted to Admiral Shares. This followed a recent announcement from Vanguard that it has lowered the minimum amount required to qualify for the lower-cost Admiral Shares. [...]

Everybody is looking for a way to squeeze a little more return out of their investments. Some will take the next step up the risk ladder while others will look at tax-advantaged accounts as a means of keeping a little more in their pockets. Both of these are certainly reasonable methods of improving your investment [...]

This topic has been discussed many times in the past. In my last post in April 2009, I mentioned that despite the apparent lower costs, index funds remains unpopular among investors, accounting for only 12% of the total equity mutual fund assets as of 2007. There are many reasons that investors turn their back on [...]

I have shared the asset allocation of our mutual fund investments a few times in the past. However, as you may have noticed, I didn’t include everything in the analysis. The reasons for only looking at the allocation of mutual funds invested in our taxable accounts instead of the entire portfolio, which includes taxable accounts [...]

Before the April 15th tax deadline, I opened and funded a SEP-IRA account with Fidelity. The reason I chose Fidelity is that it is also the custodian of my 401(k) and my daughter’s 529 account (I am using the Fidelity UNIQUE plan which is tied to the Fidelity 529 Rewards Card). In addition, I also [...]

Are you investing in equity mutual funds? If so, are you using index funds or actively managed funds? I have mentioned a few times in the past that even though I use all index funds in my retirement savings accounts, I have nothing but actively managed funds in taxable accounts. The reason isn’t that I [...]