The Sun's Financial Diary

but are they keeping pace with the growth of the fund assets? Early this week, Morningstar has an article which says that the costs of owning mutual funds are declining over the past 15 years. This is definitely good news for investors who use mutual funds as investment vehicle for their future. According to the [...]

Late last month, Vanguard introduced simplified fee structure aimed to reduce costs on owning Vanguard funds. Though at first, it seemed that replacing $10 fee with $20 fee was going in the opposite direction of reducing investor’s cost, Vanguard does offer a couple of ways to eliminate the fee all together for good and one [...]

The Digerati Life is hosting this week’s Money Question. The question that was asked this time is What are your investing strategies and how have you decided to allocate your money? What does your portfolio look like? I have discussed several times in the past about my portfolio, the most recent one was in April [...]

Sure Vanguard has some great funds with lowest expense ratio that you could find in the mutual fund industry. However, to invest with Vanguard, you would have to have a deeper pocket because most of its funds have a minimum requirement of $3,000, which essentially prevents investors with small amount of money to start investing [...]

According to Wikipedia, socially responsible investing (SRI) describes an investment strategy which combines the intentions to maximize both financial return and social good. In general, socially responsible investors favor corporate practices which are environmentally responsible, support workplace diversity, and increase product safety and quality. In the May issue of Financial Planning magazine, there’s a special [...]

Good news mutual fund investors! Low-cost mutual fund giant Vanguard announced today that it’s simplifying its fee structure by replacing four fees with one account service fee. According to the announcement, effective April 26, 2007, the following four $10 annual fees will be eliminated: The custodial fee on traditional IRAs, Roth IRAs, and SEP–IRAs with [...]

No mutual funds are equal, even if they track the same benchmark, and this is also true for lifecycle funds. Lifecycle funds, also known as target date funds, are getting popular among investors who seek optimum asset allocation for their retirement investments. The idea of a lifecycle fund is that the fund’s asset allocation evolves [...]

You are probably familiar with the Rule of 72, which tells you when the one dollar you invest today will be worth $2 once you have a rate of growth. If your annual rate of return is R%, then it will take you (72/R) years to double your money. For instance, for a 6% return [...]