Tuesday, January 26, 2010

IRAs: Traditional vs. Roth, Part 2

I'm always trying to learn more about investing, and although much of what I read covers material I already know and understand, sometimes I run across information that increases my understanding significantly.  I recently ran across a couple of articles on IRAs on moneychimp.com (mentioned in my last post on useful investing websites) that increased my understanding of the tradeoffs between traditional and Roth IRAs.  Based on what I read, I started working on a spreadsheet to further deepen my ability to analyze the tradeoffs.  Based on this work, I revised and added to my original post on IRAs: Traditional vs. Roth (December 16, 2009).  For those who may have already read it, I'm repeating the main additions to that post here, in case you don't want to reread the original article.  I'll also include some examples to demonstrate the tradeoffs.

Sunday, January 24, 2010

Useful Financial/Investing Websites

I just ran across an interesting financial/investing website, and thought I'd use a blog entry to list various sites like this that you may want to visit.  I'll update this entry as I run across other sites of interest.

UPDATE:  Rather than updating this blog entry with new sites, I've added sections with links to investing blogs and web sites I like.  See the navigation bar to the right, under the blog archives.

Tuesday, January 19, 2010

Asset Allocation: Part 2

Introduction

In Asset Allocation: Part 1, I discussed some of the thinking behind diversifying your portfolio among stocks, bonds and cash.  You can accomplish this quite simply with 2 or 3 low cost index mutual funds, and some highly respected financial authors and researchers recommend keeping it simple, and doing exactly this.  However, other highly respected financial advisors/authors/researchers recommend splitting your portfolio into more asset classes, and cite research that demonstrates that this has often (but not always) provided higher return with lower risk over the long run.  This is what I'll be discussing in this post.