Category: investments

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Tax Savings, Part 1 Of 4: Why You NEED To Contribute To Your 401(k).

This is a guest post from My Financial Objectives. Catch the rest of his four part series at his site!

People are hesitant to start contributing to their 401(k) for many reasons; the current state of the economy, a feeling of youth, the notion that retirement is a long way off, other bills to pay, etc. Whatever the excuse, the benefits a 401(k) offer should make one’s decision to contribute a much greater priority.

This is the first of four posts outlining the four biggest reasons as to why it is so important to contribute to your 401(k). The four main reasons are:

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investments
5
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How To Employ A Balanced Investment Approach.

This guest post is brought to you by The Digerati Life.

When we hear of the terms “Short Term” and “Long Term” in the investing world, these terms refer to an investment period. Traditionally for tax purposes, the Short Term is defined as any investment holding time period less than one year while Long Term is any time period greater than one year. One technical difference between the two is how you record your Capital Gains and Losses on the IRS Schedule D. It has been suggested that small investors should not invest in the short term due to high commission charges. But with the advent of online stock trading, and lowered commissions offered by many discount brokers, that advice has less relevance.

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investments
1
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Mirror The Trades Of Financial Professionals With kaChing.

Not sure I would ever start doing this with my own money, but just came across a post at Lifehacker about kaChing, which lets you do the exact same trades as professional investors. Looks like it is an investment website that you can join, which used to just let you follow the trades of different professionals, but they just changed the site into a brokerage of sorts (although assets remain in your own account). Now you can have them automatically make all the trades that your favorite investing “genius” makes in real time:

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investments
0
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Why I Use Scottrade For My Brokerage Account.

The other day I alluded to the fact that while my individual stock-trading days are over, I still do own quite a lot of shares in companies that need to be kept somewhere. I mentioned this in that post because a reader emailed me the other day asking where my brokerage account was, because I guess I have only mentioned that my mutual funds and retirement money is kept at TRowePrice, and not where my individual stocks are held. Over the years, I have used many different brokerage houses to hold my stocks – SureTrade, ETrade, Muriel Siebert, and now Scottrade. I have had my account with them for many years now, and I don’t plan on ever leaving. This is for 3 main reasons:

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investments
1
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Solid Mutual Funds With High Minimums.

Those of you who have read this site for a while have probably realized that I am mostly a “set it and forget it” type of investor. While I have a regular brokerage account at Scottrade (more about this in an upcoming post), I no longer buy individual stocks – I am an all-mutual fund kind of guy now. I like to get in, contribute monthly, and let the guys who (hopefully) know more than I do, do all the hard work. Well, I just finished reading an article at SmartMoney that was discussing 13 high-minimum funds that supposedly give pretty solid returns, and I am always on the lookout for decent funds to contemplate getting into. Because some of you are also interested in mutual fund investing, I figured I would pass along the article for you to read in case you missed it. These funds have VERY high minimum investments, but if you have the money and want to get into some funds that are doing well, you might want to take a look. The funds they talk about are the Dreyfus BASIC S&P 500, Federated Mid-Cap Index, Fidelity Four-in-One, Fidelity Spartan 500, Frontegra IronBridge Small Cap, Harbor Capital Appreciation, Harbor Internationa, Masters’ Select International, Sound Shore, Vanguard 500, Vanguard International Growth, Vanguard Selected Value, and the Vanguard Tax-Managed International. The smallest minimum of them all is $10,000, so come with your wallet open! SmartMoney

investments
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