Okay, we’re going to get into the market again—at least, we will if E*Trade stops telling me “quotes unavailable” when I try to buy. I have a little money to put into my IRA. I’d be just as happy holding off, but Jon thinks we may have hit a bottom—he noted that housing starts are [...]
Entries Tagged as ‘retirement’
January 3, 2009
My investments in 2008: a reckoning
I’ve been thinking about laying out an investment strategy for 2009. But first, I thought I’d review the performance of my IRA and 401(k) last year. The bottom line: I didn’t do nearly as terribly as I thought–my returns were roughly equal to those of the S&P 500. Still, there are things I should have done [...]
December 23, 2008
Real estate as a hedge against a market collapse
Saving to Invest included me in this week’s Carnival of Personal Finance, and I noticed another great post, “What if saving was stupid?” It makes a powerful argument for investing in real estate instead of keeping money in the stock market or in a savings account. The author’s in-laws, who lived in the Soviet Union, saved [...]
October 10, 2008
In praise of index funds
Wow, it’s been a rough week in the market, hasn’t it? My IRA is now down 35 percent. Even VDC, the consumer products ETF I bought a couple weeks ago, is down 15 percent.
And we sure picked a bad time to start playing around with buying individual stocks. Except for RQI, a real estate ETF [...]
September 24, 2008
How much should you be saving for retirement?
I’ve written before about the flaws in mortgage calculators. Retirement calculators, it turns out, have their own problems. In this interesting Salon article, the writer tries several different calculators, some of which have absurd results. One of them suggested she needed to be saving $47,000 a year.
This is a hot topic now, as many people have recently [...]
