Yearly balance of portfolios..........

[roger]

Hi everyone:
Is there a simplified method,internet site
or program that will help me to rebalance my portfolios
every year.Have no experience in $ matters and I'd like
to get as much information as possible.Thanks to all
replies.roger

[charlie]

Roger,

The best thing you can do for your financial
future is invest the time to educate yourself.
Otherwise, you will be at the mercy of financial
planners. Believe me, very few of them are
smarter than you and none are your "friend".

Please get a copy of Bernstein's "4 Pillars of
Investing" and all the mystery will be cleared
up.

I gathered from your other post that you are
already involved with a planner. IMHO, you
would be far better off putting your IRA into
something safe, like Vanguard's Short Term
Corporate Bond Fund, and spend the time
necessary to learn about investing.

If you really don't want to deal with handling
your own money, I recommend you check out
Vanguard's Life Strategy Funds or the Target
Retirement Funds. These are balanced index
funds that do the re-balancing for you automatically.
The cost of these funds is about 0.25%, which is
far cheaper than paying a planner to invest for
you and getting poorer results.

Please excuse the rant, but I have the same
discussion with my children frequently. Since
you are already retired you should know better
already.

Cheers,

Charlie (aka Chuck-Lyn)

[unclemick]

Let me join Charlie's rant.

My SO has taxable and tax deferred(IRA) Vanguard Lifesratategy Conservative. The dividends/interest are auto deposited into her Bank One checking accessable by her ATM/Visa card almost anywhere in the world. Her books are generally murder mysteries. Never listened to or hired a planner.

50% Wellesley/50% Dodge and Cox Balanced is another way if you like the work of rebalancing once a year and don't like index funds that much.

One of the Target Retiremnt Series is a third way.

Retirement investing is stone simple - if you let it.

I agree unclemick! Retirement planning requires
some thought, but does not necessarily need to be
revised daily. For example, I think about my
financial situation about every day (hard wired into
my psyche), but I make very few changes in my
investments. I believe most people make it overly
complicated.

John Galt