Nothing like a mention of Vanguard, and fees to scare the crap out of Amerprise.
Since she mentioned BRBCX. I thought it would be fun to do a comparison of it vs a comparable Vanguard fund. One of the challenges in figuring out performance is picking the right comparison. There is no perfect comparison. But a very good starting point is the Morningstar classification and the asset allocation. The blackrock fund has 65% cash and bonds,and 35% stock. It is listed as moderate allocation fund. Long time forum members can probably already guess what fund I'm going to use to compare.
Look at the chart below. As you can see the yellow line after 10 years as grown from 10K to just $20K (19,744 to be exact) while the blue line is a shade under $16k. But just as important look at what happened during 2008 and 2009 the blue fund dropped well below 10K to $8,600 or 35% decline from early 2008 peak. The yellow fund stayed above $10K the wwhole time. Now which fund would you rather own Yellow or Blue?
BRBCX Chart BlackRock Managed Volatility Inv C Fund Chart
It probably won't surprise you to learn that Blue fund is the BRBCX. Nor will it surprise long time forum members to learn the yellow fund is none other than Vanguard Wellesley.
So it is all fine and dandy to say
It all does make sense except for the simple fact that we had an awful downturn in 2008 and 2009, and that fund was suppose make downturn less severe, barely out performed 100% stock fund like Vanguard total market. The Vanguard Wellesley fund which is moderate/conservative allocation fund very similar to BRBCX not only made more money during virtually any period than Blackrock, but I bet most owners of Vanguard slept far more soundly at night than the Blackrock owners during the crisis.
There is a bunch of math to prove the Vanguard fund is less risky than the Blackrock fund eventhough they have a virtually identically percentage of stock and bonds. But since the math recently won a Nobel prize, I only have basic understanding of it..
One of the paradox of investing is that you need to be a very sophisticated investor to understand if you FA is doing a good or bad job. And understand concept like investment styles, time weight returns, and Sharp ratios.
But to to invest yourself with index funds is simple read a book, spend a few hours on website like this. Put the money into a index fund and once a year or so rebalance and you are done.
If you have any more comparison of Amerprise vs Vanguard fund to make I am sure we can help provide a different view.