42 year old, married, kids, looking to retire in 13 years

[Matthew J]

The title says a lot. I'm looking to retire at 55 years old, my wife being 54 at that time. I would still have a 20 year old daughter and a 15 year old son (yes I'm a late Dad).

Right now my biggest challenge is setting up the asset allocation for my investments, and figuring out how to divide up that allocation among the (forced) asset allocations I have to pick from.

I plan to post more in another sub-forum, however I'll say this, I'm trying to balance 5 buckets:

1: Two 457 plans, one mine, one my DW.
2. Two Roth IRAs, one mine, one my DW.
3. A rollover (traditional) IRA, DW
4 and 5. College funds for my two children.

I'll also have a pension, but there is no asset allocation planning needed on that it is essentially a 'you get what you get' setup.

Thanks for listening, I've been a lurker for a while, now I'm coming out of the shadows.

 

[scrinch]

Matthew, welcome to E-R as an active contributor. Best of luck getting your assets allocated the way you want them. Don't sweat getting them exactly perfect. Get them about right and spend your time with your family. The money will mostly take care of itself once you get it settled.

 

[MBAustin]

Welcome, Matthew!

A couple of ideas for helping with your allocations:
- If all of the IRAs are with one custodian such as Vanguard, at least you can watch that allocation in one place. Vanguard also lets you do some tracking on the rest of your portfolio by using Yodlee (I haven't tried that yet).

- Morningstar lets you do portfolio analysis - I think you have to pay for premium to actually save the data but it's a pretty powerful tool and might be worth paying for it for a year (and if you threaten to cancel, you'll get a steep discount for the 2nd year). There have been a number of threads here on using it for analysis, including this one:

http://www.early-retirement.org/forums/f28/morningstar-premium-78155.html

Happy allocations!

 

[enginerd]

I think how you invest your 457 & IRAs will depend on how much of your retirement income you expect to get from your pension(s) at 55? If the majority of your income will be from pensions, I would put almost everything in stocks. (I don't have a pension, so I don't have a target asset allocation to help you)
As far as kids college funds, I'm using a target date fund that was offered within the 529 plan. Although I may change it up a bit and get even more conservative as the kids get into high school.