Simple Minded Investor

The Minneapolis Star-Tribune financial advice columnist, Chris Farrell has an article in the Sunday May 1, 2011 edition that epitomizes the results of over-simplified financial analysis. For some reason, most of the media's financial advisers seem intent on ignoring the complexity of comparing Roth and IRA contributions and the result is often poor advice. Let's take a look at the media's conventional wisdom and how it compares to reality. Most media financial columnists will say that an IRA and a Roth contribution are equivalent assuming that your tax rate is the same on both ends. If you expect your taxes to be lower in retirement, then the IRA will give you a better return. If not, then the Roth is probably a better investment. On one level this is accurate. If you put $100 into a Roth IRA and are in the 25% tax bracket, you will have spent $125 including the taxes. Lets assume your investments break even over the next ten years and then you withdraw the balance of the...

You aren't smarter than the market. It really is that simple. A few years ago, in October 2008 right after the market "crash", I did a post on confusing volatility and risk . Yesterday an article on CNN Money in their "Ask the Expert" column made it clear that confusion about the risk of volatility extends to the media who provide advice on personal finances. You can read the column for details. But the short version is that someone approaching retirement asked for advice on changing the balance between different assets in their retirement accounts to reduce its overall risk. Specifically they wanted to know " Should we rebalance all at once or slowly over time?" The columnist response was all at once. His argument was " by transitioning to the new asset mix over time, you're really postponing (or perhaps more accurately, undermining) your decision to re-set the risk-reward balance in your portfolio. " This is just plain bad advice. ...