What do you think of Target Retirement Mutual Funds?

Question

I am opening one with T. Rowe Price - Target Retirement 2040. Next year, my husband will open one with Vanguard. Since we are novice investors, are these the best places for us to park our retirement savings?

Answer 1

You will know my answer to this question when you read my answer to your other question that you posted. Good luck. But you will not need good luck if you begin doing research now into investing. Instead you will be able to relie on your knowledge.

Answer 2

It's a good start. Vanguard is a fantastic company. Check out:
http://flagship4.vanguard.com/VGApp/hnw/FundsSnapshot?FundId=0696&FundIntExt=INT
For their own Target Retirement 2040 fund. They also have a target retirement 2045 fund, if interested.

Both firms' Target Retirement mutual funds set a specific retirement year and invest according. Ones with a later retirement date are more aggressive and therefore riskier. Ones with an earlier retirement date are more conservative in order to preserve capital rather than have it appreciate a whole lot.

In short, I do think T. Rowe Price's Target Retirement Funds are good. The total expense ratio for the 2040 one is 0.84% which is very good. The Vanguard Target Retirement 2040 (VFORX) has an expense ratio of only 0.26%. While it's a minimal difference from the T. Rowe Price offering, I'd stick with Vanguard. If you can't, it's not a huge deal but I've been with Vanguard for a few years and can't recommend them or their products enough. Service is fantastic as well. Good luck.

Answer 3

The definition for a Mutual Fund (MF) from Wikipedia:
A mutual fund is a form of collective investment that pools money from many investors and invests the money in stocks, bonds, short-term money market instruments, and/or other securities. In a mutual fund, the fund manager trades the fund's underlying securities, realizing capital gains or loss, and collects the dividend or interest income. The investment proceeds are then passed along to the individual investors.

Let’s look at Investment Company of America (ICA), owned and operated by American Funds (AF). AF is an awesome fund company for a couple of reasons. There are several advantages and disadvantages:

1.AF is a private company which means they only answer to their MF holders. Fidelity is a good company also, but they are owned by stock holders. In the long run the company that only answers to you, the MF holder, is going to look out for your best interests.

2.AF also has some of the lowest annual fees to maintain an account of any MF company. All that being said, depending on your situation ICA may or may not be good for you. You need a competent advisor to help you with that.

3.I would be cautious with ICA as it is one of the largest MF in the world. They may seem like a good thing but it actually can be bad. It means it has much less flexibility to move its money around when conditions warrant it.

4.As far as EJ goes, they hire people on average who have very little experience in the industry, so at a minimum make sure your rep has a lot of experience and didn't just start last month at this. They also have agreements with companies like American Funds where their reps get a bigger commission to them then they do with other products. The concern being your advice from EJ might be tainted by the reps desire to get more commission. You need to work with an independent rep to assist you with you decisions; one who will give you all the information and doesn't have a hidden agenda.

Now let's look at MF's, in general, or the decision to use one at all.

If you invest in a MF, you have turned that responsibility over to someone else. To me, they are mostly the same, in general, in terms of results. Fewer than 10% can beat the Dow or other index it follows because of their fees. Why would you pay someone you don't know, whom will almost certainly underperform the market, an annual fee of 2.5% to do something you can do yourself, and do it better by buying an ETF, without any input from you after the initial purchase? An ETF is a publicly traded “Exchange Traded Fund, that trades just like a stock). Just buy the Diamonds (the DJIA ETF) if you want to let it ride on the Dow, or the Spyders (SPY - the S&P 500 ETF), or the Nasdaq (QQQQ), or diversify across the entire market by buying all three. The ETF's trade just like a stock or MF. If you want to diversify, and you want to Buy and Hold, buy an ETF.

A MF is always "in" the market, so you are at the mercy of the ups and downs of the Dow. Since you don't manage your risk, you can't put a Protective Stop on a MF, at say 10%, to lock in your profits when the market goes down. Since you spend more time watching TV, or more time deciding the color of your new car, than you do on learning how to manage money, you don't have a clue what's going to happen. That is not my idea of investing.

Actually, if done properly, it is more work to investigate all of the MF's and their advisors and their traders and their fees and their methods, than it is to investigate all the similar applicable info about stocks. You shouldn't choose to be ignorant, regardless of your investment vehicle, and just blindly turn your money over to a stranger because they are "listed," like you do at a bank. Some MF's are downright reckless and go out of business. Stocks are "listed," as are commodities and ETF's and everything else. With a mutual fund, you've just added a whole new set of unknowns to the equation, simply because you don't want to know anything about it.

The market is a living thing that does what it wants, and will go where it wants, when it wants. Nobody knows these things. Your question seems to interject that somebody has "The Answer." The best you can do in any investment is try to increase your odds of success and reduce your risk. You can do these things yourself, but not in a mutual fund.

MF's are so 20th Century. Relics of the past. Unneccessary. Buy an ETF. Or sell an ETF short and bet on the downside. There are two sides to every market, not just the upside.