I wrote this article on May 14th, 2012 for my Golden Valley Patch Blog.
The school year is winding down. College graduates are coming back home, and high school graduations are coming up. It the time of the year that most people are making summer plans of all kinds.
The summer of 2012 has begun. Is now also the time to plan for another summer stock market decline?
It is great to be optimistic. But in managing your Minnesota company 401(k) account, it is much better to be realistic.
This summer would be a great time to can take some simple and common sense steps to improve the investment performance in your company retirement plan accounts.
Now is an especially good time to take a close look at how you past negative behaviors are holding you back from preserving and growing your retirement nest egg.
In most cases, individual company retirement plan participants are unqualified to manage the large dollar amounts in their company retirement plan accounts. Making the necessary investment management decisions based on changes in the stock market risk levels makes most people uncomfortable.
The vast majority of individual company retirement plan participants don’t know the facts of how their company retirement plan mutual funds will perform in both up and down stock market environments.
The biggest reason that the “buy-and-hold” investment management approach is so widely followed by individual company retirement plan participants is because it is much easier to ignore the realities of the U.S. economic and stock market cycles.
Making important investment management decisions periodically in your company retirement plan is not fun. That is especially true during a Minnesota summer.
The “buy-and-hold” investment management process makes most people think that they can ignore even the most basic investment management decisions in their company retirement plan accounts.
The financial media is no help. They always view the stock markets as a great place to be invested at all times.
It is no wonder that most individual company retirement plan participants ride the stock market cycles up-and-down every few years with little or no investment gains to show for their efforts.
We could be at another inflection point in the U.S. stock market cycle. Now is a very good time to take a few minutes to truly understand what you own in your company 401(k) retirement plan account.
Ric Lager
Lager & Company, Inc.
