Retirement Planning With Your Mutual Funds

With so much market volatility, it can be difficult to determine the best investments to use in a 401(k) account or IRA

. With such a limited selection, what should we do when they are all going down?

There seems to be a lot of confusion about these funds though, as many people do not seem to know what exactly mutual funds are or what they do. We will try our best to give you some insight and answer these questions. Usually when people talk about these funds, they are referring to a professionally managed collective investment scheme that is an amassment of money from a variety of investors which is invested into a verity of investment securities such as stocks, bonds, or commodities (mostly precious metals). Every mutual fund will be supervised and controlled by the fund manager.

Growth and income funds are the right ones if your goal is to create income and you can handle risks ranging from moderate to high. There are good chances of dividends and return on capital. If income is not your area of concern then fixed income mutual funds would be the right funds to invest. Equity income funds are another good choice. The fund manager is also the one taking responsibility for selling and buying different securities. The mutual funds falls under different laws and regulations, in the USA the IRS and SEC are over viewing the different funds.

Funds should be compared against their own peers and their respective benchmarks. While any fund in any category can have a good year, we want to make sure that a great return is not simply a fluke - a bet that paid off well. Looking a five-year performance can give us a better idea of whether the manager is able to sustain good performance. There will usually be one or two bad years in a five-year cycle, so this will help us evaluate a manager in both good and bad years. This performance should also be considered against peers and the respective benchmark.

Performance doesn't mean much if a manager is new. We cannot give much consideration to a fund's 10-year performance record if the manager has only been working with the fund for two or three years. That would mean that the majority of the fund's history is attributable to another manager. Funds with new managers need to be monitored carefully. Sometimes they are replacing a manager with a bad track record. Other times, managers retire or decide to move on to other opportunities. Nevertheless, it will take awhile to get a good idea of whether or not the new manager will be a valuable addition to the fund.

If you are looking forward to being a long-term investor and growing your capital, the aggressive growth fund would be the right one for you. These have high potential of return on capital but equally high chances of risk. If you cannot afford the high risk factor but are interested in adding to your capital growth then either growth, international and sector mutual funds would be the top ones for you. Growth and income funds are the right ones if your goal is to create income and you can handle risks ranging from moderate to high. There are good chances of dividends and return on capital.

If income is not your area of concern then fixed income mutual funds would be the right funds to invest. Equity income funds are another good choice. Estimate the time when you would be requiring the money you had invested along with the benefits out of that investment. This estimation could be a good option of finding top mutual funds for you, making your investments more secured and goal-oriented. It can be used as a starting point to help determine whether we should consider making changes to our current retirement account portfolio.

by: Arthur McCain

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