An open reply to the spam one of the companies I have retirement investments in keeps sending me:
Thanks for caring, but I know my own finances. I am well aware that my investments with you are 100% in stocks. And I am well aware that this is above the amount of stock exposure recommended asset allocation mix for an investor at my age. Your reminding me of such things is unnecessary. There are two primary reasons for this, the first and foremost is that my investments with your firm are not my entire retirement portfolio and are intended to balance out employer-matched investments which are radically under-exposed to stocks, which you could be excused for not knowing, but the fact that such under-exposure comes through a target-date fund though one of your competitors , and that particular target-date fund has massively under-performed my investments with your firm over any time interval you care to set has rather soured me on the very idea of target-date investment funds. They seem to be little more than an excuse to make churning commissions by re-balancing more often that necessary according to pre-set timing guidelines which ignore the current market conditions.
Which brings me to the 2nd reason, and this is one that should worry people in the money management business, is that in the current liquidity-trap economy with the Federal Discount Rate up against the 0% bound and likely to remain there, putting money into bonds or cash-equivalents is utter madness - the only sane options are stocks for believers in the recovery or precious metals for doomsday preppers. Yes, that's right, I just said that people preparing for doomsday are making better investment decisions than the one you keep trying to sell me on. So I will be passing on your target-date fund for roughly the next forever. And each additional time you try to sell me on one, I will recommend to more and more people that they should do likewise.
RANT: Quit trying to sell me target-date funds.
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Josh_Kablack
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RANT: Quit trying to sell me target-date funds.
"But transportation issues are social-justice issues. The toll of bad transit policies and worse infrastructure—trains and buses that don’t run well and badly serve low-income neighborhoods, vehicular traffic that pollutes the environment and endangers the lives of cyclists and pedestrians—is borne disproportionately by black and brown communities."