Comments on: Retirement Nestegg Report – March 2008

By: MFJ

MFJ — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 12:49:38 +0000

@Monevator -

I agree with you about tracking it month to month could make you do stupid things, but I’m pretty confident in my resolve not to ever do anything stupid in reaction to the market. The main reason I do track it is so that I can look back in 10 years and plot my monthly progress and show how very little market fluctuations affected my nestegg growth. Think looking at a chart of the DJI over 30 years – you’d almost think it did nothing but go up.

To be honest and I’ve said this a number of times in these monthly reports I actually like to see my investment performance being negative if that means the entire stock market is headed down as that means I get to buy more stocks on the cheap. I’ve always been wishing for a good recession and who knows looks like I might have got my wish and I’m taking full advantage of it.

By: Monevator

Monevator — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 09:47:40 +0000

On the ‘glass is half full’ front, you’re absolutely right that when your nest egg is small you can make a huge difference with savings out of salary. It gets harder to think like this when a bad month on the markets moves your net worth more than you could save in a year! I think it’s a potential danger with tracking net worth, though I accept it’s good to have targets. You might want to consider tracking the income your nest egg generates per annum, which should fluctuate a lot less.

By: MFJ

MFJ — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 12:35:14 +0000

@ T – yeah I know about the $30 fee and I don’t trade that often, but I do usually make more than 4 purchases a year at Scottrade so I will come out ahead even with the fee.

I tend to purchase individual stocks for my IRA accounts and often purchase in small chunks and then averge down if the stock falls so I probably end up making maybe 15 trades a year.

By: T

Wed, 02 Apr 2008 05:01:21 +0000

Why did you open a Zecco account? Do you trade often? There is a $30 annual fee for IRAs, versus $0 for Scottrade. So I guess it depends how many trades you make in that account per yr.

By: j2r

j2r — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 21:13:14 +0000

heh… I think everyone that has money in the stock market (long) is in the same boat..

I haven’t closed my March numbers yet, but I’ll prob have a net loss.

April started with a bang though… Let’s see how 2Q is gonna end.