To: eaglebear who wrote (21121 ) 10/9/2025 8:43:00 AM From: cemanuel 3 RecommendationsRecommended By
Respond to Re: Any suggestions how you think someone that age should be invested. She needs to look at more growth in my opinion. I can tell you what I did. Our workplace default retirement plan was a targeted date fund - Vanguard 2025. I moved out of that as quickly as I could. We were restricted to MFs but had a wide range to choose from. I looked at sectors, ran through Fidelity's MF screener, and selected one of the top funds from several of them. Criteria I used was 5-year performance relative to other sector funds and Morningstar ratings of 4 or 5. I did an annual review of these each year and generally swapped out 1-2 annually. If they were comparable I chose funds where fees were waived so I ended up with quite a few Fidelity Funds. I don't recall all of the sectors (I could check but many would likely be different from what I'd do today) but I was aggressive looking for growth. For the period I had these - roughly 2005 (before that we could only choose between TIAA or CREF) until I retired at the end of 2021 - the best performers were biomedical and tech and one I should never have had and was late getting out of was Natural Resources. I used to hear colleagues talking about how they wished theirs was doing better. I always advised them they could, they just had to self-manage them. When I went over stuff close to retirement to help several people gave shocked comments like, "You're a millionaire?" Of course I was just showing my retirement stuff, not my personal stock investments which I started in 2017. It's one of the reasons I always say that if I can do it anyone can (not 100% true but I'd say 90%). I did nothing special, just spent a little time studying things, more time after 2017. But to me I made fairly obvious selections and didn't try to outsmart myself. The numbers were there for MFs, I went where they told me. I added very little of my own money to these as I was putting my own money into my real estate but did add a little early on. I think if I were starting from scratch I'd have opened a separate Roth outside of the company plan - the company put in what it put in, there was no match - and invest in individual stocks. But I was putting that money into it in the early 90's, harder to be self-directed then.
