Gyroscopic Investing

Some of the author's opinions on planning:

It is impossible to predict returns, inflation, tax rates and financial events that may occur in your future such as
your elderly parents running out of money and needing help--or an adult child of yours with children of her own
getting divorced and needing assistance.  Few retirement planning programs encourage people to be conservative.
Many programs now are based on "average" or a "success" probability.  They fail to tell you that these are results
from past economic conditions and likely will not represent the next 20 or 30 years of your retirement.  Further,
they seldom account for investment costs which can rob a large part of your investment growth.  Researchers have
found that the average investor does far worse than security indexes used in these plans because the average
investor often buys near the top of market cycles and sells near the bottom.  It's for these reasons that I like
to see people not enter all of their savings in a retirement plan so that they have some reserves for economic
surprises.  It's also for these reasons that I like people to look at what would have happened to them had they
retired in 1965 because the following years had many return downturns and a period of very high inflation.
I have no idea whether such conditions were worse or better than we will see in our future, but the huge debts
of the world, our country, our states, our industry and our people are things that are not represented in any
of the historical "averages" or "success" probabilities, nor do they account for two decades of little individual
savings for retirement that certainly will have an effect on future consumption and when people will be able
to afford to retire.  So my own personal recommendations are to be conservative with your inputs into any
retirement plan.

mathjak107 wrote: All you need to do to get any account included is be sure it is designated on your asset page as part of your "retirement" goal..  it does not grab them from full view .

i have every account , even  my bank accounts and vanguard all included .  they all update instantly  automatically . even checks clearing .


i think what the page does where you enter the assets  is work in conjunction with full view  to auto up date because i manually up date zero out side accounts .

mathjak107 wrote: give me an example of one , i will check with mine

mathjak107 wrote: did you add e-trade to full view and do the accounts come up there ?

you should be able to go to the asset page in  the planner and check the account box to include it .

mathjak107 wrote: had a nice 2 hour meeting this morning . they will be running quite a few calculations for me .