“Balancing our stressors”.
I have been deferring some on investing money we have in our individual stock account; I have to be in the right frame of mind to go in and tackle it.
One has to determine if some funds get managed by FA and what gets done by us. I initially had our FA advisor manage this account along with the Fidelity accounts they manage (FA funds had by our choice gone over to Fidelity after TD Ameritrade was bought out by Schwab and Schwab was not giving FA the same transaction ‘deal’ they had but Fidelity would). FA manages our Roth IRAs that are Fidelity Institutional accounts.
Our individual stock account went to FA care Feb 2022; by August the valuation had dropped over 10% because bonds did the crazy dropping along with stocks dropping (which historically had not happened….) - but that was that - I wasn’t going to pay them fees to also have them lose that kind of money.
I had closely studied the breakout of specific traded investments and each position - as institutional type of investment, it is spread over a number of investments. As time went on, I got out of investments that sucked and into investments that align with better performance over time.
2026, like 2025 had a negative first quarter but then picked up from there. I go in with better confidence on doing a good job with rebalancing.
With pulling money out of 401k and into our personal stock account, we have had cash/money market to also invest. I just sold 5 investments - 2 will close out after next market close (one was nontraditional bonds, and one was high yield muni). Only one of the 5 had any gains over these 4 years; cutting the losses now and the one with a slight gain was a corporate bond fund and I can do better in a stock fund/ETF.
Still had a YTD gain of 9.21%. I have to read up/study up and determine if I want to add shares to the best specific investment option with what we hold now and what investment choices to add. Then over time, I can rebalance.
Checked our 401k - have the best 3 options there with almost all money in one fund but a small amount of money in the two others to easily get the Performance Reports off of Empower; still in the best lineup. First Quarter was down 8.55%, but YTD is 3.37% with good gains in April, May, and so far in June.
Taking a break and will do more diving into this ‘work’.
DH asked me “why are we using FA?” and I was able to answer. In addition to our Roth IRAs, they manage the annuities we purchase (neither of us have pensions, so we spin off money from 401k when that gets too big and lower our risk with purchase of annuities). We get market updates from them (short 2-minute videos about every other week), and semi-annual one hour seminar. Then we schedule an individual one-hour session with our FA. Those two things are happening in July.