With my retirement account I can go online at any time to look at the funds and even make changes if I choose. I have learned to watch my investments closely to see how they are doing in the market and make changes when I need to. Do you all have online access and if so, how close do you watch your investments?
Who doesn't have online access these days? I keep an eye on my investments on an almost daily basis but that's more out of curiosity than anything else. I do mark down the value of my portfolios (I have 2 different ones) at the beginning of each month so I can see how they are growing in the long term.
Now I am able to access it online I do most days, just to check if there have been any unexpected changes, that otherwise would have gone unnoticed. I think it's quite common now to check almost daily with the advent of online accounts.
I watch my money very closely. I rarely do anything inside my retirement accounts other than dollar cost average more investment dollars into current investments each week. I am more active in my taxable accounts.
That is a good idea to keep track of your monthly totals by documenting your starting and ending balances. I have not thought to do this, but I think I am going to start. I would love to see how my money grows from month to month.
Yeah it's worth doing. I have a very simple system, basically an excel file with Bank account 1 - Bank account 2 - bank account 3 - investment account 1 - investment account 2 - total And every month I just input the numbers (rounded to the nearest 100 for me) and calculate the total. Lets me see what's going on on the different accounts and I get to see if the total has gone in a positive direction or not.
Betterment came out with a study that for their service the more people check their accounts, the more they made changes, and most of these changes negatively impacted their account. The psychology of it is that the more often you look the more you see temporary downturns and decide your account is not doing well. If you check only occasionally them you generally see the more long term gains and feel like your account is doing well. A retirement account (this being the 401k sub-forum I assume you are discussing that type of account) is not for "buy low sell high fiddling about. It is for long term good investments that you acquire hold, and leave the hell alone. /my 2c.
I agree completely. I rebalance my 401k quarterly. (Since my company match is also quarterly and our company stock is revalued quarterly, this gives me the opportunity to look at those at the same time.) Other than that I check into my accounts every so often (less than once a month) to make sure things look like they should, but everything is set up with automatic purchases and there's not anything for me to actively do.
I dumped my local bank accounts except one small checking account to keep a safety deposit box alive. With Fidelity, I see my bank, brokerage and IRA accounts at a glance every few days. If I opt to set price alerts and some stop loss orders, I get SMS messages on the phone and tablet. But if the motive behind the original question is looking at market shifts and making adjustments, before nodding off a night I look at international market futures and indexes via the Bloomberg Business app. I usually look through the red and green numbers to see if I want to read further. Anytime the StockTwits app, even if I'm not looking at it, automatically alerts me if something in my portfolio or watch list is trending. Easy and quick, no muss, no fuss, and no serious surprises. HTH. YMMV.
My retirement plan provided by our company is the only plan I have. And I am counting much on that because the amount is substantial. I would be retiring with more than 30 years of service and getting 2 months of salary of each year of that 30 is a big number already that I think would tide me over until my last days on earth. But I know that I should have a concrete plan on what to do with that money since it cannot just stay in the bank. Money depreciates in value so fast so it is better to be invested in order to earn.
