Web sites investors can love
Dalbar, a financial services market research firm, recently ranked the Top 5 Web sites for consumers.
The No. 1 site — T. Rowe Price Associates.
Price has many helpful, fun and eye-opening calculators. It’s probably best known for its Retirement Income Calculator. The program takes into account thousands of simulations to give you an idea of your retirement success.
Plug in your age at retirement and how many years you expect to be retired. (In other words, how many years you expect to live.) Then you input your assets, your portfolio mix (how much in stocks, bonds and cash-like investments), how much income you hope your assets will generate, and how much assurance you want that you won’t outlive your money. You can go for 50 percent assurance to 99 percent assurance.
Say, you start retirement at 65 and plan to live another 30 years. You have $250,000 in assets and 80 percent of that is in stocks and 20 percent in bonds. You want a 90 percent chance that
you won’t outlive your money. In seconds, you’ll discover that it’s not possible.
You are better off, according to the calculator, of taking no more than $825 a month from retirement assets if you don’t want to run out.
Or, you can use the mutual fund comparison tool where you plug in up to three mutual funds and get a comparison chart on fees, performance and Morningstar ranking. Four-star ranked Fidelity Magellan, for instance, returned 18.83 percent last year for a fee of 0.54 percent of assets. In comparison, three-star Vanguard 500 index that produced a 5.39 percent return, but for a fee of 0.18 percent.
And have you ever wondered just how much can your money grow in 10, 20, 30 or 40 years through the power of compounding? Take a look at the Automatic Asset Builder calculator to find out what investing $100 a month at an 8 percent annual return gets you: $18,295 in 10 years; $58,902 in 20; $149,036 in 30; and $349,101 in 40.
There are loads more worth checking out.
Other winners in Dalbar’s survey: Wells Fargo was No. 2, Fidelity ranked 3rd, OppenheimerFunds came in 4th and USAA ranked No. 5.
