The DOW is only 0.8% off 20% losses the technical level for declaring a Bear Market. What does a Baby Boomer do now?

In these volatile times cash is a position for Baby Boomers in retirement. But it may be too late to exit those poor performing buy and hold mutual funds.

It is time to review your retirement nest egg and consider each investment. If there are significant losses in some of the investments then it makes no sense to sell them right now. But if you have some investments down around 10% it might be worth considering putting them into cash.

This will at least provide you with some income to hopefully ride out any further market turmoil without forcing you to sell those investments with large losses against them.

It may be best to look at the Fixed Interest/Income Investments first. Read the rest of this entry »

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This post is just a quick one to point out several important topics affecting Baby Boomers approaching retirement. I find MarketWatch has some very interesting articles and audio’s. Some I don’t agree with but the ones listed here I believe are important to us Baby Boomers.

This will be a short post because a family matter has taken most of my attention. It should be back to normal tomorrow.

They just seemed to me to hit all our hot buttons with their topics.

Consumers more at risk from financial scams as stocks slump Read the rest of this entry »

The Stock Market is going through some high volatility at the moment, as I am sure you know. The daily swings in the value of stocks is enough to give even the coolest of Baby Boomers some heart pounding moments, especially if their nest egg is fully invested. The US markets are down 11% from their highs of 2007.

If Baby Boomers are to learn anything from the recent past we must study what happened and learn from it. It was George Santayana who said “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”. Are we to forget the crash of 2000 and suffer the same fate in 2008 as Baby Boomers who retired in 2000 and who have just recovered much of their nest egg, only to be hit again by the sub-prime debacle and the credit crash?

In my research for better and more secure ways for Baby Boomers to invest when in retirement, I have come across many sites that talk about the effect a down market can have on a nest egg in retirement.

Many of these quite correctly talk about the dramatic impact of negative stock market returns on a nest egg in the early years of our retirement. But I have found none that actually tried to show a scenario that I can relate to and do it in a simple way. Read the rest of this entry »