Might be the first cassette tape I ever bought: Best of the O'Jays, maybe in about 1978 when I first put a stereo in a car.
Anyway.
To save money (can't possibly be any other reason) the corporation is shifting everyone over to a new 401(k) scheme. We have to make all new selections or they will give us the default. Internal websites are a-buzz with grouse and snark over the new fees and shitty choices. This is the sort of thing that makes my brain fuzz over in about two seconds so I don't have an opinion yet.
Won't stop me.
The deadline is in a few weeks and I haven't even opened the packet yet. It said "Open Immediately!" on it, and so I didn't toss it into recycle. I'll get to it soon. Meanwhile a friend of mine went through something similar at HP recently -- that is one company that ain't what it used to be -- and he expects the deal will be similar since they both go through Fidelity. The deal was, all new mutual funds to choose from, all of them with new transaction fees, none of them with any history.
That sounds pretty god damn useless but since I haven't opened the packet yet I can't yet complain. Not about that. What I'd rather complain about is the seminar. There was an Open Forum this morning to introduce people to the concepts. I went on down. But I got there a few minutes past the hour and the room was already spilling into the hallway. Far at the other end of the room a senior-looking financial adviser (of Indian extraction, if that means anything) was going on cheerfully about diversification. On the screen was a huge matrix of investment types, colored, and sorted by return rate over each of the past ten years. The color mix revealed no patterning whatsoever, so I hope he was saying that the investment types don't matter much. But I don't know what he was saying, because the room was SRO and the hall behind me was filling up and I was thinking "Fuck this" far too loudly to hear what he was saying.
There's a Road Show in the cafeteria during the middle part of the day, maybe I'll be able to ask a question there. Maybe I should look through the packet first. Maybe I should just forget about it and take the defaults. I don't know. I don't know why I should even have to think about it. We should of course have choices, so that people who care to play with their money can do so. But I expect an annual rate of return commensurate with the performance of the overall economy no matter what ignorant little decisions I make, so what the hell? It's not like I'll have any retirement left once the kids are done with college anyway.
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4 comments:
The slides had subtext, and it was the same for each. The subtext was this: "I AM THE GREAT AND POWERFUL OZ!"
I can't focus/absorb auditorially a bunch of boring boring things like that. I want a report with the colorful graphics printed for me to flip back and forth between those and text until it all soaks into into my brain, which it will, but not with some guy jabbering in a room full of people. This is why I took a zillion notes in school and read the material more thoroughly than other kids.
We're all doomed. Buy Krugerrands.
Gold is at an all time high, Harry.
My friend Bob (we'll call him "Bob" for obvious reasons) got packaged into early retirement when giant Megachemical bought out his long-time specialty chemical employer. His pension moneys were in a fixed Vanguard fund delivering 3% or less.
Giant Megachemical rolled it into a fixed 4% Fidelity fund which dropped to 3.6% about 3 months ago. That's a 10% cut in pay.
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