High qualityinvestment planning software is necessary to generate a fully personalized family financial strategy

Our free “financial freedom guide” personal financial planning website publishes write-ups on how to produce do-it-yourself personal financial plans

The financial and investment planning postings on this free information site supply important ideas to households about personal finance plan topics that they should consider. These essays help in establishing a lifelong personal finance planning strategy. Furthermore, to generate a fully comprehensive plan for financial success requires that you use a first-rate financial planning calculator with the top investment calculator and the top financial calculators.

Furthermore, this free financial freedom web site helps you to find a superior ALL-IN-ONE home financial software home software product with the leading financial retirement planning program, a high quality home budget planner, and a superior investment planner for your personally customized life time family financial planning.

Gauge the level of your portfolio’s overall diversification with this free on-line tool

Whenever you invest in multiple mutual funds and ETFs, you may wonder how broadly and appropriately diversified your aggregate portfolio might be. Have your investment holdings and mutual funds that you have chosen increased the global diversification of your personal financial asset portfolio? Do they just duplicate what you already own?

There is a free on-line tool that you can use to measure your portfolio diversification, and better understand the relative contribution that each of your investments makes to your goal of holding a broadly diversified global investment portfolio. On the Morningstar website, you can find their “Instant X-Ray” tool. Go to the Morningstar site at http://www.morningstar.com/

Click the “Tools” tab in the horizontal bar, select the “Morningstar Tools” pull down menu, and then choose “Instant X-Ray.” To go directly to this tool, use this URL:
http://portfolio.morningstar.com/NewPort/Free/InstantXRayDEntry.aspx

To use the Instant X-Ray Tool, just enter the ticker symbols for all of the mutual funds, ETFs, and individual securities that you own or intend to own with the dollar value of each holding. Then, click “Show Instant X-Ray” to see a summary of your overall portfolio.

Note that when you enter only one mutual fund or ETF ticker symbol or only one stock or bond holding into the Instant X-Ray Tool, the summary provides data for that single fund or security. This can be very useful, as you evaluate individual investment funds and investment securities. When you enter multiple funds, you will get an overview that blends all the funds and securities in proportion to the dollar values that you enter for each holding.

This free Instant X-Ray summary provides a variety of data about your overall portfolio. The overview allows you to evaluate how diversified your portfolio is on a variety of dimensions, including the major dimensions that are summarized in the other articles on this website about selecting a broadly diversified investment portfolio. (See the Sitemap for these articles.)

Incidentally, if you click on the other views that are offered with the Instant X-Ray tool, then Morningstar will try to get you to sign up for a “Premium” subscription. The information provided by this free summary overview in the Instant X-Ray tool is sufficient, and you are not required to pay for a premium subscription.

Note that there is no relationship between this website and Morningstar, and this website did not receive any form of consideration, financial or otherwise, to write this article. The “Instant X-Ray” is a useful financial tool for individual investors, and that is why we have provided this article.

Roth IRA calculator tools are needed to make a thorough lifetime financial plan

This free financial freedom website publishes documents regarding how to make a personally customized personal financial planning program strategy

The personal financial planning program strategy postings on this free website give individuals and families important ideas about family financial planning issues that they should think about. Our publications help in establishing a life time personal finance planning strategy. In addition, to make a fully personalized lifetime financial plan requires that you use a leading financial planning tool with a superior investment calculator and the top financial planning worksheets.

This free financial freedom online site also helps you find an excellent ALL-IN-ONE financial planning tools with the top early retirement calculator tool, the leading personal budget software, and the best investment planning software for your self-directed full life financial planning.

Roth IRA and Roth 401k Accounts and Roth Estate Planning Strategies

There are trade-offs in deciding how to set the proportion to contribute into Roth retirement savings accounts versus making contributions to traditional retirement accounts with tax deferral advantages. Please use the links at the bottom of this article to read our previous articles on the subject of an optimal Roth retirement account contribution strategy.

In many senses for some people, an optimal Roth retirement account contribution strategy also becomes an estate planning question. In the majority of personal finance situations, making 100% of allowable Roth contributions may not yield the greatest total estate at age 80, 90, or 100, when compared to the opportunity to make currently tax deductible contributions traditional personal IRA and traditional 401k, 403b, KEOGH, and other retirement plan accounts that reduce current taxable income.

However, when you expand your total present value analysis to include the long-term value to a multi-generational family, then Roth assets can have significantly greater value. If Roth assets remain at death, there are very significant long-term multi-generational tax avoidance advantages. In such circumstances where it is likely that a person’s assets will be adequate to cover retirement expenses even with a very long life, then it can be advantageous to live off of traditional retirement plan assets, which are subject to mandatory withdrawals and associated income taxation in retirement anyway. This means that over ones lifespan, when retirement assets are adequate for the long-term, then a larger and increasing proportion of ones future financial asset portfolio could consist of Roth assets.

For estate planning purposes, Roth retirement accounts can have some very significant advantages over traditional tax-advantaged retirement accounts.

If a family’s financial model indicates that there is a strong possibility that they will still have some tax-advantaged account assets at death, then those should be Roth tax-advantaged account assets, when feasible. Roth assets can be inherited by children and other designated beneficiaries, and these inherited Roth assets can also grow tax-free over the expected life of the person inheriting with certain mandatory withdrawal requirements.

For example, this means that a child inheriting from a very elderly senior citizen parent Roth retirement account assets, when that child is age 50, could perhaps enjoy another 40 years of tax-free investment growth with an income stream along the way. Under current law the child would face from mandatory, but non-taxable withdrawals. Only when withdrawn asset have appreciated in taxable accounts, would the fruit of these inherited Roth assets be subject to short-term or long-term capital gains taxes. Traditional tax-advantaged retirement accounts do not provide these very significant and valuable estate planning benefits.

You should note that the rules regarding Roth retirement plan accounts are in flux.

It is not clear what they might be over the course of your life. However, income limitations have changed and traditional to Roth asset conversions seem to be possible without income restrictions during 2010. These year-to-year changes are the reason why it makes a lot of sense to download from the IRS website and read the relevant US income tax publications, including IRS Publication 560 and IRS Publication 590. Again, consulting a knowledgeable certified public accountant may help you with current rules strategy.

Furthermore, you should also use the top retirement investment planning calculator to better understand the potential size of your projected Roth retirement nest egg assets in the future. You should find out whether you could be one of the minority of the US taxpaying population that could mass significant Roth retirement account assets and be able to pass them to your heirs with the associated tax advantages to your beneficiaries.

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