VeriPlan’s lifetime compound investment calculator retirement software develops customized scenarios that are based on your current personal financial situation and on your goals and objectives for the future. VeriPlan is a sophisticated and fully integrated future value investment calculator that automatically projects the year-by-year future hypothetical investment calculator value for your investment portfolio assets, net of all additions and withdrawals associated with your future earnings, income, and expenditures.

The VeriPlan retirement investment calculator software automatically acts as a comprehensive compound investment calculator that applies historical investment return growth rates to your cash, bond, and stock assets. This powerful home investment calculator can handle individual stocks and bonds, cash, property, and other valuable assets that you may own. Along with the individual securities that you own, VeriPlan also functions as fully integrated ETF and mutual fund investment calculator. VeriPlan automatically projects annual year-by-year future values for your cash, bond, stock, real estate, business, and other property across your lifetime through age 100.

VeriPlan’s long term investment calculator functionality uses return on investment growth rates that are in line with the very long-term historical trend. You have full control over these asset class growth rates, and you can change any of the compound investment growth rates for VeriPlan’s integrated stock investment calculator, bond investment calculator, and cash savings investment calculator functionality.

VeriPlan’s automated projections are presented net of your projected income and investment taxes, because VeriPlan also fully integrates a lifetime capital gains, property, and income tax projection estimator. This tax projection software calculates lifetime federal, state, and local graduated income taxes and the capital gains tax that would be due on future asset distributions. In addition, this do it yourself home retirement investment calculator software will automatically reduce your projected investment returns by the investment expense characteristics of the investments you choose to hold in the future. It calculates these projections according to you choice and settings on one of the five fully integrated asset allocation and annual rebalancing mechanisms provided by VeriPlan.

In addition, VeriPlan’s long term investment calculator functionality has fully integrated features that project the different asset values of your taxable investment accounts and tax-advantaged retirement accounts. This highly sophisticated, yet easy to use financial investment calculator provides IRA investment calculator and 401k investment calculator features, and can also be used to project long term future investment asset values for tax-advantaged investments in 403b, 457, KEOGH, and other retirement savings plan accounts. Moreover, VeriPlan has fully integrated Roth IRA investment calculator functionality that allows you to evaluate the best combination of traditional tax-advantaged retirement account contributions versus Roth retirement account contributions for your particular lifetime financial plan.

VeriPlan also provides a very flexible Portfolio Risk Tool, which enables you to test alternative projection scenarios that use asset class return on investment rate assumptions that may differ from the long-term historical trend. Of course, all VeriPlan supplied investment assumptions are user adjustable. You can change VeriPlan’s investment returns assumptions downward or upward, either arbitrarily or in proportion to historical securities risk measurements.

Past securities risk is measured by long term historical asset class price volatility, and these volatility rates are supplied with this retirement investment calculator software. VeriPlan will also automatically project the investment portfolio safety margin that your cash and bond assets would provide for you relative to your projected future expenditures.

For your property, real estate, and other assets, which lack prices from real-time securities markets, VeriPlan will use the current value and growth rate estimates that you think would be most appropriate for these properties. Using this information, VeriPlan will automatically project the future value of your property, real estate, and other assets net of your investment costs on a year-by-year basis up to age 100. And, of course, VeriPlan will also reflect the future cash flow and tax deduction impacts of your projected real estate tax payments.

This is an example of a seventy-year projection for one couple’s cash, bond, stock, business, and real estate assets. This graphic includes a measure of their projected net human capital (cumulative expected savings from their projected earned income), and it integrates the financial impacts of the payoff of all their debts. These projections also are net of all taxes and all investment fees due along the way. This graphic and all twenty other VeriPlan income, expense, debt, tax, and asset related graphics are automatically and instantly generated for all scenarios that you develop. Make any change to any part of your VeriPlan model and everything updates in a fraction of a second.

Note: We mail your VeriPlan lifetime and retirement investment calculator CD on the next business day after PayPal has notified us of your order. When your order ships, we will send a shipment notification email to you using the email address supplied by PayPal. VeriPlan is shipped via the USPS, and deliveries typically take 3 to 10 days to arrive.

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When making personal finance and retirement planning decisions, individuals must confront the dilemma that, historically, more conservative portfolio investments have yielded substantially lower investment returns than the returns that riskier investments have delivered. With either lower or higher risk-adjusted market return strategies, you simply cannot have your financial cake and you eat it too.

If you take on higher investment risk, you may be able to consume more, to save less of your earned income, and to make lower investment contributions, because the return on investment of the assets you hold is expected to be more rapid. However, future financial growth outcomes are less certain with higher investment risk strategies, and the probabilities of lifetime financial plan failure and running out of money in retirement are also higher with higher risk assets.

Conversely, if you expose yourself to less investment portfolio risk, you must plan to consume less, to save more, and to invest more. However, the future outcome is likely to be more certain. How to strike a personally appropriate balance between investment risk and return is part science and part art.

There are no easy answers, because the future is fundamentally unknowable by anyone. And, anyone means anyone. The future is unknown and uncertain to everyone. Just because someone makes a prediction does not make it so, as happens all too often with representatives the financial services industry. Too many financial professionals seem to know so much beforehand and so little after the fact.

VeriPlan can help you to determine the level of savings that you need to achieve to support your future financial requirements

The VeriPlan hypothetical investment calculator and retirement investment calculator does not predict the future in any way, shape, or form. No investment calculator can do this for you. Instead, the VeriPlan lifetime compound investment calculator allows you to explore what could happen over your lifetime within the context of your present financial situation and future financial planning goals. VeriPlan’s sophisticated and fully integrated long term investment calculator functionality allows you to very quickly and easily evaluate the potential viability of your lifetime financial plan using more or less risky investment strategies.

The VeriPlan financial investment calculator allows you to test the investment risk and return tradeoffs between various asset allocation strategies. By experimenting with its various investment and asset related settings, VeriPlan provides a coherent lifetime projection all your financial affairs. Using very long-term historical asset class growth rates, VeriPlan’s risk-adjustable future value investment calculator can demonstrate that a conservative asset allocation strategy focused on cash and bond assets and modeling your particular financial affairs would tend to grow more slowly than an asset allocation more heavily weighted toward stocks or equities.

Your long-term success with such a more conservative asset allocation strategy would depend far more upon continued higher rates of saving rather than on higher returns on your investment portfolio. Therefore, a conservative asset allocation requires greater personal financial planning discipline to sustain year-after-year and decade-after-decade. Conversely, stock or equity heavy asset allocation strategies rely more upon capital appreciation or the growth in the future value of your assets. These riskier investment strategies would still require significant savings — just at lower rates than more conservative asset allocation strategies. Yet, whether these investment returns will actually materialize are less certain, and so is your lifetime financial plan.

VeriPlan can help you to determine the level of savings that you need to achieve to support your future financial requirements. VeriPlan’s fully integrated and automated cash savings investment calculator, bond investment calculator, and stock investment calculator features can help you understand the trade-offs between the various investment strategies that are available to you.

Also, if you want to understand better how mutual funds fees and expenses affect the investment wealth and asset buffers that you may be able to build over your lifetime, VeriPlan does this for you, as well. Check out this investment book review on the lowest cost top no load mutual funds for a thorough treatment of this important direct investing topic.

VeriPlan’s cash, bond, and stock mutual fund investment calculator software automatically projects the asset buffers that you would hold on a year-by-year across your lifetime

Another way to evaluate the trade-offs between investment risk and return is to understand your family’s projected ability to meet its financial obligations using only your projected cash and bond assets. These assets tend to hold their value better during depressed economic and securities market panics. As one method to cope with the anxiety of personal financial planning, it is useful to project how large a relatively liquid asset buffer you might have over your lifetime. VeriPlan’s Portfolio Safety Tool acts as a highly sophisticated future investment calculator focused on your cash and bond investments. It can provide insights about the future value of your assets broken down by asset class.

With every projection, the VeriPlan cash, bond, and stock mutual fund investment calculator software automatically projects the asset buffers that you could hold on a year-by-year across your lifetime. In its “Safety Margin” graphic and corresponding data table, VeriPlan shows the number of months going forward that your cash and fixed income assets would cover your projected expenses, if all your income sources ceased and you had to liquidate cash and bond assets to cover these expenses. In addition, when you experiment with different settings on VeriPlan’s Asset Allocation Tool in conjunction with your settings for VeriPlan’s Portfolio Safety Tool, you can get a much better understanding of the interactions between asset class returns and the safety margin provided by these more liquid cash and bond assets.

This is an example of the lifetime investment risk and return Safety Margin graphic that VeriPlan automatically generates for all projection scenarios that you might wish to develop. Note that in this particular scenario, approximately an eight year expense coverage buffer is built up in their cash and bond assets by retirement at age 66. However, this buffer is exhausted by age 94, which indicates that projected retirement expenses would exceed retirement income sources, financial asset yield, and financial asset principal. This family would need other assets, such as positive home equity, to tap to meet expenses in during their mid to late 90′s were they to live that long.

Note: We mail your VeriPlan lifetime financial planning and investment calculator CD on the next business day after PayPal has notified us of your order. When your order ships, we will send a shipment notification email to you using the email address supplied by PayPal. VeriPlan is shipped via the USPS, and deliveries typically take 3 to 10 days to arrive.

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Your tolerance for investment risk is a relative concept — rather than an absolute concept. Your tolerance for investment risk is relative to the investment risk tolerance of all other investors. Few people like investment risk, but some can handle it better than others can.

The more “sensible” investment risk you are willing and able tolerate, the higher your potential expected investment returns and investment growth. At the same time, the investment road you take might be rougher. Sensible investment risk means investment risks that securities markets have compensated with “risk premiums” in the past and which have been verified in the objective investment research literature.

Sensible investment risks are not infinite. They are bounded by the risks that other sane investors are willing to shoulder. Furthermore, they are bounded by the fact that you would only lose up to your entire investment in the pursuit of higher investment yields and capital growth. (Incidentally, sensible investment risks do not include debt leveraged investments, certain options, and exotic investment contracts that can multiply your potential liabilities far beyond your original investment. Leave that to hedge funds playing with other people’s money and huge, irresponsible banks backstopped by taxpayers. They have demonstrated a particular competence for shooting themselves and the public in the foot simultaneously.)

Securities markets tend to pay an investment “risk premium” only for shouldering investment risks at the market level. The cash, bond, and stock financial asset classes have different expected risk and return characteristics. Financial asset allocation is the apportionment of your investment portfolio into one or more of these classes of market-traded financial assets. How you allocate major portions of your assets among the primary financial asset classes determines your portfolio’s overall exposure to investment risk and thus your potential for investment growth.

Align the risk and return of your financial portfolio with your personal investment risk tolerance

VeriPlan’s automated asset allocation calculator tools help you to align the risk and return of your financial portfolio with your personal tolerance for investment risk. VeriPlan’s integrated financial investment calculator and saving for retirement calculator software provides an easy-to-use asset allocation calculator tool, which includes five user-selectable and user-adjustable asset allocation methods. Each of these asset allocation methods provides automatic annual portfolio rebalancing.

VeriPlan’s five fully automated, compound investment calculator asset allocation projection methods include:

• Level or constant lifetime asset allocation percentages for the cash, bond, and stock financial asset classes, including:
• Constant lifetime asset allocation percentages using the proportions of your currently held financial asset portfolio
• Constant lifetime asset allocation percentages representative of an investor with an average investment risk tolerance
• Constant lifetime asset allocation percentages using any percentage for each of the financial asset classes
• Variable lifetime asset allocation percentages for the cash, bond, and stock financial asset classes, including:
• A declining lifetime percentage allocation to stock or equity assets and an increasing allocation to bonds or fixed income assets with a constant percentage of cash assets. (This is the method illustrated in the graphic below.)
• A declining lifetime percentage allocation to stock or equity assets with and an increasing allocation to both bonds and cash. A constant ratio between cash asset and bond asset percentages is maintained.

These five asset allocation methods give you unprecedented flexibility in your personal financial planning. The VeriPlan asset allocation calculator tool allows you to analyze a wide variety of asset allocation strategies for your lifetime through its easy-to-use:

• cash savings investment calculator,
• bond investment calculator,
• stock investment calculator,
• mutual fund investment calculator,
• 401k investment calculator,
• IRA investment calculator, and
• Roth IRA investment calculator software features.

The fully integrated and automated VeriPlan future value investment calculator enables you to choose the lifetime and retirement investment strategy that matches your preferences for investment risk and return on investment. Within the context of your particular financial circumstances, the VeriPlan retirement investment calculator can give you a much better understanding of the interplay between investment risk and investment growth projected out over your lifetime.

This is an example of the lifetime asset allocation percentage graphic that VeriPlan automatically generates for all projection scenarios that you might wish to develop. In this case, the user has chosen to maintain a fixed 10% lifetime cash asset allocation. The remaining 90% is allocated to bonds and stocks. Initially, 80% is the stock asset allocation and 10% is the bond allocation. Over this person’s projected lifetime, the bond asset allocation percentage will rise as the equity asset allocation percentage falls.

VeriPlan’s asset allocation calculator functions perform an automatic asset allocation rebalancing process at the beginning of the second and all subsequent projection years. Note that the percentages in this graphic are not inputs to the model. Instead, these percentages are lifetime model outputs which are calculated directly from projected assets in the major asset classes each year after annual rebalancing has been performed. They represent automatically rebalanced asset class holdings across your projected lifetime taxable account assets, traditional tax-advantaged retirement account assets, and Roth retirement account assets.

Note: We mail your VeriPlan long term investment calculator CD on the next business day after PayPal has notified us of your order. When your order ships, we will send a shipment notification email to you using the email address supplied by PayPal. VeriPlan is shipped via the USPS, and deliveries typically take 3 to 10 days to arrive.

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To develop your investment growth projections, VeriPlan’s stock investment calculator software allows you can enter as many as 99 separate stock and equity asset holdings. For each of your current stock and equity holdings, you can also enter your investment portfolio costs and your tax basis. In addition, you can indicate whether you hold a particular stock or equity asset 1) in a taxable investment account; 2) in a traditional IRA, 401k, 403b, 457, or other traditional retirement plan investment account; or 3) in a Roth IRA or designated Roth 401k, 403b, or 457 account.

Internally, the VeriPlan compound investment calculator maintains separate information for each of your individual asset accounts throughout your lifetime projections. The VeriPlan financial investment calculator automatically projects your overall portfolio tax efficiency and investment efficiency for each year of your lifetime projection.

VeriPlan’s investment calculator software does this even though the net values of your individual asset holdings may change at different rates due to differences in investment returns, costs, and taxes. By avoiding the use of arbitrary averages across groups of investors, the VeriPlan mutual fund investment calculator can provide you with much deeper insight into your projected personal finance and retirement planning circumstances.

This is a VeriPlan future value investment calculator graphic with a decreasing allocation to equity or stock investments as the user ages:

The VeriPlan long term investment calculator software automatically rebalances your stock and equity assets annually over your lifetime

Using the information that you provide about your current cash, bond, and stock asset holdings, the VeriPlan hypothetical investment calculator automatically measures the annual net worth, return on investment, investment cost, and tax characteristics of your current financial asset portfolio. Next, it performs a cash flow analysis and projection of your year-by-year positive and/or negative net income from your earned income and your other non-asset income sources, after your annual living expenses would be paid. Then, the VeriPlan investment calculator spreadsheet automatically projects your overall net annual investment portfolio returns and asset portfolio values according to the particular asset allocation method that you have chosen from among the five that are provided by VeriPlan’s asset allocation calculator tool.

Simultaneously, the VeriPlan retirement planning calculator will automatically take into account and report on your capital gains tax obligations and investment costs. Your VeriPlan compounding investment calculator projections always maintain a separation between your taxable accounts, your traditional IRA, 401k and other traditional retirement investment accounts, and your Roth IRA and Roth 401k accounts.

Taxes on your projected asset returns and withdrawals are applied differently, depending upon the current rules for each type of retirement plan account. Your current investment costs allow VeriPlan to measure the cost efficiency of your financial asset portfolio related to the five major types of investment costs. VeriPlan’s cost efficiency measurements are weight-adjusted by the value of the assets that you hold in each of your cash, bond, and stock asset accounts across you lifetime.

Note: We mail your VeriPlan home investment calculator CD on the next business day after PayPal has notified us of your order. When your order ships, we will send a shipment notification email to you using the email address supplied by PayPal. VeriPlan is shipped via the USPS, and deliveries typically take 3 to 10 days to arrive.

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High mutual fund fees and other excessive investment fees are huge problems for the average individual investor. These excessive investment fees are the major factor that undermines the financial welfare of millions of Americans. The potential value of your investment portfolio assets lost through excessive investment costs and compounded across your lifetime can be huge – even when your costs are “only” at the financial securities industry averages!

Average investment costs are not “just a few percent.” In fact, in any average year with average returns, a sophisticated compound investment calculator will demonstrate to you that average financial services industry investment fees will take away between 1/4 and 1/3 of your entire gross annual portfolio return. Since the investment fees you pay recur every year, these compounded annual investment costs year after year after year grow to be huge over years and decades. The financial services industry wins and you lose more and more.

Cutting investment fees is the single, best strategy that people have to improve their net investment returns.

At the same time, you can easily avoid high investment costs. The most significant personal investment success factor that your can control is to lower your investment costs.

When you drive the costs out of your investment portfolio, you give yourself a substantial head start over the average individual investor. You also cut down on trading and turnover in your portfolio, which simultaneously reduces trading costs, while it also cuts down on the completely unnecessary realization of some short-term capital gains taxes and long-term capital gains taxes.

VeriPlan’s fully automated retirement investment calculator spreadsheet software helps you understand the full impact of excessive mutual fund fees and other excessive investment fees over your lifetime

VeriPlan’s future value investment calculator functionality gives you fully automated investment cost-efficiency analysis — an incredibly valuable feature that you will not find in any other home investment calculator software. These valuable investment cost analysis features can help you to understand the cumulative impact of unproductive investment costs over the years.

VeriPlan’s investment growth calculator functionality automatically analyzes your future investment portfolio values across your lifetime, and it does this net of your projected investment fees and investment capital gains taxes. Once you enter the investment cost characteristics of your current portfolio, VeriPlan easily handles the rest of the analysis for you automatically.

VeriPlan develops projections that assume you will continue to acquire assets throughout your lifetime using the same level of cost-efficiency or cost-inefficiency that is apparent from your current investment portfolio. The VeriPlan financial investment calculator also provides an easy-to-use investment cost-effectiveness tool that allows you to develop hypothetical investment calculator projections that override your current investment fees in favor or lower and more reasonable investment costs. By flipping a single software switch, you can instead tell VeriPlan to develop future investment calculator projections that reflect any lower investment costs that you believe would be more reasonable to pay over your lifetime.

Here is an example of one of the cost-efficiency graphics automatically developed by the VeriPlan compounding investment calculator for all your projections.

If your current investment portfolio costs and mutual fund fees exceed your reasonable cost assumptions, then VeriPlan will automatically measure the cumulative value of the financial investment assets that you would lose in the future. VeriPlan’s fully automated mutual fund investment calculator and retirement planning calculator features will project your lifetime financial asset portfolio using your current investment fees and cost structure. Furthermore, it will show you what you could lose compared to more choosing investments with lower investment fees and lower total expense ratios, as you can see in the graphic above.

Every VeriPlan growth of investment calculator projection automatically develops full lifetime projections that include these five primary types of investment costs:

• Fees to buy investments (e.g. front end loads)
• Investment portfolio management fees (e.g. the management expense ratio)
• Annual marketing and sales fees (e.g. 12b-1 fees for investment funds)
• Fund trading costs (e.g. portfolio trading and market impact costs, which are indicated by rates of portfolio turnover)
• Personal account custody fees, commissions, and advisory fees (e.g. wrap account fees or annual percent of assets charges on account balances for advice and client services, which are in addition to portfolio management charges)

Note: We mail your VeriPlan savings and investment calculator CD on the next business day after PayPal has notified us of your order. When your order ships, we will send a shipment notification email to you using the email address supplied by PayPal. VeriPlan is shipped via the USPS, and deliveries typically take 3 to 10 days to arrive.

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Your investment portfolio and assets in VeriPlan

For each of your current investment portfolio asset holdings, the VeriPlan investment calculator software collects information about your share ownership amounts, values per share, investment costs, account taxability, and expected taxable capital gains distributions. The VeriPlan financial investment calculator automatically projects your net annual holdings by financial asset class, including new investments from future positive net investment returns and investment withdrawals to meet future expense budget requirements. Compound investment calculator values are automatically projected net of personal living expenses, debt repayments, ordinary income taxes, capital gains taxes, and investment costs throughout your full lifecycle. Long term investment calculator rebalancing is performed annually and automatically according your choices and user adjustable settings on five asset allocation strategy methods.

VeriPlan’s fully integrated retirement investment calculator projects the growth of your “centerline” investment portfolio asset values based on historical risk-adjusted and inflation-adjusted cash, bond, and stock asset class growth rates. Compound investment calculator growth rates are fully user-adjustable using VeriPlan’s systematic and judgmental growth rate adjustment tools. VeriPlan’s integrated, automated, and high performance mutual fund investment calculator asset projection facilities enable the rapid evaluation of a wide range of customized financial plans.

For each of your portfolio asset holdings, VeriPlan separately and automatically projects annual investment returns, volatility, ordinary income taxes, capital gains taxes, and investment costs. Then, in combination, the VeriPlan retirement tax calculator automatically assesses your overall annual net portfolio returns, tax efficiency, and investment cost efficiency. The VeriPlan investment calculator can project these aggregates, even though the net valuation of your individual asset holdings may change at different rates due to user return adjustments, varying investment costs, uneven capital gains distributions, legal differences in taxability, and variations in marginal tax rates. Therefore, VeriPlan can provide significantly more insight, because its investment calculator projections focus on your particular financial planning circumstances and do not rely upon general population averages.

Your Cash Assets:

VeriPlan’s cash savings and investment calculator projects up to 24 separate cash asset holdings.

Your Bond Assets:

VeriPlan’s bond investment calculator projects up to 24 separate bond and fixed income asset holdings.

Your Stock Asset:

VeriPlan’s stock investment calculator projects up to 99 separate stock and equity asset holdings.

Your Property Assets:

VeriPlan’s real estate investment calculator projects up to 10 separate property and real estate asset holdings.

Your Other Assets:

VeriPlan also projects up to 10 separate “other” asset holdings.

Your Human Capital:

The VeriPlan home investment calculator automatically projects your depletable, yet-to-be-earned “human capital.” Gross human capital is your yet-to-be-earned total wage and earned income. Gross human capital pays your ongoing living expense budget before your retirement, and it provides the potential to save. Net human capital is your yet-to-be-earned savings or your net income from your earnings. You must convert your net human capital into assets that will pay your living expenses, after your human capital or your potential to earn is gone.

An example of VeriPlan’s lifetime family total assets graphic:

This is an example of a lifetime investment calculator projection for one couple’s cash, bond, stock, business, and real estate assets. This graphic is automatically generated for all scenarios that you develop in VeriPlan. Investment projections are net of all taxes and all investment fees. This graphic also includes a measure of human capital, and it integrates the financial impacts of the payoff of all debts.

Note: We mail your VeriPlan investment calculator CD on the next business day after PayPal has notified us of your order. When your order ships, we will send a shipment notification email to you using the email address supplied by PayPal. VeriPlan is shipped via the USPS, and deliveries typically take 3 to 10 days to arrive.

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Investors who are more risk-averse are more satisfied with a less risky investment asset allocation – regardless of lower expected investment returns or the related need to save more to achieve their lifetime financial plans. The reverse is true for investors with a greater tolerance for investment risk, since they can stomach greater market price swings without panicking. Historically, investment results for more risk tolerance investors have allowed them to achieve higher returns and to save at lower rates in pursuit of the same financial goals as more risk averse investors.

Nevertheless, all sane investors are risk averse to some degree, and that is what normally keeps current securities market prices down relative to expectations about future securities values. The key question is what kind of investor are you from an investment risk tolerance standpoint? This important answer is a direct driver of the asset allocation percentages of your personal portfolio. Your asset allocation percentages determine the greater or lesser degree of exposure that your personal investment portfolio has to investment risk and the opportunity for higher investment returns.

Trivial financial industry investment risk tolerance questionnaires often use just a couple of leading questions that quickly categorize you along some part of the range from “conservative investor” to “aggressive investor.” Sadly, these simplistic investment risk tolerance questionnaires are just a way for securities industry sales people to push you forward through a well-honed process of selling you overly expensive investment securities products that will drive up their sales commissions and bonuses and the profits of their financial services company employer. However, from the point-of-view of your best interests, it is very important to measure much more carefully your risk tolerance regarding the expected investment risk versus reward composition of your portfolio’s asset allocation percentages.

There is an inexpensive way for you to get a much better assessment of your risk tolerance than you would from a simple conservative versus aggressive financial industry investor questionnaire.

You can complete an investment risk tolerance assessment survey online, and you do not have to work with any financial industry intermediary or financial advisor to do so. Furthermore, by doing this investment risk tolerance analysis yourself, you can separate the process of assessing your investment risk tolerance from the financial industry’s product sales process. By doing so, you can give yourself the alternative of buying very low cost and broadly diversified index fund investments directly from low-cost mutual fund vendors. Industry intermediaries tend to sell only high cost investments that pay them high fees and/or high commissions. Often associated with high pressure securities sales efforts, these higher fees and commissions come out of your pocket and can really damage your long-term finances. You pay more and get less. Click here to learn about: Investment Fees

If you want to do an online survey to assess your personal investment risk tolerance, you can do so at MyRiskTolerance.com, which is a product of Finametrica. Their website explains it all, so I will not repeat their materials here.

Finametrica has a scientific process for the assessment of personal risk preferences. Their survey has some sound economic and social science behind it, plus they have a growing dataset of other survey respondents against which your responses are compared. This is one of the more tricky parts about personal risk preferences and setting an asset allocation strategy.

The objective of personal investment risk tolerance analysis is not just to measure one’s desire to avoid risk, because almost all people are risk averse investors. The goal of proper investment risk tolerance analysis is to assess your personal risk preferences against the backdrop of a representative sample of other investors.

Finametrica has a database of tens of thousands of other investors who have already completed the questionnaire from major developed, English speaking countries around the world, including the US, UK, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia (where they are based). (There also is a French Canadian risk tolerance questionnaire available.)

You should note that there is absolutely no business relationship of any kind between this MyFinancialFreedomPlan.com website and Finametrica’s MyRiskTolerance.com website. This not a paid review or recommendation of any kind, and this website will not receive compensation of any kind, if you decide to use Finametrica’s investment risk tolerance questionnaire.

Here is a durable link to this survey that we maintain on The Skilled Investor website: Investment Risk Analysis Just click this investment risk analysis link and you will be redirected to the investment risk tolerance survey on the MyRiskTolerance.com. When you get to the MyRiskTolerance.com website, read the page and then just click the link entitled “Click here to do your FinaMetrica Risk Profile online” near the bottom of the text in that page. If you want to learn more, follow the links in the blue horizontal bar that will lead you to other information on their website.

Here are a couple of hints as to how to do this online investment risk tolerance survey. If you decide to go ahead with the MyRiskTolerance.com questionnaire, remember to use an Internet Explorer browser, because the IE browser works with the WorldPay system that they use. The company is based in Australia, and they do not use PayPal. The survey costs $45 in US dollars for one or two people to use. (Obviously, Finametrica’s prices are subject to change without notice, and they set their own prices. Survey prices are different for other countries.)

If two people are going to complete the survey, then each person should fill out the survey separately and then compare results, after both have completed their investment risk survey independently. From a process standpoint, the first person orders and completes their survey, and then Finametrica will send a token via email for the second person to log in to the website and complete their survey. Remember to save off a printable copy of each person’s survey results to your home machine.

The personalized investment risk tolerance analysis profiles that you get after you complete the questionnaire are detailed and very informative. They explain your results and compare them to the responses of others who have completed the survey before you. When the particular answers that you give differ from the responses of other investors who have a similar investment risk tolerance profile to yours, these differences are explained to you.

With your personalized risk tolerance analysis, you can do a better job of determining your portfolio asset allocation percentages. Then, you can buy the needed low cost, broadly diversified, passively managed index funds to fill out the asset allocation of your portfolio directly from the lowest cost vendor or via a discount broker.

Assessing your investment risk tolerance is vital to developing a fully personalized plan for long-term financial success

Our free financial freedom plan web site provides essays about how to generate a personally customized financial planning strategy. These articles can help you in developing a lifetime financial plan for your family. To generate a comprehensive long-term investment management strategy also depends upon using a high quality financial software with the best investment planning software and the best personal financial planning software combined. The home page of this website helps you to find the best do-it-yourself financial planning tools, including the top financial retirement planning program, the top home budget calculator, and a very high quality lifetime investment calculator for your self-directed life long personal financial planning.

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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.

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.

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The complexity of personal investment management is driven by the nature of investing in securities that have uncertain and unknowable future values. Nobody — amateur or professional — has a working crystal ball that can predict future asset values. Anyone can have a more or less well-informed outlook and operate with an evolving set of theories as to what might happen.

However, it is what actually unfolds in the future in terms of positive and negative economic, technological, competitive, political, and other developments that will determine the evolution of securities values. And, even as new information becomes known in the future, the value of a particular securities will be always be an amalgamation of currently known information and a forward looking market consensus about the murky future.

In general, it is this very uncertainty that provides investors with opportunities (however unpredictable) to earn over time more or less than a market return on their invested assets. Investing involves varying degrees of risk and participants in real time securities markets buy securities at what they perceive to be a discount against their expectations for higher future values. They sell when they think current market prices exceed the future opportunity.

Thus, the uncertainty about the future drives much of the inherent complexity of investing. Everybody wants a magic system to beat the market and to do better than the other guy, but when you take the time to think about it, you realize that the future cannot be known until it arrives and that there can be no magic bullets, reliable systems, or sure bets with investing.

Nevertheless, the inherent complexity of investing is greatly exacerbated by the proliferation of investment products and services aggressively promoted by a securities and financial services industry that purports to serve your best interests. However, this proliferation of complex investment products most often seems only to serve the financial self-interests of the securities industry itself. Averaged across all retail investors, the high fees of the financial service industry dramatically reduce rather than help to increase retail investors’ net assets.

Personal investing can be simplified greatly by focusing only on valid strategies that have support in the investment research literature. This personal investment planning summary is intended to help you to understand that you can manage your investments using strategies that have a demonstrated basis in the research literature.

When one pursues strategies that are designed to focus solely on the fiduciary interests of individual investors, the vast majority of investment products promoted by the industry can simply and easily be eliminated from consideration. They cost far more than they are worth. Aggressive investment cost control is not a magic bullet to beat the market, but it is a very effective way to avoid being the rube who gets fleeced by the fast talking slick suit.

Once you have committed to a durable long-term investment strategy, you can manage by yourself relatively easily the details of investment implementation. You do not need to pay high costs for something you can do yourself.

You can build an easy-to-manage, do-it-yourself, lifetime investment strategy based upon these principles:

• To improve your long-term investment returns, move fully toward the completely passive, globally diversified, and extremely low cost end of the investment securities products spectrum. Invest only in a variety of passive, very broadly diversified, and low cost investment funds.

• Understand better your investment risk tolerance relative to the larger population of investors and decide how much you are willing to be exposed to investment risk. Your investment risk tolerance leads to your asset allocation strategy, which sets the balance of overall expected investment risk and return in your personal portfolio.

• Get invested and stay invested in the global securities markets according to your asset allocation — through thick and thin. Never attempt to second-guess the markets or to time the markets by moving assets around hoping to beat the markets. When you hold securities with an asset allocation that is commensurate with your tolerance for risk, you can ride out market panics without panicking, so you will also be in the markets when they rise toward new highs. The academic research shows clearly that nobody really knows how to time the markets and jumping in/out when you are confident/scared usually leads to inferior results.

• Buy and hold and hold and hold. When you own broadly diversified, passive index investment funds, professional investment portfolio managers will make all the needed adjustments within these funds for you over time.

• Maintain your asset allocation within the percentage policy variance that you have pre-determined. Do so in as low cost a manner as is reasonably possible. Use asset purchases during your accumulation periods and asset sales during your divestment periods to maintain your target asset allocation. This reduces the need to make changes and incur costs solely to maintain your asset allocation percentages.

• Only buy investment mutual funds from mutual fund companies that deal directly with the public. Only buy exchange-traded funds (ETFs) through discount brokers. Only a small fraction of either mutual funds or ETFs are low cost, broadly diversified, passive funds with low turnover. Buy them and ignore the rest with middling or higher fees. And, if you do not have a clear understanding of ETF trading, buy only mutual funds. After the May 6, 2010 stock market flash crash, it should be clear that naive traders fooling with ETF market orders and stop loss orders that automatically convert to market orders unwittingly could do real damage to their portfolios
• Never pay any broker or any other commissioned financial advisor another dime during your lifetime to tell you what funds you should buy. They do not know what will happen to future asset values, because they have no information to make such judgments. Instead, their high advisory costs will be extracted from your assets up front and along the way. Purchasing investment funds through an advisor is far more likely to reduce rather than increase your wealth. Investment cost are not “just a few percent.” For the average investor, average investment costs consume about one-third of average annual investment returns — year after year after year after year. The cumulative losses with even average investment costs are huge and simply horrendous across the lifetime of the average investor.

• Improve your overall net investment portfolio returns by consciously managing the asset “tax location” of your investment assets, which can reduce the investment taxes that you pay. Federal capital gains investment tax rates vary by holding period and different types of assets have returns that are treated differently under the federal tax code. Take advantage of the opportunities that you have to arrange your assets for minimal taxation.

• Focus the time that you spend on financial affairs during your lifetime on increasing your income and/or managing your consumption to increase your savings rate. In addition to reducing your investment costs, saving more is the single most effective way to accumulate assets for retirement and other personal finance goals.

• Enjoy your life and resist the compulsion to act as an amateur investment portfolio manager. By ceasing their amateur investment management activities, most people can free up substantial amounts of time to spend on far more pleasurable activities. Don’t you have other things you would rather do than spend your life playing futile investment games?

Most people waste a great deal of time on investment activities, tactics, and strategies that are more likely to reduce rather than increase their investment portfolios.

Very low cost, professional index fund managers can manage your money far more efficiently in terms of much lower costs, far greater diversification, better returns, lower taxes, and significantly less time than you can ever realistically hope to do as a personal investment portfolio manager. Do yourself a favor and decide to fire yourself as a personal investment manager in favor of a handful of index fund managers running very broadly diversified, low cost funds.

Despite these factors, some people just cannot resist the personal investment management game. If you simply cannot resist the temptation to play personal investment portfolio manager, then understand clearly that this is likely to be one of the most costly hobbies that you could have. If you are anything like the average investor (and you probably are), then your self-managed personal investment portfolio is highly likely to cost you money through inferior returns, higher costs, and inadequate diversification. Moreover, this hobby is extremely likely to waste a significant amount of your valuable time over your lifespan.

However, if you must play investment manager, then never play with the rent money, the baby’s milk money, or the money that you are relying upon for your retirement, your kids education, or other important obligations. Since investment portfolio self-management is not likely to be a value-added activity, never allocate more than 10% of your overall investment assets to this hobby. Invest the remaining 90+% in accordance with the investment methods summarized above.

In addition, learn how to track carefully and accurately your investment performance relative to appropriate passive benchmarks, so that you do not fool yourself into thinking you have more skill than you actually do. Everybody is an investment genius in a rising market, if they do not track performance relative to appropriate passive market benchmarks. Academic research clearly demonstrates that individuals most often achieve significantly sub-optimal investment results relative to passive benchmarks, while simultaneously they carry higher and unnecessarily risks due to non-diversified self-managed portfolios.

You investments should work for you rather than you working for them. Avoid all the financial industry games designed to make money off of your assets and to keep you moving assets around chasing performance gains that have already passed you by. Instead, simplify your investment program, and use your financial assets to enrich and protect your life and the lives of those you love.

OK — So How Does One Go About Doing This?

Here are some ideas to get you going:

1) On the “Retirement Investment Calculator” front page of this website, you can read about VeriPlan, which is an automated personal financial planning and retirement savings calculator software tool that individuals and families can use to do their own lifetime financial plans. This lifetime savings and investment calculator is the most sophisticated and high quality financial planning software that you can buy at a great bargain price. VeriPlan automates all of the tedious calculations needed to do fully integrated lifetime financial planning in a manner that is customized to reflect your particular financial situation, all your financial resources, and all your financial life goals and objectives.

Furthermore, VeriPlan also provides very extensive and absolutely objective personal financial planning documentation that helps you to understand the lifetime financial planning process and how to use VeriPlan’s automated and fully integrated IRA investment calculator, 401k investment calculator, mutual fund investment calculator, and saving for retirement calculator functionality. While VeriPlan hides the complexity of millions of inter-related financial investment calculator operations, it also treats you like an adult!

VeriPlan was designed with the firm belief that smart, well-educated adults need and want well-designed financial decision support tools with sophisticated future value investment calculator functionality. If you are going to invest the time needed to plan your family’s financial future, you need a financial planning software “power tool” to help you. It must be highly functional and robust, while it also provides useful and entirely objective financial information.

2) In parallel with checking out VeriPlan, you might also want take a look at this “Financial Planning Reading List.” This reading list compiles the top 60 or so personal financial planning and personal investment management articles from the many hundreds that the designer of VeriPlan has published on various personal finance websites across the web. All of these “Financial Planning Reading List” articles were personally researched and written by the designer of VeriPlan. If you want to judge whether VeriPlan could be right for you, then these articles might help you with your decision. Furthermore, the more articles on this reading list that you read, the better prepared you will be to manage your own family financial planning and personal investment portfolio over your lifetime.

3) I do believe that it is a virtue to engage in a lifelong effort to understand economics and investments, because of the significant impact of economics and investing on our lives. Personally, I believe that this knowledge provides a very long-term economic perspective and allows one to rise above the constant pressure from the industry and the media to change something – change anything – with ones investments, without any rational reason other than to generate more revenue and profit for the industry, yet not for you.

The more one learns, the less one is inclined to jump from one currently popular investment strategy to the next. Stability, constancy, passivity, broad diversification, risk control, and very low costs have been the hallmarks of the most successful personal investment programs of the past. I have found nothing that makes me believe that these viewpoints should ever change.

Given these viewpoints, I have also determined that I will not pay additionally for any “special insights” from industry professionals. Paid insights are no better that the abundance of free insights. However, since they cost more, one is likely to end up poorer for having paid.
Therefore, I have decided that I will only use free resources. Everything I do relies upon free public information or at least information that is very, very low cost. One just has to learn how and where to look. Of course using only free or extremely low cost public economic and investment information, means I may have to wade through a lot of rubbish to find things that are useful and valid. However, that is far better than wading through a lot of rubbish for which I have paid very dearly.

4) Recommended journals and books

In addition to materials that I have published, here is a short list of my investment reading recommendations concerning other sources that I consider worthwhile. The online sources are all free. You could buy the books inexpensively on Amazon.

A) Journal of Indexing — http://indexuniverse.com/index.php/publications/journalofindexes.html  Back issues can be read online.

B) John Bogle’s book “The Little Book of Common Sense Investing” Go to “John C. Bogel’s Blog.” You can read the first chapter of his book online on his blog. http://johncbogle.com/wordpress/

C) “Capital Ideas: The Improbable Origins of Modern Wall Street” (1993) or “Capital Ideas Evolving” (2007) by Peter Bernstein. These books chronicle of the intellectual development of modern investing.

D) Investment research papers via Google Scholar (To find investment research papers via Google Scholar, go to Google, click “more”, click “Scholar” and enter a search term. This takes time, but researching personal finance via Google Scholar can be very informative. For example, if you want to learn about forex trading online, just type in that phrase. With this example, you get about 2,700 research papers on foreign exchange and related forex topics. Once you get results, you can use Advanced Scholar Search to specify searching within particular subject matter categories and you can select particular authors who have many citations, among other search refinements. Look for most cited papers. Read abstracts, intros, and conclusions.)

After these recommendations, I have few additional recommendations, although I track and read a very wide variety of sources. The next book I would recommend is Ben Franklin’s Autobiography. I do not recommend many investment books, because I think that much more objective materials can be found in research papers on the websites of financial academics.

Comprehensive investment calculator and personal financial planning software is needed to develop a fully personalized family financial strategy

This free “financial freedom guide” on how to invest is just a part of our web site about how to develop a personal family financial plan. The personal finance plan essays on this free site supply important ideas to individuals and families about financial planning program and financial strategy subjects that should taken into consideration. These postings help in understanding how to establish a life time personal finance planning strategy. Also, to generate a really useful long-term money management strategy depends upon you using the best retirement savings calculator and personal financial planning software with a high quality stock investment calculator and the leading long term investment calculator software features.

Also, our financial freedom web site enables you to find the top all-in-one saving for retirement calculator software program for home PC use, and it includes the best retirement investment calculator tool, the best personal budgeting software, and a high quality mutual fund investment calculator for your personally customized lifetime financial planning. It also automates the long-term analysis of debts that you have, which could include mortgage debts, educational loans, credit card debt, business credit, or whatever other credit obligations you wish to analyze individually or jointly. Furthermore, it has an automated tool to assess an interest rate for your choice in situations where your financial assets are projected to have been exhausted, and you would use your other real estate or business assets as collateral for the personal or business credit loan you would need.

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Without becoming a victim of identity theft, you can get a free credit report from each of the three credit reporting agencies once a year. Federal law requires the three major credit reporting agencies to provide these free reports annually. To satisfy their obligations, Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion jointly have established www.annualcreditreport.com, where you can order your free credit reports.

You can also call them at 1-877-322-8228 or write to them at Annual Credit Report Request Service, P.O. Box 105281, Atlanta, GA 30348-5281. Because the material in your credit reports is usually largely redundant across these three companies, stagger your requests over the year and rotate between the three firms. If there is any problem with your credit report, it usually will show up on any of your reports from these three firms.

(Avoid using any of those obnoxious free credit report copycat companies, such as “freecreditreport.com,” that advertise on TV, but will only supply “free” credit reports, when you pay a lot for their other supposedly valuable premium services. Also, if you are a woman, you probably have already figured out these freecreditreport.com TV advertisers are not to be trusted. Incredibly cluelessly, their TV ads always blame the bride’s bad credit for young guitar playing slacker hubby having to work at a pirate themed fast food job. What a clueless company marketing department to insult the female half of their target audience with their advertising budget! Have they written off women because women shop and are too smart to pay for something that is supposed to be free? Free credit reporting my keister! This is another confirmation that the Federal Communications Commission is dead at the wheel with respect to consumer protections. Companies can get away with confusing people, screaming “free, free, free,” and then charging people for something that they have a legal right to get for free, if they just knew the correct web address.}

Identity Theft Events Provide Opportunities to Lock Down Reporting about Your Credit

While identity theft is a large and growing problem and can be very costly and inconvenient to you, it is just a business cost and headache to financial and retail firms, who also have benefited greatly from the proliferation of easy credit.

One way to protect yourself is to put restrictions on your credit records with the three major credit reporting agencies, Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion. These credit reporting companies have made profitable businesses on both sides. They charge fees to business firms who may not always treat your financial information carefully, and they charge you fees when you want to restrict access to your financial information in their data bases.

For some, these credit information access restriction fees go away when you become an identity theft victim. Whether or not you lose money, if you become a victim of identity theft, this may actually be an opportunity for some of you. In some states, like California, identity theft victims can get long-term locks put on their accounts without having to pay fees to the three credit bureaus.

California Residents Can Get a Free Fraud Alert for Seven Years Following Even a Minor Fraud Event

If you live in California and have become a victim of identity theft, you have rights under California law as an identity theft victim to have your credit files frozen for seven years without paying fees to the credit reporting agencies for such a long-term “fraud alert.” For example, if your credit card shows suspicious charges that you did not make and even if your credit card company takes them off your statement, you still can make an identity theft report to your local police and get a police report. With this police report and by writing to the appropriate addresses and following the procedures, the three credit reporting agencies are obligated legally to put long-term fraud alerts on your credit reports.

The downside of locking your credit report is that you cannot yourself apply and be approved immediately for instant credit. The good news is that nobody else can do the same for seven years, as well. (Note that if you do need to apply for a credit card or refinance a mortgage, you still can do so, but the credit lock on your account just creates a delay. You have to proactively contact the credit bureaus to inform them of the validity your efforts to apply for more credit.)

Lock Up Your Credit at the Credit Reporting Agencies

The upside to locking your credit report is that new attempts to establish credit in your name are blocked without your permission. Not only does that mean that criminals cannot open new credit cards in your name, it means that you have greater protection from other kinds of credit related crimes. For example, the credit crisis has spawned a crime wave of mortgage and real estate line of credit frauds.

Criminals have opened credit lines in home owners names and then have quickly drained the credit lines of their funds. In addition, homes have been sold without the home owners knowledge and sometimes the knowledge even of the “buyer” who also had his or her identity stolen and was an unwitting participant in the transaction.

Obviously, it is better to prevent costly situations like these than clean them up. In addition, pay close attention to any document sent to you by your county registrar. Because of increasing real estate fraud some county registrars, including Los Angeles County, now send notices to the address of record whenever any deed or other records change is filed with them.

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Personal financial planning tools are recommended to generate a thorough plan for your financial freedom

This free “steps to financial freedom” information site has info concerning how to develop a personally customized family financial plan

The personal finance plan essays on this free web site give important ideas to families and individuals about financial planning program strategy subjects that they should consider. These write-ups help in producing a life time family financial planning strategy. Also, to establish a fully personalized plan for your financial freedom demands that you use an excellent financial calculator with a high quality investment calculator and the top home financial software.

In addition, our free financial freedom information site helps you find the best ALL-IN-ONE financial planning software program home software product with a high quality retirement investment calculator tool, the top personal budgeting software, and the leading investment calculators for your personally customized life long family financial planning.

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