Tag Archives: asset allocation

Figuring Out Asset Allocation Across Accounts

Figuring out our desired asset allocation was only the first step – the next was figuring out what trades I needed to make to get that allocation.  Enter Google Spreadsheet – which can pull financial information from Google Finance.  I’ve made it available with somewhat dummy data (The funds we have are accurate, but the number of shares is not), so you too can play with it.  It’s not likely to be immediately useful to you, but you can see it as an example of how we allocated across accounts, and create one for yourself.  The important page is the first one – you just want to categorize your holdings according to the asset classes you’ve defined (which may not be all that easy), then fill in your current amounts.

I used the second sheet for data – I keep track of the number of shares I have, and Google Finance pulls in the current prices and then updates the first sheet.   I have conditional formatting enabled on the second row to show me when my allocation is out of whack by +/- 1%.  If you change your desired allocations, you’ll need to change the conditional formatting – Google won’t let me use a cell as a starting point.

There is no magic linking the first sheet and the data sheet – it’s all manual linking in the formulas.

If you do happen to have more Google Spreadsheet-fu than I do and update it, please let me know so that I can link folks to an updated version.

Asset Allocation

Image courtesy of iosphere/ FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Image courtesy of iosphere/ FreeDigitalPhotos.net

As I turn 35, I just spent a good chunk of time updating all of our investment accounts.  I recently read All About Asset Allocation by Richard Ferri and decided that my haphazard investment selections needed to change, and I needed to really focus on what we wanted.  We want to retire when I turn 50 (exactly 15 years from now), with approximately $2.4 million in assets.  Now, that’s a lot of money, and I’m basing it off the 85% rule – we’ll want 85% of our current salary in retirement, then multiply by 25 for a safe withdrawal rate of 4%.  I’m hoping that we can work to reduce that number closer to $1.5 to $1.6 million (and also the retirement age!) as we work through our debts and lowering our expenses.

We’ve been very aggressive investors up until now – only about 5% in bonds, the rest in equities of varying types – but with a 15 year horizon, we want to start being a little more conservative.  I learned a lot about assets and their correlations and statistics in the book, and I took a look at what we were doing – we had a halfway decent allocation for our very aggressive model, but it could be improved.

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