Wednesday, November 22, 2006

pausing with the financial advisor?

I talked with our financial advisor recently.
He raised a very good point - maybe we want to put the investment planning on hold until we have relocated to IL.
His points were:

  • We have numerous life changes about to occur
  • Many expenses - not all predictable
  • A more expensive house would eat into our cash - especially if we chose to make a larger down payment (he favors large downpayments to obtain cheaper interest rates - I prefer the minimum until the difference in rates is tangible)
  • Once we moved, he could do a more thorough advisory role by performing financial planning as well as investment plan - repositions us from the cart before the horse situation.
  • Although not optimal, most of our retirement investments are in lifecycle funds, there is a level of simplicity and elegance that should tide us over until June of next year.

Impacts:

  1. I don't spend money until we complete the planning
  2. We lose about 7 months of better investment management
  3. I have to re-balance my out of retirement investments (and probably change them) - this actually would be a fun thing to try doing. Unfortunately it would be difficult to take an entire portfolio view due to the lack of transparency with the lifecycle funds.
  4. We can do proper financial planning once we are settled.

What would you do?

Regards,

makingourway

1 comment:

Dimes said...

I think I'm inclined to agree. Moving is a PITA and you always run into more costs than you expect. It's good to have some more cash on hand as you invariably will need it.
As soon as you're settled, though, definitely resume with your plan.