Background and Current State

In late 2006, my wife and I decided to fire our financial planner and start to keep track of our own retirement funds. This included old 401k accounts that we rolled into IRAs and our current companies 401ks. Currently, we have no investments outside of though 2 IRAs and 2 401ks.

Taking 01/01/2007 as a starting point, here are the annual return of all 4 combined accounts

-2007 : +15.34%

-2008 : -45.55%

-2009(as of 11/6/9) : +27.45%

Note: I currently am using Google docs to keep track of things. I use the XIRR function to account for monthly inflow to the 401k accounts.

Currently, I've been lagging the markets for the last few months, as I've taken a more conservative bent on the markets. I'm under the impression that markets have run too far, too fast given underlying fundamentals. However the market seems to be providing us with evidence to the contrary.

In my next post I'll talk more about the make up and current status of the 4 accounts, as well as provide more about my thoughts and strategy.

Meanwhile here is a link to an interesting article I read on one of my favorite financial sites on the web, Minyanville. In it writer John Maudlin discusses the possible approaches to getting out of this financial mess, or ways we could make it worse, All America's Possible Futures.