Last week, we saw in our DB work that having your long-term savings in 10% instead of 2% means a difference of hundreds of thousands of dollars more in your savings for long term goals (new house, child's college education, retirement, etc.). But some of you may have been thinking that getting an average 10% return is impossible. I used 10% because that is extremely easy to find (anything over, say 15%, though, and you are either taking bigger risks, and/or you are having to spend at least a few hours a week attending to your investments). The investment vehicle I'm talking about is a mutual fund, and many of you may already have some money in one if your company offers a 401K plan with choices. Finding a mutual fund which averages over 10%/year and has been around doing that for 20-75 years through all kinds of economies is easier than you might think. Your DB task for this week is to find a mutual fund from among the companies I list below that satisfies these requirements: 1) averages over 10% return; 2) has an inception date before 1997 (so it's done that through at least 2 recessions); 3) has no entry or exit fees (these fees are called "loads" in the industry); 4) has an expense ratio fee of less than 1%. Besides the fund name, give the minimum investment to start investing in it, and the minimum amount of future additions to it. There are many mutual fund companies out there, but some of the best are listed below (feel free to search through others though, if you like). Once on the site, look for a list of their mutual funds (might be under a personal investors category for some companies), and if they have a search filter, look for equity funds, or highly rated funds (4 or 5 star). Make sure you look to see what funds have been posted by others on the DB before you look because if you post one that has already been posted, you won't get credit. There are at least 40-50 different funds just among the companies listed, so it should be too hard to find one, and hopefully this will help you with your savings goals.
Companies: Fidelity, Vanguard, T Rowe Price, Janus