Ms. Savage is not affiliated with, or compensated by, U.S. Global Investors Inc.
|
Order The Savage Truth on Money from Amazon.com
In her latest book, The Savage Truth on Money, Chicago Sun-Times personal financial columnist and award winning author Terry
Savage gives you the facts, resources and confidence you need to take charge of your finances today and give you a secure future for
tomorrow. A former stockbroker, founding member and first female trader on the Chicago Board Options Exchange, Savage comments
regularly on investing and the markets for Barron’s Online, Microsoft’s Money Central, PBS’ Nightly Business Report and Oprah!
You can read about the All American Equity Fund and how to start an investing program with our ABC Investment Plan®, which are
both featured in the “Getting Started is Easy” section of her book. To find out more about her book, log on to our website at www.usfunds.com.
|
There’s a new dimension in using your computer and the Internet to gain control over your
investments and financial planning. Now you can not only track your investments and get
the latest information, but you can actually get sophisticated, objective and personalized
financial advice. That’s the cutting edge of Internet technology these days.
I hope you’ve already discovered the benefits of banking, tracking your investments, and
doing money research online. Today you don’t have to rely on a financial professional to
give you current information about your investments. It’s all available with the click of a
mouse.
Now it’s time to take the process one step further — to financial decision-making. The truly
big question for every investor is: “Am I on track to reach my financial goals?” Whether
you’re saving and investing for retirement, your children’s college education or any other
target, your goals are individual ones. One size does not fit all, and a simple percentage
asset allocation plan is not particularly useful. Plus, there are always a lot of uncertainties,
ranging from market performance and inflation to your own life expectancy.
Now several websites, backed by sophisticated computer algorithms, help you create a personalized
investment plan to meet your goals. The leaders are www.FinancialEngines.com,
www.mPower.com, and the ClearFuture section of the Morningstar.com website. Each
charges a small fee that’s well worth the advice you receive. Here’s how they work.
you need to take charge of
your finances today and
give you a secure future for
tomorrow. A former stock-broker,
Just go to the website of your choice and choose a trial subscription. (FinancialEngines and
ClearFuture are already accepting individual accounts; mPower will be online for individual
accounts soon.) Each will give you a private PIN to access the account information
you’ll enter. You’ll have to spend about twenty minutes inputting facts about your financial
goals and current status, as well as your current investments.
Then each program will send your information back to its computers via the Internet, for a
sophisticated Monte Carlo analysis of whether you’re on track to reach the goals you set.
(By the way, Monte Carlo does not refer to a casino, but to a modeling theory that takes
complex variables and creates potential interactions and forecasts results!)
Perhaps the most impressive of these programs is offered by FinancialEngines.com. The goal
is to give individual investors access to the same information, advice, and portfolio modeling
tools that the big pension fund managers use to optimize their investment process. But
you don’t need to be a Nobel Prize-winning economist to use and profit from this site!
Just go to www.FinancialEngines.com and give it a free try to see where you stand now.
Then, a series of easy-to-use slider bars lets you figure how you could change your status
by either increasing your contributions, taking more risk, or delaying retirement by a few years.
But the real benefit of this service is the advice it offers. You can input the choices in your
40l(k) plan, and the computer will tell you how to re-allocate your investment assets. If
some of your investments are held outside a retirement plan, they’ll include those assets in
the analysis. It’s as if you had your own expert investment advisor giving you a personalized
consultation based on your own financial situation and goals. Now, that’s really using your
computer and the Internet to gain power over your financial future.
|
|
Investment Professionals 
