When it comes to managing your retirement portfolio, you can put the power entirely in your own hands. In other words, you can sit in the driver’s seat as you travel along the road to retirement.
Fortunately, thanks to the proliferation of technology and the abundance of information online about retirement, you have a variety of tools and resources to help manage your retirement portfolio. What follows are five potential benefits of managing your own retirement portfolio.
1. Giving You Freedom Regarding How Your Money Is Put to Work
Managing your retirement portfolio allows you to be the lone decision maker for the assets you do and do not want to include in your portfolio. You alone are able to make informed decisions about your portfolio and choose what you should do with your money.
In addition, you can pick where you want those assets to be held. For instance, you might choose a self-directed precious metals IRA that enables you to buy and hold gold and other precious metals or other alternative assets.
But if you’re a little nervous about going solo with portfolio management, you might consider enlisting help from a robo-advisor.
A robo-advisor is a digital advisor that relies on technology, rather than humans, to build and oversee your retirement portfolio. A robo-advisor makes decisions based on your personal information, giving you a considerable amount of control over what happens to your portfolio.
A robo-advisor can also tweak the direction of your portfolio at any time based on updating things like your financial goals. But for the most part, robo-advisors enable a hands-off approach to managing your retirement portfolio. They offer a hybrid between managing everything on your own and letting the professionals do all the work.
2. Letting You React Quickly to Market Changes
When you’re in control of your retirement portfolio, you might be able to respond faster to market shifts than if you work through a financial professional.
Let’s say you see that the markets are in freefall, and you’d like to move some of your assets around right away to account for this. If you self-manage your portfolio, you can swiftly take action without contacting a financial advisor, waiting for their response, and then waiting on them to make a move on your behalf.
3. Getting a Better Handle on Portfolio Diversification
As the sole manager of your portfolio, you might be able to achieve portfolio diversity more rapidly than if you work with a financial advisor.
Portfolio diversification involves spreading risk among a variety of asset types. In your portfolio, these asset types might include stocks, bonds, money market funds, certificates of deposit (CDs), real estate, and precious metals. Diversification has proven to help portfolios better weather the long-term ups and downs of asset performance.
Portfolio diversification also helps ensure that you maintain a balanced portfolio, rather than one that’s tilted too much toward one asset type or another.
4. Avoiding Some Management Fees and Commissions
You often must pay fees and commissions to financial professionals who oversee your retirement portfolio. But when you handle the portfolio on your own, you can eliminate many of these management fees and commissions.
5. Enabling You to Open a Self-Directed IRA
If you opt to manage your retirement portfolio on your own, one of the options out there that can empower you is a self-directed IRA.
A self-directed IRA, which typically is a Roth IRA or traditional IRA, lets you purchase and hold alternative assets, rather than traditional paper-based assets like stocks and bonds. These alternative assets can include precious metals, real estate, tax lien certificates, and promissory notes.
Alternative assets like precious metals might help protect you from inflationary and economic swings. Precious metals that can be housed in a self-directed IRA are IRS-approved gold, silver, platinum, and palladium.
Take financial ownership of your future. When you’re in charge, there’s no limit to how successful you can be. Download a free Precious Metals IRA kit to learn more about a retirement tactic that can help put the power in your hands.
