I left my previous company last March and therefore stopped contributing to the 401k. I was planning to roll it over into a rollover-IRA but didn’t get around to it. Luckily I did check in a few times to make sure the asset allocation was ok and I’m glad I did.
From April 1st 2006 until Feb 20th 2007 it returned 16.66%. And for the year 2006 it returned a stellar 21.4%. Now if I could keep this up, I’d be in the running with Warren Buffett 😉
Of course my regular brokerage account hasn’t done nearly as well, basically because I buy individual stocks and not mutual funds, because I think I’m so damn smart!! (Actually it was those stupid WCI puts that ruined the performance) Anyway, as soon as August rolls around (thats the 1 year anniversary of the new account) I’ll post how that account did. Right now its not worth even mentioning!
My Roth IRA which I opened in September is up 11.66%. My previous Roth which I opened in 2002 and funded with $4,000 has a balance of $1.99. Its been like that for about 4 years and I don’t have the heart to transfer it to TDAmeritrade or close it. Don’t even know if I can close it.
Anyway, I’ll be funding the wife’s 2006 Roth at Bank of America. I just got an email that if you maintain a $25,000 balance they’ll give you 30 free trades per month which is pretty sweet. Don’t know if they have the same breadth of products as TDAmeritrade but they can’t be too bad.
Incidentally I found out that TDAmeritrade had taken out some of my dividends from last month and reapplied them the next day. When I inquired why, I found it was because the fools didn’t know what the Canadian Loonie to US Dollar conversion rate was and mistakenly gave me $0.002 cents per US Dollar. That didn’t even make a 1 cent difference which leads me to wonder where all those rounding errors go??? Is there some programmer (like in ‘Office Space’ or ‘Superman III’) who’s getting fat off these?