Recommended CONTRIBUTION ALLOCATIONS

[lovegardening]

imported post

Can anyone recommend CONTRIBUTION ALLOCATIONS. I am pretty new at this. I understand the interfund transfers but where should one have their Contribution Allocations and how often do you change those funds? Shouldone just leave them alone? Can you change them along with your interfund transfers? What is good and what is bad? Any and all advice from anyone would be very, very helpful.

 

[neirbod]

imported post

Hello Lovegardening,

You can change your contribution allocation at tsp.gov. Go to account access, then account transactions and you'll see the link to change your contributions.

Where to allocate funds is a personal choice. Manypeople on this sitemake interfund transfers so often (e.g. several times a week) that it doesn't matter much where they allocate funds, since the funds will be moved within a day or two anyway. Some of these frequent traders have decided to put all theirmoney into the G fund, then chose the moment to move from G to another fund. Others take more of a "buy and hold" approach. They allocate their money to a given fund or funds, and then let it sit there for weeks or months (or longer). In this case you'd want to make sure you are allocating to the funds that are right for you.

I tend to trade a few times a month,butthe frequencyvaries. I allocate my money according to where I tend to keep my money. That way, if I don't make an interfund transfer for a few weeks, I know my money is generally in the right funds.

If you are looking for information on what funds are "best," you can check out this link for longer-term investment strategies:

http://www.tsptalk.com/longer_term.html

There is also a lot of information in the various foums on this site.Doa search on "day trading" or "buy and hold" and you'll find some good discussion on the merits and risks of frequent (e.g. daily)trades vs. longer term strategies (e.g. holding onto a given allocation for months).

Hope this helps,

Dave

 

[lovegardening]

imported post

thanks Dave..........

 

[grums]

imported post

You might want to read some more info on this stuff. The best book I could recommend is The Four Pillars of Investing, by William Bernstein.

It helps explain the fundamentals of investing, asset allocation, etc. Its important to get a handle on all of this stuff before diving in. This place is a great asset as well.

Good luck!