For my financial outlook, I have a distinct feeling of having turned a corner.
what I wanted :
You all will remember my struggles last summer with moving money around and consolidating accounts. I had a fear of the stock market crashing. Also, I wanted a better view of the big picture for general asset allocation.
I also wanted a general plan for end-stage-of-life for our money.
what I completed
I accomplished moving money around to consolidate accounts. Our household now has three brokerage accounts, all easily accessible online. ( Technically there are more due to my father-in-law’s estate but I’m not counting those because I don’t manage them and one of them will soon go away when the estate closes.)
With online access I can check balances any time. I have access to DH’s accounts as well.
To you all, online access is just a normal thing that you’ve been doing for years. See, I have not. DH receives reams of paper every year from these brokerage accounts. It was mysterious to me where the paper went and what it represented. I hope to move him off paper reports, but right now he is emotionally connected to the paper so he can have his paper.
The key word in that paragraph above is “mysterious. “ That word is important because I felt as though I did not have a ‘way in’ to general financial data. We made an asset report once a year, And that was super important to me because that showed me the big picture. The huge problem with that is that it came only once every 12 months. I did not have a ‘way in’ to our households assets outside of that report.
It has taken a lot of discussion with DH that includes discord, and a couple of conversations where we got very angry with each other, but it was worth it to get rid of the mystery.I would characterize the mystery as the fact that DH has been handling our money for 30 years and has his very detailed set procedures that I trust are eminently accurate. He’s very responsible with money. And I haven’t been at all interested in details and I’ve not been very interested in mid-level information. I wanted top level executive summary level information once a year but I would’ve liked that information more often. He was mad at me because he says I can’t understand the big picture without looking at the details, but I say yes I can.
I would’ve also liked to see an overall allocation of assets, but that would require all the brokerage accounts be put into one pot to analyze. I now have the beginnings of that and will be using Wells Fargo’s tool. I think all the brokers have this kind of tool so it’s not some unique thing.
This was a very strong year for the stock market, so we made a lot of money. The market crashed but came back up. It will drop again no doubt. I made a big push to move monies from income producing funds to cash funds. Obviously those cash funds did not grow but our income producing funds made leaps.
Part II:
I don’t have a plan in place for our final years.
I have a clear view of what I would do if this was my money and DH wasn’t in the picture: I would give away all growth for the year. That’s a huge amount of money this year, and he won’t agree to that so instead I dole out bits and pieces, nickel and diming it to the organizations I want to support.
The other hand, it’s kind of good that DH is in the picture to temper that.
And the reality is that the one fund that is mine alone did not grow at all this year. All of the growth came from his IRA, our stocks, and our joint accounts.
I am managing market risk by taking my funds and putting them in cash. So that means that “my “funds do not grow at all. There are risks to the strategy in that he gets rich dont.