Can I consider my pension to be a partial stand-in for bonds?
I’m 41, late to the game of investing anything for retirement… except for a pension that I’m vested and 12 years into. My coworker finally “forced” me to doing something with about $20K I had sitting here saved up in a basically-0% account. I’ve filled my Roth IRA for this year, and am making $2K in monthly contributions to my 403b/457b, plus more for the rest of the year to get it going and work down some of the cash I’ve got sitting here, leaving myself a few months of rent’s worth of cash (that I hope to eventually build up into a proper emergency stash).
Now… so far I put everything into FKSAX (this is all though Fidelity). It’s only been a couple months. I know I should put some percentage (20%?) into an international index for diversification. But I’m not sure what I should do in terms of bonds.
Since I’m starting a little late here, my plan was to basically go full-equity, all index funds for about 10 (ish?) years before moving into a target date retirement fund that will handle balancing it for me in a more protected way the rest of the way.
My reasoning was that my pension’s value is already much larger than my total investments so far, and represents some measure of money in a low-risk place. Is this a reasonable way to think of my pension?
Thanks for any help. I feel like I’m close to knowing what to do here but not quite there.
Posted Oct 4, 2024, 4:32 AM UTC