Half a percent is not a big deal, right? After all, half a percent of $100,000 is only 500 bucks. Wrong! An extra 0.50% paid in mutual fund fees can can be the difference between a comfortable retirement and living on a shoestring budget. Yesterday we looked at How to Find [...]
The Morningstar User’s Guide is a series of articles discussing how to make the best use of the tools, research and analysis available at Morningstar.com.
As we saw in the last article covering Morningstar’s Portfolio Manager, the tool provides some basic information about our investments, including the fund name, price, market value and the Morningstar Rating. [...]
I recently got an invitation to join Covestor. If you haven’t heard, Covestor is a new website that allows you to track your portfolio of investments. You can allow others to see what investment choices you’ve made, and Covestor tracks your performance against other Covestor participants. Covestor also has widgets you can [...]
I wish mutual fund companies actual sent us a bill each time they charged us. They don’t, of course, and so like The Dark Side of Placing Your Finances on Autopilot, we can easily forget about just how much they cost us. On top of that, not all costs of owning a mutual [...]
I like reading older personal finance books that aren’t part of the current craze of “Get Rich Quickly” books that seemed to get published daily. That’s why I love used book stores, and last week I found this gem, Money Game, which was published in 1967. The author is George Goodman, [...]
The Morningstar User’s Guide is a series of articles discussing how to make the best use of the tools, research and analysis available at Morningstar.com.
In the last article we covered a basic Introduction to Morningstar.com. Today we look at adding our portfolio to Morningstar. After you register with Morningstar (which is free), adding [...]
The Question of the Week examines some aspect of personal finance where reasonable (and not so reasonable) folks may disagree. Post your responses to the question as comments, and I’ll summarize your views and mine at the end of the week.
Let’s assume an individual has $10,000 in credit card debt at 14.99% interest and [...]
The Dough Roller regularly looks Back to the Future because “even if the time for action has gone by, the time for extracting a lesson from history is ever at hand for those who are wise.”–Demosthenes (384-322 BCE)
I was browsing through an antique store this past week and found some old bank checks. Let’s [...]
Morningstar offers a wealth of free and paid tools, research and analysis of stocks, bonds and mutual funds. As useful as this information can be, however, it can feel like information-overload or just plain confusing. For example, when I first started using Morningstar, I had many questions:
what does the Morningstar Star ratings mean [...]
