401K Reinrollment: Why Your Money May Be Put Into Target-Dated Funds
401K Reinrollment: Why Your Money May Be Put Into Target-Dated Funds
Target-dated funds are mutual funds that automatically adjust the asset mix of stocks, bonds and cash usually based on the investor’s future retirement date. Companies have been offering these options for their employees for many years. Some companies are now even having employees have to acknowledge if they don’t want to have their money put into target-dated funds.
In the hope of helping employees keep their money safe, companies are stepping in and trying to control where they hold their retirement funds. Employees can continue to choose from their company’s listed fund choices, but if they don’t opt out of the target-dated funds, their money may just be moved for them.
For those people who don’t want to hassle with choices and watching their funds, this may be a good choice. For those who are more financially savvy, the target-dated funds may not appeal to them; they may prefer to have control over their investments.
There are pros and cons to using target-dated funds based on gender, age and risk tolerance. For more information about target-dated funds and employers utilizing them, check out a recent article by the Wall Street Journal by clicking here.
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Wealth and Its Impact on Children’s Mental Abilities
Many traits have been studied to see what actually determines a child’s mental abilities. Nature vs. nurture is a common debate. Recent research from the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Virginia tested the mental abilities of 750 pairs of twins to determine if wealth made an impact. Their abilities were analyzed at 10 months and again at 2 years.
According to WSJ.com, “When it came to the mental ability of 10-month-olds, the home environment was the key variable, across every socioeconomic class. But results for the 2-year-olds were dramatically different. In children from poorer households, the choices of parents still mattered. In fact, the researchers estimated that the home environment accounted for approximately 80% of the individual variance in mental ability among poor 2-year-olds. The effect of genetics was negligible. The opposite pattern appeared in 2-year-olds from wealthy households. For these kids, genetics primarily determined performance, accounting for nearly 50% of all variation in mental ability. (The scientists made this conclusion based on the fact that identical twins performed much more similarly than fraternal twins.) The home environment was a distant second. For parents, the correlation appears to be clear: As wealth increases, the choices of adults play a much smaller role in determining the mental ability of their children.”
To read more about this study, check out the following article by the Wall Street Journal by clicking here.
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Quora Confusion: How to Navigate This New Social Media Site
Quora is a social media site created by former Facebook employees. It is designed to be an interactive question and answer site. It appears to me to be like the Q&A section on LinkedIn where someone can ask a question and receive an answer in a more sophisticated way than a simple Yahoo Answers response. Unlike Yahoo Answers, users must be a member of the site to view the discussions.
I have received several notifications that people were following me recently on Quora, so I decided to give it another look yesterday. Interestingly, this morning, the Wall Street Journal did a piece on Quora. I was a bit relieved to hear that I wasn’t the only one who finds the site to be a bit confusing. According to the WSJ article, “The site lacks instructions on how to use it; people just have to figure it out as they go. For example, a newcomer might not know that Quora answers can be voted up or down by seeing two tiny triangles that appear beside each answer. If I select the up triangle, this indicates I voted for that answer, and news of this vote is shared on the Quora home page of anyone who follows me. A number beside each answer indicates how many votes it has received so far. But unless you’ve used the site for a while, you wouldn’t know any of this.”
I like the Q&A section in LinkedIn and I think Quora has some possibilities. I will have to give it another try. I recommend reading the article in the Wall Street Journal to learn more about Quora and how to navigate within the site by clicking here.
For now, I have answered questions on Quora including one titled: How do you know if you are emotionally intelligent? If you are on Quora and want to see my response to that question click here.
Related Articles
- What Is Quora? (techie-buzz.com)
- Where Inquiring Minds Run Wild (online.wsj.com)
- Quora, LinkedIn or Twitter: Where should you find answers to questions? (sharemarketing.wordpress.com)
Wall Street Journal Partners with Unigo to Create a Site that Offers Potential College Students Some Sound Advice
The Wall Street Journal has teamed up with Unigo’s student correspondents from more than 2000 colleges across America to produce a site they call WSJ on Campus. If you are not familiar with Unigo, you can watch a video that explains what they do by clicking here. Their system helps student match their interests and values with appropriate universities. Their offer help to prospective students by providing reviews written by past students regarding the schools they have attended. This information is used to help prospective students decide which school is best for them.
If you to go to WSJ On Campus, you will find that they offer the following information about getting prepared for college:
- What matters when choosing a school
- What it will really be like when you get to college
- The perfect school for you
- Are Ivy schools are really worth it
- How to master the admissions essay
- How to deal with school’s turning your requests for admission down
- How to prepare for the SAT
- What to do if you can’t go to your first choice school
They also offer the following information about what to expect once you get there:
- How to choose the right classes
- How to choose the right major
- Who earns the most money
- How to handle doing the assignments
- Understanding academics
- How to succeed in your Freshman year
- How to get an A on your papers
- How to use textbooks on your iPhone
I tried searching by online, online colleges, distance learning and other terms but found no information about online education on the site. I even typed in some of the top online universities to see if they would come up and there was nothing. It appears this site is very helpful if you are considering going to a traditional college but not so helpful if you want to use it to choose an online university. Even if you do decide to attend an online college or university, you can learn a lot from their articles about how to be a successful student.
For more information about being a successful online student, click here.
What is Rapleaf and What Do They Know About You?
If you look at Rapleaf’s site (now Towerdata), they describe their business in the following manner: “Rapleaf is a San Francisco-based startup with an ambitious vision: we want every person to have a meaningful, personalized experience – whether online or offline. We want you see the right content at the right time, every time. We want you to get better, more personalized service. To achieve this, we help Fortune 2000 companies gain insight into their customers, engage them more meaningfully, and deliver the right message at the right time. We also help consumers understand their online footprint.”
According to an article by Emily Steel from the Wall Street Journal, Rapleaf is building a database with all of our information in it. They do this by tapping into voter-registration files and looking at our social networking, shopping and real estate purchases. According to that same article, “Rapleaf says it never discloses people’s names to clients for online advertising.”
I’ve seen blogs that consider this “scare journalism”. Are these articles meant to scare us or are they something we need to worry about?
Here is what The Wall Street Journal found:
- Rapleaf knows your real names and email addresses.
- It can build rich profiles by tapping voter-registration files, shopping histories, social-networking activities and more. In effect, it can built the ultimate dossier on you.
- Rapleaf sells pretty elaborate data that includes household income, age, political leaning, and even more granular details such as your interest in get-rich-quick schemes.
- According to the WSJ, Rapleaf segments people into 400 categories.
- Rapleaf says it doesn’t transmit personally identifiable data for online advertising, but the WSJ found that is not the case. Rapleaf shared a unique Facebook ID to at least 12 companies and a unique MySpace ID number to six companies. Any sharing was accidental, the company said.
- Politicians, both Democrats and Republicans, are using Rapleaf. It has provided data to 10 political campaigns