Consolidators use Track My Portfolios to move beyond buy-and-hold investing.

Peggy and George are near retirees, in their late fifties and preparing for retirement. They were avid savers throughout their career, routinely contributing to IRA’s and 401k’s along the way. Their children are independent, so they are beyond the college saving/spending years.

With their various retirement and investment accounts, it was time consuming managing their portfolios, especially given that each one is held at different brokers and custodians. To make life easier, their allocations remain somewhat consistent, differing slightly because some asset classes are not available in their 401k’s, specifically REIT’s. Even though similar, they are not all the same, so rebalancing was sporadic except for automated annual rebalancing within their 401k’s.

As retirement draws near, their risk awareness became heightened, concerns about having enough to fund retirement is worrisome. Early on, not much thought went into investments, typical investors having chased individual stocks and hot funds and eventually settling into broad market funds for the long term. Having reached a point where they have knowledge, understand their risk and locked into asset allocations, they need a way to keep track to ensure their investments did not stray too far from their asset mix – a priority for them.

They are wary of advisors and their motives. Good ones are out there, but conflict of interest is a concern. They are also leery of free online services, those who take all your account information and upsell to managed accounts or sell their private information to third parties. They agree it is not a good idea to provide this information to any of these firms.

TMP offered the perfect solution for self-managed individual investors like themselves. They simply enter their portfolio holdings and corresponding asset allocation percent for each one and let TMP do the tracking. That’s it - no account numbers and no dollar amounts, therefore no private data vulnerabilities. And with a couple of clicks, they can get a quick snapshot of their portfolios to keep track. They buy into the investment strategy because they recognize it's something they should have been doing all along and know it is the best going forward.

With their portfolio perspectives in one place, combined with the knowledge they will get an alert at the appropriate time; they can rest assured knowing they are getting the most from their portfolios. Their management became much easier and their investing confidence increased because TMP’s underlying constant-mix formula aligns with their goals. A bonus is that their personal account information remains confidential – completely unknown to TMP, therefore not susceptible to theft and one less thing to worry about.

It is the ultimate win-win for Peggy and George. They moved beyond a buy-and-hold strategy to an industry standard and accepted strategy. Their only regret is they did not do it sooner.