Investment Re-balancing – Part Two

The process to consolidate my 403b took far longer than I had anticipated.  The funds from Plan sponsor 2 were finally released in early April.  I had provided them with a mailing address to send the proceeds, but requested that if a different address was provided by the receiving company in the Letter of Acceptance, to use the updated address.  It took 2 weeks between the time the funds were released to be received. Unfortunately, the original mailing address was used and this created an additional delay in the fund proceeds being deposited correctly.

I had set up for the money being transferred to be assigned to different funds from the ones designated by my payroll contributions.  Because the transfer came in through a general accounting center address vs. the retirement center, the transferred funds ended up being deposited to the accounts for my payroll allocation.  I contacted my plan sponsor about the error and they acknowledged the mistake and agreed to correct the balances.   Because the funds were “in play” in the fund accounts, it took the accounting department almost 3 weeks to calculate the market fluctuations and move the money with the adjusted amounts to the correct funds.  I have to admit that I have been very pleased working with the current plan sponsor and how responsive they have been in helping me get any issues sorted out – including linking individuals from multiple departments into conference calls.

The next steps in re-balancing will be two-fold.   The first will be realigning the portfolio to an allocation more based on my age and investing timeline.  I admit to being guilty of the “set and forget” style of investing.  My husband is a risk adverse investor, so his retirement portfolio has been very conservative and had much lower returns.  The second will be adjusting the portfolio amounts to cushion them from market adjustments and have the funds set aside for 2-4 years worth of withdrawals.  I have been working on several posts to explain some of the financial theory and strategies I have evaluated and will utilize.