Investment Options

Hi, I'm Matt Daley. Thanks for tuning in to the Financial Success Academy.

In this episode, I'll discuss the different investment options available to you on the DecisionPoint 457(b) platform.

Your employer has hired DecisionPoint to serve as an independent fiduciary investment manager on your 457(b) plan. This means that we have fiduciary responsibility for the selection and monitoring of the available investment options.

When selecting these investment options, our job is to go out into the universe of available investments and identify those funds that consistently benchmark high against our peers when measured for cost and performance.

Your 457(b) account is one of the greatest vehicles through which you can access the power of the capital markets and grow the wealth that you'll need to successfully retire in the future.

Over the past 100 years, the global stock market has generated annualized returns of about 10%. However, capturing these returns over time requires proper investment allocation, patience, discipline, and consistency.

When you enroll with DecisionPoint, you'll need to make an investment election for how you want your monthly contributions to be invested. This is a critical decision, and we're here to provide you with conflict-free advice to help make sure the investments align with your goals and investment time horizon.

At the core of the DecisionPoint investment platform are six professionally managed mutual fund portfolios, ranging from all stocks to all bonds and anything in between. Each portfolio contains over 12,000 securities traded in over 40 countries. The vast majority of our clients, with our assistance, select one or more of these portfolios to achieve their proper investment allocation appropriate to their investment time horizon.

In addition to the DecisionPoint model portfolios, we also offer Vanguard target date retirement funds. These funds are designed to automatically reduce an investor's exposure to volatility by gradually transitioning from stocks to bonds over time. A target date fund associated with the year you plan to retire may or may not provide you with the ideal investment allocation for your specific time horizon and financial situation.

A common pitfall we often see by those who use target date funds is becoming too conservative too quickly. For those wanting to create their own models, we give you the option of investing in the specific asset class funds we use in our model portfolios. However, most of our clients utilize our model portfolios because they're professionally managed, broadly diversified, monitored by our team, and they're designed to help you maximize your investment returns over the long term.

We hope you found this video helpful. And as always, stay safe, and thanks for tuning in.