This Week’s Investing Update

Photo by alberto tondo on Unsplash.

It’s time for another investing project update — and, although this week’s news isn’t quite as exciting as last week’s, I still have a lot of news to share:

My HSA completed its first auto-trade yesterday. As a reminder of how this all works: I manually deposit 5 percent (pretax) of each freelance check I receive into my HSA account, and every time my cash balance is larger than $50, my HSA automatically invests it into a preselected target-date index fund.

Which means I got a delightful email from HealthEquity confirming that everything had happened the way it was supposed to.

I got a less-than-delightful email from Capital One Investing, informing me that my Roth IRA transfer was in progress but that it might take 15–30 days for the transfer to complete, which seemed a little extreme. However, the transfer was fully complete as of yesterday, and my Roth IRA is now reinvested at Vanguard.

My Traditional IRA transfer is still in progress; I couldn’t submit the paperwork at the same time as I submitted the Roth IRA paperwork because I didn’t open the Traditional IRA until this year, so I needed to wait until I got my first official statement. I expect that transfer to complete by the end of the month.

My 403(b) rollover, as you might remember, completed last week with impeccable market timing; TIAA sold the funds the day before the market started to decline and Vanguard invested them the day the Dow dropped 1,000 points.

But how are all of my investments doing now?

My HSA currently shows a $50 cash balance and a $242.81 target-date fund balance — but my portfolio has lost $7.97 of its value, or 4.6 percent.

My Roth IRA has an $0.02 cash balance and a $6,554.70 target-date fund balance, and I don’t have any gains/losses yet because those funds haven’t even been invested for a full 24 hours. (Index funds show gains/losses at market close.)

My 403(b) rollover has no cash balance and a $44,936.33 balance in Vanguard Admiral Shares index funds at 45 percent domestic stocks, 27.5 percent international stocks, and 27.5 percent bonds. That’s 0.81 percent higher than the $44,574.70 I invested on the day the Dow had its historic drop.

My personal brokerage account has a $54.95 cash balance and a $331.67 ETF balance.

Vanguard also has this lovely chart that shows me how much all of my investment accounts have grown over time; currently, I’m up by $354.96. In, like, a month. (Something something past performance not indicative.)

I’m not sure I need to keep doing these updates every week, now that it looks like my investments are up and running. I’m assuming that my Traditional IRA will complete its transfer soon, and going forward I can add any investing news to my monthly financial update. But before I close out this investing series, are there any other questions you’d like me to answer? I am by no means an investment expert — seriously, I’m learning as I go — but I’ve gotten very good at filling out Vanguard forms!

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