Tuesday, November 03, 1998

Beating Inertia
by Jacki Stirn ([email protected])

My recovery to Fooldom has had little to do with escaping from full-service brokers. They were out of my life before The Motley Fool entered it. To paraphrase Pogo, I have met the enemy and it is... me! I confess I haven't completed my journey to a Foolish life because of... inertia.

As far as I'm concerned, we have a boatload of retirement money (all I can say here is start early and never pass up a matching dollar). Much of the money is where it first docked. Why? Well, if it took more than a phone call to move it, it stayed anchored where it was. As a working mom with three kids, it seemed beyond me to get the forms, fill them out, and mail them to get the money moved. Even if I started the process, I never managed to get the ship out of dry dock.

I was proud of the fact that I actually rolled money over into an IRA index fund this summer. (Of course, it was retirement money from a job I left about four years ago.) Now I'm angry, though, and money will roll. I have in my possession the forms to open a self-directed IRA brokerage account and this time it WILL happen. Why? I recently received a notice in the mail that a mutual fund company holding a 403(b) from a former employer is instituting an annual fee after 12 years. This added insult to injury. The fund has done okay by S&P 500 standards. But wait a minute! This
fund charged a front-end load and now they want an annual fee?

Whaack!! (Thanks, I needed that.)

I'm outta there and on the way to becoming Fully Foolish.

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