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Overview
This wiki organizes the investment ideas and processes of Index Planners, Inc. We provide personalized, tax-savvy, index-oriented investment advice to regular people, and do so at a very low fixed cost.
This wiki contains both the guidelines used by Index Planners advisors and background material explaining the "why" behind these guidelines. All of this material is intentionally available to both Index Planners investors and the public in order to encourage conversation and consensus around investment best practices.
The investment principles that Index Planners uses are discussed on the Bogleheads web forum and were largely crystallized in the book The Bogleheads' Guide to Investing. This is all based, to quote Money magazine, on Vanguard founder Jack Bogle's eminently sensible investment philosophy: "Keep your costs low, don't chase performance, focus on asset allocation rather than stock picking, and invest early and often." Although some Index Planners advisors are frequent posters on the Bogleheads forum, this site and company are not directly connected with the Bogleheads or Jack Bogle, other than drawing our inspiration from them.
Index Planners Advising Process
There are an infinite number of Boglehead-style portfolios. However, the purpose of the Index Planners Guidelines portion of the site is to assemble guidelines to enable advisors, buy essay, given an investor's accounts and assets, to consistently create near-identical portfolios. This largely consists of a formalization of the advice process that already occurs in the Help section of the Bogleheads forum. There are 3 steps to the advising process:
- Info we need from new investors
- Portfolio Creation - The process for converting this info into a portfolio
- Example Reports - What Index Planners produces for investors
Backup information
- Total Market - Why total market investing is good
- Vanguard safety - Is it safe to keep all of my money at Vanguard?
- Social Security age - What is the best age to take social security?
- Emergency funds - Why to hold them at Vanguard
Discussing this wiki
General discussions of financial topics can best occur on the Bogleheads investing theory forum. For discussions of specific details about content on this wiki, you can use the Discussion page associated with each wiki page.
More info on Index Planners
Background info
- Jack Bogle's website
- Recent breakaway of the Bogleheads forum from Index Universe, January 2008
- Diehards history and get-togethers from Money magazine, September 2001
Note on total market vs. slice & dice
Total market investing focuses on holding the entire universe of stocks and bonds through a small number of index funds, and with minimal weighting toward ==Related Links==
Slice & Dice investing also uses low-cost indexed or passive funds when available, but tries to divide up the universe of different asset classes and adjust the weighting with the hope of reducing risk and improving return. The Fama/French approach of weighting toward small value stocks can be accomplished in either approach, though slice & dice naturally gives far more flexibility.
The Index Planners advisors use a total market approach. That's not an argument that total market is better than slice & dice, just that the simplicity of total market investing is superior for less experienced investors. As those investors become more educated and interested, they may decide to switch to a slice & dice portfolio, or stick with the total market approach.
It's fine to include slice & dice content on this wiki, as long as it's not on the pages constituting Index Planners investment guidelines.
