Ballroom Dancing is EXCITING!

My Investment Portfolio is BORING.

In this blog post, I will elaborate on this distinction to help prioritize and focus on what is valuable and what is not. As you already guessed, I find ballroom dancing more valuable and important than worrying about my portfolio in the wake of all the useless noise in the financial world.

Note: The Desert Classic DanceSport Championships never saw us coming! Premier Dance Studio fielded four students, the three women, from the left Margie, Rachel and Bridgette and me on the far right. We are with our wonderful teachers and dance partners. On the left, Charles Thomas, owner of Premier Dance Studio, and his teacher colleagues Van Spencer and Elvia Gomez. All students in the pro/am competition were dancing with a professional and we were no different. As you know dancing can put you in a vulnerable position but this competition was safe and supportive for all competitors. The comradery of the seven of us pictured above was infectious as 100 tuning forks!  During the three day event with hundreds of other dancers, we won numerous first, second, and third place awards in our newcomer, pre-bronze, and bronze categories.

Ballroom dancing has several obvious benefits that deserve a reminder: mentally and physically healthy as it is social and active, and it is fun. For me, learning to dance has been new and challenging. I love learning new things, and its healthy for us older folks to keep our brains healthy and pliable. And that’s exactly what retirement is for.

On the other hand, exciting (and usually volatile) portfolios take up my time and energy that I want to focus on activities that are useful, positive and give back to society. I will never purposely construct an exciting portfolio. The excitement of watching it go up or down quickly is too distracting. It’s fake and mistaken excitement and the returns could be up very high or the losses very bad. I don’t ever want that again as I experienced that back in the run-up to the 2000-2002 tech bubble and crash.

Meeting new people, sharing a wonderful activity, getting exercise and showing you how my boring portfolio has performed this year so far is much more satisfying than daily watching individual stocks. My father-in-law spent his entire retirement life watching his individual stocks every day. He might have gone on one cruise. How tragic!

My Portfolio Report

(Recall, I am not a financial professional and there are many DIY investors like myself. Almost all of us DIYers agree that a BORING portfolio is an excellant portfolio: CLICK HERE).

I constructed my current portfolio over a decade ago. So there is not much to report, which is good! I love my boring portfolio. For many years, it does exactly I want it to do, just to follow the stock and bond markets. Nothing more or nothing less, most of the time my money grows. If the markets go up, then my portfolio goes up and if the market goes down, my portfolio follows like a duckling following its mama. Can you guess the mid-year return of my portfolio? If you have followed the stock market since January 1st, 2018, you would have guessed that my portfolio was flat. Smart guess. Technically, my portfolio lost less than 1/10 of 1.0%.

If you believe the negative news reports and the constant ranting and endless discussion about tariffs, trade wars, increasing interest rates and our president’s love fest with Russia’s president has a deleterious effect on your portfolio, fear not. If it wasn’t for tariffs and trade wars, interest rats or our president’s latest outrage, it would be other financial events that the financial news media would rant on. It NEVER ends.

Because of raising interest rates, the value of the Total Bond Market Index and Vanguard Wellesley performed in the negative. But the International Bond Index and TIAA went up.

The green and positive returns of my YTD was 46.35% of my portfolio. The red and negative returns of my portfolio reflected 52.95% of my portfolio. Roughly half of my portfolio went up slightly and half went down slightly. My portfolio as a whole performed right where it is supposed to perform in a mixed market, essentially flat.

As I have written before, ignore the financial news machine and do something different and positive for your health and well being.

Steve’s BIO

Stephen A. Schullo, Ph.D. (UCLA ’96) taught in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) for 24 years and UCLA Extension teaching educational technology to student teachers. Steve wrote investment articles for the United Teacher-Los Angeles (UTLA) newspaper for 13 years. Thrice featured retirement plan advocate in the Los Angeles Times and U.S. News and World Report. He co-founded an investor self-help group 403bAware for teacher colleagues and wrote 7,500 posts in three investment forums since 1997. Frequently quoted by the media, testified at California State legislative hearings and honored with the “Unsung Hero” award by UTLA for his retirement planning advocacy.

For the last twelve years, he serves on LAUSD’s Investment Advisory Committee as a “Member-at-Large” and former co-chair. The committee contains collective bargaining reps from the unions and monitors the district’s tax-deferred retirement plans, 457b/403b, of 55,000 former and current LAUSD employees, worth $2.5 billion in total assets.

He started this blog in 2012 to help all PreK-12 public school educators nationwide, especially his Los Angeles Unified School District colleagues. He belongs to a small national group of 403(b) advocates (mostly teachers) who want to bring closer attention to the 403(b). During the last 20 years, over 30 newspaper articles have been published and each one says the same thing, TSAs (Tax Sheltered Annuities) are terrible plans and the salesperson gets the benefit from lucrative commissions and high costs. Nobody in the educational establishment reads these articles NOR talk about the proper place for annuity products publically. We come together at 403bwise.com. Come on over if you want to join us so we can help our colleagues avoid these self-conflicted retirement plans, TSAs.

This content was originally published here.