The Life Cycle

By Barbara Kiviat

As people age, they should move their portfolios from riskier investments like stocks to more conservative options like bonds and cash. Yet often they don't. Enter life-cycle funds. Investors pick a fund based on the year they plan to retire and let a professional manager do the rest, gradually swapping investments as the years go by. Michael Porter, senior research analyst at investment tracker Lipper Inc., calls it "fast-food investing."

And investors are eating it up. Assets in life-cycle funds--also called target-date or target-maturity funds--jumped more than 65% last year, to $44 billion, with people buying them mostly in retirement plans like 401(k)s and IRAs. The Federal Government is a fan too, adding them to its employee-retirement plan this summer. President Bush has even suggested offering them for proposed privatized Social Security accounts.

However appealing, though, these funds do have their pitfalls. Typically, a life-cycle portfolio invests in a mix of other funds, delivering risk-reducing diversification--but also a chance for an added layer of fees. You will want to stick with funds firms (like T. Rowe Price and Vanguard) that charge only the underlying funds' expense ratios or a modest amount on top. (Fidelity, for example, charges an extra 0.08%.) Some firms charge far more.

Another warning: each fund has its own one-size-fits-all mentality--and that size might not be yours. The American Century My Retirement 2025 Portfolio, for example, aims this year to have 67% in stocks, 28% in bonds and 5% in a money market. Yet Vanguard Target Retirement 2025--pursuing the identical goal--holds a 59% stock, 41% bond split.

Finally, life-cycle funds are meant to be all-in-one portfolios, yet a survey of retirement savers by Hewitt Associates found that people who invest in them held an average of six different funds in their 401(k)s. That not only undercuts the great advantage of those vehicles--ease of use--but it can also put your overall portfolio allocation out of whack, morphing you into a middle-of-the-road investor when an aggressive or conservative allocation might better suit your time frame. "Employees think this is another fund," says David Wray, president of the Profit Sharing/ 401(k) Council of America. "But it's an investment-strategy alternative." Life-cycle funds can help you better invest for retirement, but you still have to pay attention.

HANDS OFF MY FUND

Fidelity Freedom 2035 Fund, for folks retiring in 2035, automatically moves money to more conservative investments as the years go by

[This article contains a table. Please see hardcopy of magazine or PDF.]