retirement fund question

For my purposes I have decided to place the ira portion
of my investments into the so called target retirement year accounts, that
are offered by the usual sources,(t rowe, fidelity, vanguard etc)
What I wanted to know,(and I am looking at target
retirement at around 2035), is there any advantage to spreading this money
around to different companies that offer this type of plan, or keeping it
simple and just keeping it in one fund, with one company.
I have 13,000 in vanguards plan now, which includes my
2005 contribution.

Thanks for any input that
can be provided to me.

Re: retirement fund question

flatfoot2 wrote:
>
> For my purposes I have decided to place the ira portion
> of my investments into the so called target retirement year accounts,
> that are offered by the usual sources,(t rowe, fidelity, vanguard etc)
> What I wanted to know,(and I am looking at target
> retirement at around 2035), is there any advantage to spreading this
> money around to different companies that offer this type of plan, or
> keeping itsimple and just keeping it in one fund, with one company.
> I have 13,000 in vanguards plan now, which includes my
> 2005 contribution.

There really isn't any need to spread money across families simply to
have money in multiple places. There are, however, differences between
each family's target maturity funds, that you might care about.

Vanguard tends to be more conservative (higher bond percentage for the
same target year), and uses index funds. T. Rowe Price mixes active and
index funds, while Fidelity appears to use exclusively actively managed
funds (with substantial overlap). Fidelity also charges 8 basis points
in fees, in addition to the fees charged by the underlying funds.

Pick the style that best suits you, but I don't see a reason to spread
your money around.

Here are a couple of articles that may help identify the differences:



--
Mark Freeland