Expert: Dr. Joseph de Beauchamp - 10/15/2006

Question
Two years ago I rolled my 401K into an Edward Jones IRA.  I am in the Van Kampen family of funds. I bought all A shares; load approx $3000 on a $64,000 rollover. Recently I have been reading up on investing; The SEC has a link to a mutual fund load calculator that will let you compare fund loads and the effect on overall earnings. Yikes! I wish I would found this sooner.  I want to get out of the Van Kampen funds and go to Indexed funds i.e. Dreyfes. What are your thoughts on this.  I am 47 and have 70,000 in this account now. Even though I will be retiring in 12 years I don't plan on withdrawing mony from this account for untill I am 65.  

Answer
Load is not as important as you are looking over. You should go to the local library and pull out the Morningstar and read everything. This is free and not linked to any broker dealer slant. You should take a careful look at the future performance numbers, and not so much the history. Moringstar book is over a thousand pages of reading, and best to do this on a sit down. I am not very fond of the index funds right now, since I think the markets are generally in for 10 years of problems.

Dr. Joseph de Beauchamp