My Retirement Basket

Currently, my retirement basket is made up of the following accounts:

• 401k at my work (John Hancock Pensions)
• Rollover IRA from my previous employers' 401k accounts (Scottrade brokerage account)
• Traditional IRA for me (American Funds)
• Roth IRA for my wife (T. Rowe Price)
• SIMPLE plan from the company my wife owns (T. Rowe Price)
• Regular brokerage account (Lincoln Financial Advisors)

We regularly contribute to the 401k, SIMPLE plan, and brokerage account. We'll begin contributing to the IRAs in 2006. The rollover account is essentially a holding place for any old 401k money.

In all honesty, things aren't very balanced in these baskets. I'm not an expert on asset allocation, however one of my goals for 2006 is to figure out a better way to manage these accounts and find some balance.

I'm contributing 15% of my gross income to this basket. Ultimately I'd like to be at 20%. My wife laughs at this since 10% use to be enough. As soon as we achieved that goal, I wanted to bump it to 15%. Now that we are there, I'd like to bump it to 20%. She jokes that what I really want is to put 80% into this basket, buy some Ramen noodles with the rest of it, and live in a single-wide trailer. I tell her not to give me any ideas...