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Obviously, what you invest in can mean the difference between getting rich and losing your shirt. But where you invest can be even more important — especially if you end up picking winners.

Most people have several different ways to put their money to work. If you have a 401(k) or other retirement plan at work, you can have deductions pulled directly out of your paycheck and put toward your long-term savings. Opening an IRA can give you many of the same benefits with even more flexibility. For goals other than retirement, regular brokerage or mutual fund accounts let you have complete control over your money, and you can take it out or move it without any penalties.

But if you have a diversified investment portfolio with a variety of assets — such as stocks, mutual funds, bank CDs or other fixed-income investments, and alternative investments — you may not spend much time figuring out where each investment fits best across all the accounts you have. As a result, you could be missing out on big tax savings.

What should go where?

The right answer depends on your individual situation, but some general rules of thumb apply to many people.

1. Interest-bearing assets belong in IRAs. If you have bank CDs, bonds, or other investments that produce interest income, the best place for them is in a Traditional IRA. The reason is that these assets benefit the most from the tax savings that IRAs provide. Unlike income from stock dividends and capital gains, interest income gets taxed at your higher ordinary rate. Given how low the rates on these investments are right now anyway, the last thing you can afford is to lose a big share of that meager income to the tax man.

2. Save your best ideas for a Roth IRA. A Roth IRA is a special type of retirement account that let’s you withdraw all the income it generates tax-free. Therefore, you should put the investments that have the best chance of soaring in value inside a Roth.

High-growth stocks fit that bill. Think about some of the blockbuster gainers over the years — stocks like priceline.com (PCLN) and Green Mountain Coffee Roasters (GMCR) that have made a bundle for their longtime shareholders. If you’d put those investments in a Roth IRA, you could’ve enjoyed all those profits without paying a penny in tax. That’s why Roth IRAs are so valuable — but since you can only contribute limited amounts to a Roth, you have to use your Roth money wisely.

3. Invest long-term in taxable accounts. Even though stocks give you the best chance to make significant money over the long haul, that doesn’t mean that they aren’t suitable for taxable accounts. Until you actually sell a stock you own, you don’t pay tax on any gains. So plenty of people are still sitting on big gains from stocks like Amazon.com (AMZN) and Apple (AAPL) that they’ve held for years, letting their profits ride — and they haven’t had to pay a dime in tax along the way.

Moreover, as long as you hold onto investments for more than a year, any gains qualify for a tax break. Currently, the maximum tax rate for long-term capital gains is 15%, compared to up to 35% for regular income. So putting stocks and stock mutual funds or ETFs in taxable accounts can be a smart idea — especially when you can’t afford to lock up that money until you retire.

Think Smart

Figuring out what investments to buy may seem hard enough without worrying about which account to use to buy them. But in your constant fight with the IRS, it can make a huge difference — and it’s worth the effort.

For more on smart tax moves:

• 2012 Tax Changes: What You Need to Know
• The Real Reason to Adjust Your Withholding
• Legally Dodge the Tax Man in Retirement

Motley Fool contributor Dan Caplinger learned a lot of tax lessons the hard way. You can follow him on Twitter here. He doesn’t own shares of the companies mentioned in this article. The Motley Fool owns shares of Amazon.com and Apple. Motley Fool newsletter services have recommended buying shares of Amazon.com, priceline.com, Green Mountain, and Apple, as well as creating a lurking gator position in Green Mountain and a bull call spread position in Apple.

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Tagged: 401k, assets under management, AssetsUnderManagement, bonds, cds, Finance, investing tips, InvestingTips, Roth IRA, Tax-freeSavingsAccounts, Traditional IRA, Twitter

Article source: http://www.dailyfinance.com/2012/04/02/an-investment-puzzle-how-to-put-your-assets-in-the-right-places/

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You’ve heard it so often you can probably repeat it in your sleep: Equities are the best protection against inflation.

Financial planners say it. Money managers say it. Pundits and gurus say it. Without a nice chunk of equities in our portfolio, we are told, inflation will ravage our net worth, and we may not have anything left for our very old age.

That’s why some experts have even recommended that retirees or near-retirees hold 60% or more of their assets in stocks — terrible advice, and it destroyed many people’s finances and peace of mind during the crash a couple of years ago.

The market has come back since then — without the participation of those who sold at the bottom in despair — so maybe some advisors believe it was sound thinking after all.

But academic research, old and new, completely flies in the face of this conventional “wisdom.” It establishes clearly that stocks are not a very good hedge at all against inflation, particularly high inflation. Even Stocks for the Long Run himself, Jeremy Siegel, acknowledges that.

“Historically, that’s been the case,” said John Tatom, a finance professor at Indiana State University.” I claim that’s one of the most well-established tenets in financial economics.”

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In a 2011 paper, Tatom wrote: “There is a strong negative correlation between inflation and real and nominal stock prices. Contrary to opinion, equities are not a good hedge against inflation.”

Some new research by three noted experts on asset prices confirms this. Elroy Dimson, Paul Marsh, and Mike Staunton of the London Business School have one of the world’s deepest databases on the performance of stocks, bonds, bills, and currencies, as well as inflation. It covers 19 different markets and goes all the way back to 1900.

In an article in the 2012 Credit Suisse Global Investment Returns Yearbook, they found that during periods of “marked” inflation, equities easily outperform bonds, probably the worst investment to own during inflationary episodes. Yet equities gave a real return of -12% during those periods, while bonds lost 23.2%. Double ouch.

“When inflation has been moderate and stable,…equities have performed relatively well,” the three professors concluded. “When there has been a leap in inflation, equities have performed less well in real terms. These sharp jumps in inflation are dangerous for investors.”

“High inflation reduces equity values,” they summed up.

• Read why Howard is permanently reducing his stock holdings.

Confusing ROI with Inflation Protection

So why have so many experts embraced equities as an inflation hedge? Because they’re confusing the large total returns investors may have earned from equities over long periods of time with an actual “hedge” against inflation.

Because of their greater risk, equities tend to produce bigger rewards over the long run — say, 20 years or more.

But that’s not quite in the bag, either.

Exhibit A: the lost decade. The average annual total return for the SP 500 index from 1999 to 2011 was -0.4%. So, we’re going to need a hell of a good next eight years to reach the SP’s long-term averages of just under 10% a year in this 20-year period. Dow 36,000 anyone?

Of course, if you invested in certain types of stocks — small-cap value, real estate investment trusts, and emerging markets — you would have done well. But who knew that in 1999?

And when it comes to inflation, even the esteemed Jeremy Siegel of The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania hedges his bets, so to speak.

“Over 30-year periods, the return on stocks after inflation is virtually unaffected by the inflation rate,” he wrote in Kiplinger’s last year. “Although stocks do well when annual inflation is in the range of 2% to 5%, their performance begins to falter when inflation exceeds 5%.”

Why? Because “companies can’t always pass along increased costs, especially in the case of an important raw material, such as oil. As a result, many companies will see their profits squeezed,” he wrote.

Siegel’s conclusion: “Stocks are not good short-term hedges against rapidly increasing inflation, but bonds are worse.”

What You Should Actually Buy

So, what does that mean? If you own a lot of stock because you want to protect your portfolio against inflation, you probably should sell some.

For instance, if you’re five to ten years from retirement and you have 50% to 60% of your assets in stocks, you should reduce those holdings to 40 to 50% of your portfolio.

And if you’re worried about inflation, you should take some of that money — and sell some of your bond holdings, too– to buy some asset classes that have better track records as inflation hedges.

• Read Howard’s take on why cash isn’t trash in MoneyShow.com.

Such as? “In periods of high and increasing inflation, gold and commodities are definitely something you want in your portfolio,” said Mark Johannessen, managing director of Harris SBSB in McLean, Va., and former president of the Financial Planning Association.

Dimson, Marsh, and Staunton’s research backs him up. “Gold is the only asset that does not have its real value reduced by inflation,” they write. “Gold has on average been resistant to the impact of inflation. However, investment in gold has generated volatile price fluctuations…There have been long periods when the gold investor was ‘underwater’ in real terms.”

Not for the last decade, of course, when gold rose more than sevenfold before stalling below $1,900 per ounce. But the researchers are talking about the very long run.

Another good hedge: housing. Don’t everyone all groan at once. According to Dimson, Marsh, and Staunton, “real house-price changes … seem relatively insensitive to inflation … Housing has provided a long-term capital appreciation that is similar in magnitude to gold.”

Unfortunately, U.S. housing has produced the weakest returns of major markets over the last century, so if you’d like to hedge against inflation with your home, pack up and move to Australia.

Real estate investment trusts (REITs) may be a decent substitute, but there aren’t as much data on their performance over many, many years — and they’ve had a big run.

Finally, there are TIPs (Treasury inflation-protected securities), inflation-linked bonds issued by the US and other governments. Smart people like David Swensen, Yale’s chief investment officer, recommend them for individual investors as good protection against inflation. But they’re very expensive now.

So, what should you do? I’d take some profits in your stock and bond holdings and buy small positions (maybe 5% of your portfolio each) in gold, commodities, REITs, and TIPs ETFs, preferably when they’ve sold off a bit, too.

Then, I’d keep 40% to 50% in stock, 20% to 30% in bonds, and another 10% in cash. That way, you’ll have some protection against inflation, deflation, and just normal life.

And if your financial advisor tells you to buy more stock to keep from outliving your money, tell him or her that in the long run, we’re all dead.