Please stay tuned for important disclosure information at the conclusion of this episode.

Welcome to Investing Insights. I'm your host, Ivanna Hampton. Investment accounts like 401ks can start to pile up the more you change jobs. And so can the number of investment providers

you have relationships with. It could become a hassle to keep up with those tax deferred accounts,

along with your IRA and taxable investing accounts. Those may also be held with different

investment providers. How can you streamline

all of it to reduce the clutter? Morningstar, Inc. Director of Personal Finance, Christine Benz,

explains how in this excerpt from her webcast, five steps to spring cleaning your investment

portfolio. The first step in this process in terms of streamlining your portfolio is to take a hard look

at all of your investment providers as well as your investment accounts.

So the advantages of doing so, it gets again gets back to reducing oversight, reducing your record keeping responsibilities.

One is purely logistical that you'll have fewer passwords and portals to have to keep track of.

That gets to be a pain if you have a lot of different investment providers and a lot of different accounts,

keeping those passwords safe and making sure

that you have access to them gets to be a bit of a pain in the neck. So it's helpful to reduce

those number of investment providers. And it simplifies tax season, as I said. And then one factor

that I think probably doesn't get enough

play is that if you are able to have accounts sitting side by side, it really expedites the transfer

process. So an example would be, I'm someone who's still in accumulation mode for retirement. So I have

my taxable account sitting right alongside

my IRA accounts. When the calendar page turns and I'm able to make an IRA contribution for the new

tax year, it's as simple as just a couple of mouse clicks and I'm able to transfer money from

our taxable account right into those IRAs.

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