W2s, brokerage tax forms, and bank and mortgage statements are piling in. These are the documents we need to prepare our tax returns, but they serve another purpose as well: Evaluating your own financial performance over the course of 2005.

The year-end beige statement that Fidelity sends out is particularly useful. It breaks down each account by balance, starting and ending amounts, contributions, and a key metric -- gain (or loss) less contributions and withdrawals.

2005 was a good year for me. Our family's Fidelity accounts -- mostly mutual funds, but a few stocks, an ETF, and the kids' 529s -- gained about 15% over the course of the year (not including contributions to our Roths).

That's pretty good, but this level of performance came with a risk: Our Roths are heavily invested in foreign-oriented funds ... About 45%, which is quite high according to the recommendations of most profesional money managers. Taking this level of risk can seriously backfire. I learned this the hard way in the late 1990s, when several international financial shocks shook foreign markets.

I am not counting on a similar stellar year for foreign funds in 2006. I haven't done in yet, but will rebalance in the next few weeks, and decrease my foreign exposure.

Read this post on the Blogger mirror -- Reader comments sometimes appear there that won't show up on this page. You can leave comments on either page, I'll read 'em all!mortgage calculator