Business and Personal Finance Dictionary

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• FAMILY OF FUNDS
  
  Many large mutual fund companies offer a variety of stock, bond, and money market funds with different investment strategies and objectives. Together, these funds make up a family of funds. If you own one fund in a family, you can usually transfer assets to another without sales charges-a transaction also known as an exchange. (Unless you hold the funds in a tax-deferred retirement plan, though, you will owe capital gains taxes on any increase in share value of the fund you're moving out of.) Investing in a family of funds can make diversification and asset allocation easier, provided there are funds within the family that meet your investment criteria. Investing in a family of funds can also simplify recordkeeping. However, the advantages of consolidating your assets within one fund family are being challenged by the recent proliferation of fund networks, sometimes called fund supermarkets, which make it easy to spread your investments among several fund families.
  
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