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Historically, the first quarter is the best time to rebalance.

The yearly rebalancing of your investments is a dull chore that’s tempting to postpone. Investors who put it off too long, however, can live to bitterly regret their procrastination.

Here are six things you need to know about rebalancing:

The main reason to rebalance isn’t to make more money; it’s to control your exposure to risk.

The most fundamental relationship that needs to remain properly balanced in a portfolio is the ratio of stock funds to bond funds. Imagine that your target allocation is 60% stocks (for growth) and 40% bonds (for income and stability).

If you never rebalance, the long-term higher return of stocks will make your portfolio progressively more risky. After 10 years, stocks could easily make up 70%, and bonds only 30%. After 25 years without rebalancing, stocks could make up more than 80% of your holdings.

That might give you favorable cumulative gains, but it will also give your portfolio substantially more risk. In a severe bear market, a very large majority of your portfolio will shrink, instead of only 60%.

If you never rebalance, your risk exposure will almost certainly keep going up as you age. That’s the opposite of what is normally recommended.

2. Asset classes

You can also rebalance two equity asset classes, for example large-cap stocks and small-cap stocks. Both are expected to have favorable long-term returns, but to some extent they may go up and down at different times (non-correlated, in other words).

If you rebalance non-correlated asset classes that have similar long-term returns, it is possible that rebalancing will produce a higher return than that of either individual asset class by itself.

When one has significantly higher returns than the other, rebalancing is likely to leave you with a return somewhere between the individual returns of the two.

3. Buy low, sell high

A time-honored investing formula calls for buying low and selling high. Rebalancing is the best way I know to do that. If the asset classes you own have a long history of bouncing back after major declines, this will likely pay off.

In 2008 and 2009, bonds became very popular while stocks suffered one of the largest loses since the 1930s. Few investors were happy that they needed to sell some relatively safe bondholdings to buy more stock funds. However, those who made this difficult move were rewarded well when the market rallied in 2009 and 2010.

4. Tax consequences

You may need to pay attention to the tax consequences of rebalancing.