The New Year is off to an inauspicious start with the stock markets around the world selling off 4% since the end of 2014, and to add insult to injury (no pun intended), I suffered a severely torn ligament in my left ankle from a minor skiing accident on New Year’s. As I'm confident my ankle will heal, so too will the markets. 2014 Review Last year the stock markets experienced sharp & quick selloffs...
By Michael Santoli 20 hours ago Yahoo Finance Light a couple of candles and sing for the relentless rally, the tireless gain-without-much-pain phase of this bull market, which has added $8 trillion worth of U.S. stock-market value since it began two years ago. Sure, this bull market dates back five and a half years to the March 2009 climax of the financial crisis. But it was in mid-November of 2012, just after the election, when...
By Laura Saunders The Wall Street Journal June 23, 2010 It is a burning question for thousands of taxpayers now deciding whether to pay taxes to convert their regular individual retiremen to Roth accounts. All taxpayers are eligible to make the switch, because this year the income limit of $100,000 was repealed. Many have done so already: Fidelity Investments says that as of May 31, the firm had handled 87,000 Roth this year, about four...
Investors are prone to many behavioral mistakes that can cost them dearly. Trying to time the market, trying to pick the winners, chasing returns, trying to go it alone are among the most common. But the one that can inflict the most damage over a period of time is when we succumb to investing inertia. What is “investing inertia?” In physics, inertia refers to an object’s “amount of resistance to change in velocity.” Without some...
With many people still stinging from a housing market that, in many parts of the country, is still struggling to recover, any suggestion of adding real estate to an investment portfolio may fall on deaf ears. Unquestionably, the bloom has come off the rose in the real estate market; at least when compared with it’s heydays of the last couple of decades. These days the average investor seems perfectly content to leave whatever opportunities exist...
Who doesn’t like options? We love them when buying a car, and we expect them when ordering lunch off a fast-food menu. When buying life insurance, however, too many options can not only increase confusion, it can often lead to making the wrong choice, or worse, no choice at all. With life insurance, it’s not quite as simple as choosing between a sedan and a coupe; life insurance options are far more complicated and far-reaching...
Have you made up your mind on just about everything, even before you know what it is? For instance, when you meet someone, is your opinion of the person formed from the first impression? Or, when you hear a political argument from the other side, is your mind opened or closed? Are you able to concede the “good points” the other side make, or do you dismiss the whole argument? We encounter people and ideas...
The biggest risk to your financial future is the possibility of losing your earnings due an injury or an extended illness that prevents you from working. In fact, nearly one in three people between the ages of 35 and 65will suffer some sort of disability which will keep them from working for at least 90 days. Yet this is the one risk that, for most people remains unprotected. When a Disability Strikes It happens when...
If you come from a typical family, finances were rarely discussed in detail even as you matured into adulthood, which was fine as long as your parents were fully capable of running their own lives. But, as your parents age, and with today’s life expectancies that could span another 20 to 30 years at age 60, there is a strong likelihood that they might lose their cognitive function over time. Not only will your parents...
When financial planners first began to calculate retirement income needs back in the 1970s and 1980s, many of them latched on to the “70 percent” rule, which says that retirees should plan on needing just 70 percent of their pre-retirement income to live comfortably in retirement. It’s a straightforward rule with assumptions that probably worked well back then, but are dangerously flawed in today’s “new normal” retirement. The fact is that the “cost” of retirement...
For most people, buying life insurance is difficult enough even when it’s done right. But when it is done with only one eye open, or haphazardly just to get it over with, mistakes are very common, and they can be very expensive. Without question life insurance is one of the most important purchases people make in their lifetimes, yet many people are ill-equipped to make the critical decisions in the process that will produce a...
Anyone with a family to protect understands the critical role life insurance plays in their financial plan However, in determining the actual amount of coverage to provide essential protection needs, many people tend to adhere to simplistic rules-of-thumb, such as a “multiple of income,” which may leave them wondering if they own too much or too little coverage. That’s not exactly the “peace-of-mind” we hope for when buying life insurance. With your family’s financial future...
