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 All taxpayers are eligible to make the switch, because this year the income limit of $100,000 was repealed.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...
As the stock market resurgence continues, investors are reawakening to the performance benchmarks of their mutual funds to see if their fund choices are drawing every ounce of gains that have been produced over the last couple of years. As investors pour more of their funds back into surging stock funds, they are, once again, feverishly comparing their funds’ performance against the indices as the a gauge of the quality of advice they are receiving...
Young families with an eye to the future are faced with a daunting choice – to save earnestly for a secure retirement or to save for their children’s education. Can you do both? Certainly it is possible; however, with the cost of a college education and retirement (thanks to health care costs) rising faster than the rate of inflation, just targeting one of those goals with savings is no sure thing. And, with the increasing...
When people’s attention eventually turns to planning their estate, they are suddenly confronted with a new language replete with the kind of legalese and Latin terms that only a lawyer can love, and that’s mainly because lawyers are typically the only people who can understand it. Among the more mysterious terms are the various types of trusts which are used in estate planning; and two of the more popular trusts in particular – Revocable Trusts...
For Maximum Retirement Income You Need Tax Diversification One of the most important tenets of investing for retirement is to diversify broadly for the best possible long-term returns in your portfolio. However, for the best possible outcome in generating maximum retirement income, special attention needs to be given to achieving optimal tax diversification. Conventional portfolio diversification focuses on blending together a mix of assets from across the spectrum of asset classes that creates the best...
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...
