Category Archives for Financial Education & News
Quick Budget Hack: Easily Figure Out Your Average Expenses
Article after article on personal finance exhorts you to create a budget. You’re finally (reluctantly) willing to do it. But if you’re gonna do it, you really want to get it done already.You wish somebody
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When Headlines Worry You, Bank on Investment Principles
On Friday, March 10, regulators took control of Silicon Valley Bank as a run on the bank unfolded. Two days later, regulators took control of a second lender, Signature Bank. With increasing anxiety, many
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401(k) Loan vs. Personal Loan – Which Should You Choose?
Individuals often need cash to pay for items like a down payment on a new home, unexpected medical bills, or just simply to consolidate debt. Two common options to shore up money are tapping your 401(k)
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Trust the Financial Advisor Who Trusts the Market
With over 200,000 financial advisors in the United States, how do you pick one?First, eliminate the stock pickers. Those are the people making predictions about which stocks are going to be winners and
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What’s Your True Net Worth?
Many apps today claim to instantly calculate your net worth by adding up your banking and investment accounts and then deducting what you owe on your credit cards and mortgage. But in my mind, that number
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People Have Memories. Markets Don’t.
One of the best things about markets is that they don’t have memories. They don’t remember what happened last week or last year. They don’t even remember what happened a minute ago. Prices change
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This Has Been a Test: Developing a Financial Plan You Can Stick With
Think back to December 2019. The economy was humming. Unemployment, interest rates, and inflation were at historically low levels. But then what happened?
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Avoid These Investing Mistakes to Reach Your Retirement Goals (Part 3)
While many rail against taxation as an unjust seizure of our money, I firmly hold that taxes (at reasonable levels) are a necessary evil. That’s how we fund things like our national defense, federal
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Avoid These Investing Mistakes to Reach Your Retirement Goals (Part 2)
Most American workers have access to an employer 401(k) or 403(b) plan, and most employers offer a match for employee contributions.
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Avoid These Investing Mistakes to Reach Your Retirement Goals (Part 1)
Have you started thinking about retirement and begun to worry about what life in retirement will be like if you don’t build a whopping big nest egg?
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What is Portfolio Construction?
An investment portfolio should be built based on a client’s risk and return objectives along with an assessment of their constraints. While downside protection is a common focus, the advisor must ensure
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How Much Money Makes You Wealthy, Wealthier, or Wealthiest?
Sure, having such a high income means you can afford to buy a lot of things. More importantly for our purpose here, it means you can save and invest a lot, which lets you build wealth far more easily than
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What is Estate Planning and Why is It Important?
“In this world, nothing is certain except death and taxes.” These famous words attributed to Benjamin Franklin over 200 years ago still ring true today. Minimizing the amount of taxes you have to pay
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Back to the Investment Basics (Part 5)
So far in our investment basics series, we’ve explored the history of investing; how important it is to save (so you have money to invest); how to invest efficiently in broad markets; and why to avoid
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Back to the Investment Basics (Part 4)
In our last piece, we described our marvelous markets, and how to account for their being both robust and random at the same time. Today, we’ll look at how stock pricing works, and why Nobel laureate
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Back to the Investment Basics (Part 3)
In our last piece, we introduced the importance of saving, which is the first of five basics that have served investors well over time. Today, we’ll look at where stock market returns really come from,
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Back to the Investment Basics (Part 2)
In our last piece, we wrote about how recency bias can damage your investments by causing current crises to loom large, while rewriting your memories of past challenges. Recency tricks us into overpaying
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Back to the Investment Basics (Part 1)
There were so many big events competing for our attention this summer … said nearly every investor, almost every summer, ever.
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Rising Rates: Short-Term Pain for Long-Term Gain?
Investors have likely noticed the improved opportunity set in fixed income due to higher yields. And yet some investors may be hesitant to take advantage of higher yields because of concerns about future
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The Stock Market Can Be Less Risky Than Cash
Common sense will sometimes cost you a lot of money. Comparing inflation-adjusted returns shows when investing in the stock market was less risky than cash. Do You Own any Stocks? A Gallup poll shows that
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Want to be a Better Investor?
I was in my early 30s and finally managed to scrape enough money together to start investing. I picked a high-flying mutual fund offered by a popular asset manager at the time. For a while, it made me
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Investing in Uncertain Times
After taking a closer look at interest rates and inflation we come to the heart of the matter: When interest rates, inflation, or both are on the rise, what’s an investor to do?
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Has rising inflation got you down?
Inflation is the rate at which money loses its purchasing power over time. As you might guess, there are many ways to measure such a squishy figure. There are various economic sectors, such as energy,
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Fed Takes Center Stage
At its March 15–16 Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) meeting, the U.S. Federal Reserve raised its federal target funds rate by a quarter-point. It was the first increase since December 2018, but it
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Ukraine
Despite our fervent hopes that Ukraine’s sovereign rights would prevail over tyrannical aggression, it’s now clear that Vladimir Putin has doubled down on the latter.
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Navigating Geopolitical Events
The recent conflict between Russia and Ukraine is an important reminder that geopolitical risk is a part of investing in global markets. Navigating geopolitical events requires expertise and flexibility.
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The Small Caps That May Be Holding Back Your Portfolio’s Returns
The underperformance of small caps in 2021 was driven by poor returns of small growth companies with low profits. These companies have underperformed historically. An approach that excludes small growth
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You Want the Size, Value, and Profitability Premiums … But How?
Capturing the size, value, and profitability premiums in real-world portfolios requires expertise. Investors should be cautious about favoring one premium over another or one region over another based
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Fighter Planes and Market Turmoil
Have you been reading the daily headlines—watching markets stall, recover, and dip once again? If so, you may be wondering whether there’s anything you can do to avoid the motion sickness.
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Market Review 2021: A Recovery Amid Challenges
It was a year of uncertainty and anticipation, of hopes for a return to a degree of normalcy following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. And it was a year that showed, again, the difficulty of
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