Category Archives for Financial Education & News

Value’s Rebound Rewarded Investors Who Stayed in Their Seats

Value’s recent turnaround has rewarded investors who remained disciplined following its prolonged slump. In addition to reminding us how quickly premiums can show up, the past few years reinforce an

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What Happens to Your 401(k) When You Quit Your Job?

It was the end of 2008. After a long time contemplating it, I finally pulled the trigger.I gave my supervisor my resignation letter. It was past time to go elsewhere. It was probably the second-best professional

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Single-Stock ETFs: The Worst of Both Worlds?

Investors awaiting ETFs with as few stocks as possible are in luck: Single-stock ETFs have arrived on the scene, providing leveraged or inverse exposure to individual names such as Tesla, NVIDIA, Nike,

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5 Simple Steps to Invest for Your Retirement

Would you like to increase your odds of enjoying a comfortable retirement? If you already set aside money from every paycheck for long-term savings, you’re off to a good start. But to really turn the

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Active Management Hasn’t Shined in Volatile Markets

Many investors have likely heard the adage that active management performs better in times of market turbulence. This may sound like an emotional hedge for market stress akin to betting against your favorite

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3 Tips to Save More Money and Reduce Your Money Stress

You’ve heard before that you have to set money aside — money for emergencies, for buying a car or house, for a kid’s college education, and for retirement. This is hardly news. What you may not have

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Hoop Dreaming Is Fun in March. Investing Realities Apply across a Lifetime.

Every year at this time, the NCAA men’s basketball tournament thrills fans and creates so much interest that it’s estimated one in four Americans filled out a bracket to try to predict who will win

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What Are Liquid Alternatives?

Liquid alternatives (or “alts” for short) are investment vehicles that are thought to provide diversification benefits to traditional portfolios made up of stocks and bonds. They often come in the

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How to Invest Better—and Live Better

It can be challenging to start a conversation about investing. That’s why I encourage having a conversation before the investing conversation—what I like to think of as a “preamble.” Connecting

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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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