I'm not in love with 529 plans. I think they are really fabulous in a few settings, but most of the time they'd be my third or fourth choice for ways to save for college ( Read more... )

I heard Gary Shilling speak at a conference last month and his discussion of demographics was interesting and insightful so I sought out his most recent book: "The Age of Deleveraging: Investment Strategies for a Decade of Slow Growth and Deflation".  This book was 500 pages long.  Five hundred.  I told B. I felt like I was taking a graduate level ( Read more... )

It was the fall of 2007 when I decided I needed to beef up my skills in investing, pronto.  I did that and tucked my portfolio into safety mode just in time for 2008.  Last Fall when I saw Dow 12,000 I said "this can't last!" and re-shuffled a bit more.  It's time to do my semi-annual reallocation again.  At this point I've had several years of ( Read more... )

My husband and I are professionals with graduate degrees who have been saving for our retirement for twenty years now, even before we got our student loans paid off.  My husband is 56 and is a middle manager in an overhead department.  He lays awake at night worrying about layoffs in an industry where he's unlikely to get another job again.  We ( Read more... )

I've been doing a lot of reading on financial planning for the past couple of months and I've become convinced that I am not capable of picking a decent stock.  Or, perhaps I can, but I can't tell because the market can stay irrational longer than I can stay solvent.  In any case, I'm won over to the concept of pick an allocation, fund it with the ( Read more... )

One of my clients passed along a book for me to read: "Show Me The Money: Covered Calls and Naked Puts for a Monthly Cash Income" by Ron Groenke.    It was all about the uses of covered calls and naked puts and how much money a few good stocks you have in your portfolio could make for you by selling these options to other people, essentially making ( Read more... )

Do you know why we save for retirement?  It's because we are pretty sure we're going to be unable to work and we'll need a way to pay for our cost of living ( Read more... )

I'm talking a lot with my clients lately about expense ratios on their mutual funds.

Vanguard Target 2015

TIAA-CREF Lifecyle Retirement

John Hancock Lifestyle Moderate

Astonishing discovery of the day: did you know that the average annual fee for a growth and income mutual fund is about 1.9% of assets each year? That's equivalent to real estate taxes on the value of your retirement accounts each year! It's just collected in such a sly way that you probably didn't even notice paying it! Every year!

Let's say you know you're going to need a big pile of money in ten years for something.  You work harder than necessary right now and earn excess over your subsistence level to fund that anticipated need.  You now have $10,000 you'd like to store up to use in ten years ( Read more... )