If you’ve been planning to retire in the next few years, odds are that you’ve spent a lot of time reviewing your investments, including the account balance, the specific investments you own, the asset allocation you have, and even reading about proper distribution strategies. While all of that is important, you’re actually missing the most important thing to know before you retire: Your Retirement Expenses! Simply put, nothing else matters until you figure out how much you want to…
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15 Things I Wish Every Retiree Knew
As we all know, there is a lot of noise out there coming from TV, newspapers, friends and family members as to what we should do with our finances, and how we should plan for our retirement. A lot of it, frankly, isn’t such great advice. So I’ve been thinking: If I had the ability to speak to everyone close to or in retirement, what would I tell them? Well, this is what I would say. 15 Things I Wish…
4 Reasons Women Are Better Investors Than Men
Do you want to become a better investor? If so, I’d encourage you to look at the lessons that female investors can teach us. During the last decade, there has been a plethora of research on the investing differences between men and women. At the outset, it wasn’t exactly clear what the research would show. But by now, the evidence is clear: women have qualities that make them far better investors than men. A study by the University of California…
Forthright Finances Investing Philosophy
If you’re going to invest in the stock market (whether on your own or with a Financial Advisor), it’s essential to know what your investing philosophy is. What is going to guide your decisions on how to invest? The good news is this doesn’t have to be complicated. You don’t need to get an MBA or degree in finance to understand (or create) an investment philosophy. What you need to do is make sure that you understand, and agree with,…
7 Questions To Ensure You Are Fully Diversified
We have all heard that we want to make sure our portfolio is diversified, and I’ve definitely said that on this podcast many times before. But what does that mean exactly? Well, that’s the topic of today’s episode. We will go through 7 questions that you can ask to make sure your investment portfolio has all the characteristics of a diversified portfolio. 1. Do you have any market cap deficiencies? Large cap refers to companies worth 10 billion or…
ETF vs Mutual Fund: Which is Better?
Investment decisions are filled with many ongoing, never ending debates: stocks vs bonds; IRA vs Roth IRA; active vs passive, 4% vs 3.3% rule? While it is pretty easy to determine a winner in some of these face-offs, one of the hardest to decipher is exchange-traded fund (ETF) vs mutual fund. Their similarities make them nearly identical to the average investor, while their minute differences might appear as light and day to a seasoned financial planner. Deciding on which one…
5 Tips For Navigating Down Markets
If you’re going to be invested in the stock market for the next 30 years (which you’ll need to do if you want to create a retirement paycheck that will last for life), then you’re going to experience down markets, like what we’re going through so far in 2022.
Tune in to today’s episode as I go through 5 tips/reminders I have on how to navigate down markets.
Active vs. Passive Investing: Which Strategy is Better?
There are a lot of debates in the investment world, but few are as important (in my mind) as the choice to invest actively or passively. Tune in to learn the difference between the two, the pros and cons, as well as which strategy has done better over the long term.
Avoiding A Deadly Investment Sin
Oftentimes we are our own worst enemies. This is especially true in investing. In today’s episode, we are going to detail how one investor cost himself thousands of dollars by engaging in actions that he knew he shouldn’t do.
Tune in to learn what mistakes he made, and how you can avoid costing yourself in the future.
Huge Tax Bills Caused By Poor Asset Location
Last week we talked about the Essentials of Asset Location; basically, what investments we should put in different account types. In today’s episode, we go through a real life example of how very poor asset location ended up costing investors thousands (and in one case hundreds of thousands) on their tax bill.
Tune in to learn from their mistake and not end up with a nasty tax surprise.