Social Security: Stronger Than Most Realize

My Comments: This article was directed at advisors who provide financial advice to those who are starting to take their Social Security benefits. This includes me, both as an advisor and recipient of benefits. I’ve long maintained that periodic tweaking of the rules, similar to what has happened in the past, will serve to make …

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Hubble and the Cosmos

My Thoughts: I’ve long been fascinated by visions of the cosmos, how it came to be, what’s out there, and reasons that might explain why we’re here. It’s mind boggling and understandable how as society evolved, faith in an unseen hand at work made it possible to grasp the unthinkable. Whatever the case, technology today …

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An Invocation to Remember

My Comments: I'm rarely asked to offer an invocation at any function I attend. There are always others better suited to the task than I. But if I were to be asked, I'd like to think that I could do as well as Mary Maxwell. She was asked to offer the invocation at an event …

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A Bumper Sticker World

My Comments: A conversation this morning with an attorney friend revealed a world which is far more complicated today than seemed possible just a few short years ago. He remarked that tens of thousands of new laws have entered the books across these United States in the last three decades. It’s impossible to know the …

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Death Is Not a Treatment Failure

My Comments: Many years ago a physician friend and fellow golfer told me that when you go to a doctor for a routine physical, it’s his or her job to find something wrong with you. If you don’t want to find that something IS wrong with you, then don’t go. But as the years pass …

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Sine of the Times

My Comments: Many of you have read my comments about interest rates lately. (Yesterday!) For many, many months, the Fed has used its powers to keep them low to encourage economic growth. Now that growth is again endemic, sooner rather than later, pressures will exist to cause interest rates to increase. The chart at the …

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Get Ready For The Biggest Margin Call In History

My Comments: Like a broken clock that is right twice every 24 hours, I’ve been talking about the probability of us having a severe market correction for the past 12 months or more. It’s obviously not happened yet. But every time I turn around, there are new observations from people who understand this better than …

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The Middle East, Iraq, and the United States

OK, you’re sick and tired of this issue and want it to go away. But it never does and it may never, at least not in our lifetimes. So I challenge and urge you to read a recent interview and the comments made. As someone who started life amid bombs raining down from time to …

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THOUGHT FOR THE WEEK – April 23, 2015

There is a positive correlation between the age of the advisor and the age of the client. I have few clients who are millenianals, but many who are roughly my age. And while I spend a lot of time helping them massage their retirement portfolios, one of the issues that surfaces frequently are the taxes …

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Obama Welcomes Kissinger Realism

My Comments: Regular readers of these posts know I’m not a fan of the GOP and many of the people who call it home these days. I find them un-Christian, narrow minded, selfish, and living in the past instead of developing the future. They are not providing the leadership needed to secure the future for …

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