Ideas with no specific focus
My Comments: I’ve been licensed to sell life and health insurance policies since 1975. Over these many years, I’ve been fortunate to have had many exceptional clients who have listened to what I had to say and made what we agreed were intelligent choices. In the days when interest rates were significantly higher than they …
Continue reading Buy Term and Invest the Difference — Not Anymore!
Stock guru sees extended run-up for stocks; 'everybody into the pool' My Comments: Laszlo Birinyi is one of those people who have made both good and bad predictions before yet are almost always seen as having a better insight into the future than the rest of us. Whether we hit a record high in 2013 …
Continue reading S&P 500 Will Hit Record High in 2013: Birinyi
My Thoughts on This: I’m unsure if commenting on this is relevant at all for someone who is supposed to be focused on investments and retirement planning and financial matters. But with grandson now in the picture, his health now and in the future is important to me personally. I suspect if you have grandchildren, …
My Comments: This whole episode is so mindbogglingly stupid that I simply shake my head in dismay. Yes, I know, hormonal activity is not something easily brushed aside, but this is a man with an allegedly iron will whose self discipline is legendary. But, since this is Friday, I’m still exhausted by the recent election, …
My Comments: While the title of the article is a little obscure, the message is clear: most people do not have a plan to deal with their assets when they pass away. As I mentioned recently about Long Term Care insurance, there is a strong denial force at work here. At the very least, get …
My Comments: As I find myself getting older, I find myself increasingly fascinated by how the future is going to unfold. Some of this may be because the number of years I have left is predictably shrinking. My uncle, my father’s younger brother, recently died at age 96. My grandson is about to turn 2 …
Much of the financial services industry connects to consumers through what we used to think of as the Brokerage Companies. Think Morgan Stanley, Smith Barney, Merrill Lynch, etc. Many of them are gone, absorbed by other companies that somehow managed to survive. Another part of the industry is comprised of insurance companies, and you know …
Continue reading Thought for the Week: Are Annuities Right for You?
My Comments: Yeah, I know. It's Thursday and the day I post something about economics. There have been a lot of 'thursdays' lately. For those of you who look to me to give you good investment advice, or are looking for someone to give you better advice than you are getting now, a lot of …
My Comments: This comes to you via the NYTimes and Tom Barnett whom you have seen me repost before. The anger we are seeing over there results from decades of US behavior. We now live in an internet age, and those folks are discovering what the rest of the world looks like and, like teenagers, …
Continue reading Good Piece on U.S. Concerns: Libya v. Egypt v. Whomever
My Comments: I think we can agree that one objective when designing an investment portfolio is to have diversity. For those of you who remember a company and a scandal called Enron, apart from the fact that Enron fell off the face of the earth, the retirement plan investments for most of their employees was …
Helping Define Your Financial Future 