My Comments: Two years ago I began trying to understand what appeared as a new class of investments. Over my 40 year career as a financial consultant, stocks and bonds in all their many variations formed the basis for investment decisions. Over that time, stocks and bonds tended to be relatively uncorrelated, meaning their ups …
Tag: Alachua County
Stimulate Your Customer’s Lizard Brain to Make a Sale
Or: Stimulate Your (fill in the blank) Lizard Brain to Make a (fill in another blank) Apart from the fact this is a fun photograph to look at, there's a message here that applies to me as a financial advisor looking for new clients, for a politician hoping to get people to vote for them, …
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A Modern-day Depression: The Current Secular Market Cycle Mirrors the Past
My Comments: This article is further confirmation that these are not “normal” times. My efforts to help you manage your money cannot follow the traditional “buy and hold” approach that worked in the eighties and nineties. If you expect to have more money in the future than you have now, you have to be either …
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The Election, the Presidency and Foreign Policy
My Comments: Last Monday I got a call from a client who asked me to close her investment account. Her comments suggested she didn't expect Romney to win and if Obama was elected to a second term, the world was going to come to an end. She wanted her money under her mattress even if …
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Seeking Creative Ways to Pay High College Costs
My Comments: I'm very involved with a foundation out of Tucson, AZ that has the ability to help parents find endowment money to pay for college. A typical result when you engage with the foundation is $60,000, spread over four years, that does not have to be paid back. In spite of this record, many …
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Is Another Lost Decade on the Horizon?
My Comments: This article, which appeared in a recent issue of “Producers Web”, an online magazine that caters to the investment and financial planning community, affirms what I have been telling clients and prospective clients now for about five years. Namely, that we are looking at another 5 – 8 years of essentially sideways movement …
Realistic Planning: There’s More to Life Than Retirement
By Bob Seawright (Bob Seawright is chief investment and information officer for Madison Avenue Securities in San Diego.) On the day I write this column, I made my last payment towards the education of my children. Had I paid via actual paper draft rather than electronic transfer, I would have waited to receive the cancelled …
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J.P. Morgan Weekly Market Recap – July 23, 2012
For those of you who pay attention and want to time the market, here’s this weeks best summary:
The Economy is Sloooowing…
My Comments: The source of this headline is a free weekly investment newsletter called Cognitive Concord. I don’t know what that means exactly and am unsure how the author came to be called what he claims to be his name. But the ideas are good ideas and well articulated. And since I don’t have the …
Thought for the Week
When I first started in financial services in 1975, I was hired by a company called American National to sell life and health insurance policies. I was able to earn a living and discovered that not having a regular paycheck was survivable. And fortunately, my wife chose to tough it out with me. Over the …
Helping Define Your Financial Future 