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 …
Continue reading Social Security: Stronger Than Most Realize
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 …
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 …
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 …
Continue reading Get Ready For The Biggest Margin Call In History
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 …
Continue reading The Middle East, Iraq, and the United States
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 …
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 …
My Comments: As many of you know, my professional life has revolved around financial issues and economics. The world I’ve lived and worked in was largely shaped by the global forces at work following World War II. That era has ended. We can shake our heads and whine about what might have been but it …
Continue reading Time US Leadership Woke Up To New Economic Era
My Comments: The blog post title above comes from me; the one that actually accompanied the article is Public Pensions Face New Challenges As We Live Longer. Huh? As a financial planner, I try to make people aware of the existential threats we face as we all grow older. These threats are things that “might” …
My Comments: I admit to perverting the title to this article (Lobbyists Pervert Politics And Earn Their Infamy) which appeared in the Financial Times recently. But it points to a problem that may have no solution, at least until the clowns who inhabit our Congress feel enough pain to find a solution. But it most …
Continue reading To Lobby, or Not To Lobby, That is the Question
Helping Define Your Financial Future 