Austerity Exposes the Global Threat from Tax Havens

My Comments: Unless you have been to the Cayman Islands, or happen to make far more money than you actually need to live your life, the idea of an offshore tax haven is pretty remote. You’ve heard about them, but since they are so far removed from your reality, they seem to stay under the …

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Investor Optimism Rose in March

My Comments: I have no idea what I’m having for supper tonight, much less how the markets are going to perform over the next several months and years. However, assuming I haven’t left the building, I expect to eat something, and in like manner, I expect the markets to move up and down with a …

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The Annuity Puzzle

My Comments: As a financial planner and investment advisor for the past 38 years, I recognize that we, that's me and you, are moving into uncharted waters. While the future is always an unknown, what we are dealing with now is how whether many of us are going to have enough money to live with …

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The Disclosure Paradox: How Much Information Is Too Much?

Too much information can be as harmful to retirement plan decisions as too little. My Comments: Somewhere along the way during my last 40 years in the world of financial services, I read or was told that at some point you have to make a decision. You cannot simply attempt to absorb more and more …

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Record U.S. Stocks at Lowest Valuation Since 1980

My Comments: Many of my clients are elderly clients. For many, their investment horizon going forward is not 20 years or more. They have little need to take what many of them think of as aggressive steps to grow their money. On the other hand, good advisors today are encouraging their clients to be more …

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Clean Electricity from Bacteria? Researchers Make Breakthrough in Race to Create ‘Bio-Batteries’

My Comments: Why, you ask, do I repost an article that on the face of it has nothing to do with investing money, or financial planning or making sure taxes are minimized. Well, because many of you are going to be investing money ten, twenty, and thirty years from now. Your lives will change from …

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Americans Take Payroll-Tax Increase in Stride to Keep Spending

My Comments: There is a lot of evidence and sentiment that 2013 will be a solid year. Housing starts are strong and will continue to be at least until interest rates start to climb. The jobs report continues to be positive with roughly 200K new jobs every month for the past four months. GDP growth …

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Farnarkeling

Farnarkeling is a sport which began in Mesopotamia, which literally means ‘between the rivers’. This would put it somewhere in Victoria or New South Wales between the Murray and the Darling. The word Farnarkeling is Icelandic in structure, Urdu in metre and Celtic in the intimacy of its relationship between meaning and tone. Farnarkeling is …

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Obama Planned Big Budget Cuts All Along

My Comments: I’m trying to decide if the author of this article is fundamentally to the left of the Obama administration and therefore critical of his lack of fire in promoting new revenue sources for the country, ie higher taxes, or whether the writer is critical because virtually everyone on the right is critical, regardless …

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Austerity Obstructs Real Economic Reform

My Thoughts on This: This article comes from the Financial Times, a primarily English publication. If it has a bias, it is probably toward what we think of as liberal. And I’m usually forced to copy the entire post for those of you who are interested since to create a link forces the reader to …

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