2 in 3 Women Are Uncomfortable With Their Financial Situation

My Comments: I saw this headline on an email from a source that see people like me as their target audience. It's from a company that creats insurance products such as life insurance and annuities for prospective clients. None of this is bad; I rely on such sources to keep me aware of changes going …

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Women to Benefit Most from Health Reform

My Comment: This article appeared in a recent edition of a newsletter addressed to those of us who focus on employee benefits for corporate America. In spite of high unemployment numbers, many successful businesses cannot find enough people with the necessary skills to help them grow. Keeping the ones they do have is critical. Across …

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Realistic Planning: There’s More to Life Than Retirement

My Comments: This article is about someone who put all three of his children through college and saw them graduate with no debt. As he says, "Woo-Hoo!" Many of you with children in high school, or perhaps already in college, are doing your best to help your kids get into or through college with money …

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J.P. Morgan Weekly Market Recap – August 6, 2012

For those of you who pay attention and want to time the market, here’s this weeks best summary:

Alternatives Becoming Mainstream

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 …

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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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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 …

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Obama Healthcare War Will Rage On

My Comment: I read in the Gainesville Sun this morning that all four GOP candidates for Cliff Stearns seat in the House of Representatives are committed to the repeal of the Affordable Care Act. Never mind that millions of otherwise uninsured Americans will have better access to health care, that the Congressional Budget Office has …

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