How a 12-year Vanguard win streak makes it the ‘Amazon of wealth management’

My Comments: For the vast majority of us, mutual funds ( and sometimes ETFs) are the default financial tool when it comes to growing our money for the future. For about 100 years now, mutual funds have evolved and spread to become ubiquitous in the world of investing money. In my opinion, Vanguard, as a …

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Who Now Pays for Healthcare?

My Comments: A fundamental shift being triggered by the PPACA (Obamacare) is the level of income earned by medical specialists and medical generalists. In order to make it more attractive for a medical student to focus on primary care, the idea was to compensate specialists less and instead redirect those funds toward those focused on …

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Rate Hike Rally

My Comments: Interest rates and where they are going is a relatively hot topic. For those of you with savings accounts and Certificates of Deposit know, the returns you get are anemic at best. But if you need to borrow money for whatever reason, low interest rates are good. Since there is an expectation that …

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Stop Tinkering With Your Retirement Portfolio

My Comments: I can’t tell you how many times over the past 40 years that a client has talked with me suggesting something is wrong with his investments. It usually comes after a long run up in the markets and he or she thinks his portfolio is lagging. And almost every time we’ve made a …

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J.P. Morgan Weekly Market Recap – October 14, 2013

My original idea was to post these every week or so. Many people like to make their own investment decisions and this recap is a great way to gain insight into what is going on globally. This weekly broadcast from J. P. Morgan will give you some insights as to what is going on right …

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Estate Planning is Dead — Long Live Retirement Planning!

My Comments: While these comments were directed toward advisors like me, they are representative of something that happens to many of us over time. What we are trained to do, and from which we earn a living, changes and we become irrelevant. An example happened in Detroit, once the heart of American car manufacturing. And …

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Why Medicare Won’t Cover You Overseas

My Comments: It's been a few years since my wife and I last travelled out of the country. During this time, she and I both became eligible for Medicare benefits. And given my health history over these past few years, without Medicare we would have been financially stressed. We still have expectations of visiting family …

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3D Printers Now Available for Everyday Consumers

My Comments: Yes, all the recent duscussion about printing a gun or hand grenade in your garage was a little disturbing. Not sure how that will be controlled or if it’s even realistic to think it can be controlled. But clearly, the geni is out of the bottle so we can all look forward to …

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It’s Scary

My Thoughts About This: I think today is the day that the House of Representatives is scheduled once again to hold a vote to repeal the PPACA. I find this disturbing, ludicrous, a waste of taxpayer money, grandstanding and any number of other perjorative words. This opinion by Darwin Carmichael points to the crux of …

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Move Over, Saudi Arabia, and Let North Dakota Take Over

My Comments: How many of us saw this coming as little as five years ago? By Gil Weinreich, AdvisorOne | May 14, 2013 A buyer’s market in oil is in the making and will bring about disruptive market change that should benefit American manufacturers and consumers and prove challenging for Middle Eastern producers and European …

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