3 Reasons The Current Equities Market Is Exhausted

My Comments: Many of my clients are asking how come their investments are not as exciting as what they hear on TV these days. And my standard answer is that exciting comes in two flavors, great and frightening. For the most part, I’m trying to help them avoid the frightening part. For many years I …

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Could Obamacare Prompt You to Retire Early?

My Comments: Retiring early is a desired goal for many people. For one thing, they really don’t like what they do, and two, they think they have either enough money or time to fill their lives. I planned to retire at 65, which seemed sort of normal. But then came the crash of 2008. It …

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Be Flexible On 4% Rule

My Comments: Increasingly, I find myself working with older clients. After all, I’m an older advisor. From time to time there is a question of how fast you should decumulate your nest egg(s). (I’m not sure if “decumulate” is an approved word, but the intent is to convey the opposite of accumulate.) The rule of …

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Every Day Should Be a Good Day to Die

My Comments: If this headline caught your attention like it did mine, then what is the message? As a life insurance salesman for lo these past 40 years, talking about death is not something new to me, though always somewhat uncomfortable. You and I both know it’s inevitable, but not something to dwell on. The …

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Capitalism: Looking Past The Bottom Line

My Comments: If this author is right, then this issue will have an impact on the mid-term elections this fall as well as the elections in 2016. The lasting legacy of the Obama administration will be the PPACA or ObamaCare legislation. When it was enacted, our cost of health care was increasing much faster than …

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6 Social Security Traps to Avoid

My Comments: (I’ve missed a couple of posts for which I apologize. We went to my 55th high school reunion and met some interesting people. Much more interesting than thay were 55 years ago, assuming I remembered them at all. The prevailing sentiment was to congratulate each other for being upright, breathing and taking noursishment.) …

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Keeping the NSA in Perspective

My Comments: This won’t interest some of you, which is OK. Others will recognize it as part of the cosmos that includes our economy and our political environment. These things contribute to the process that results in the amount of money we have to live our lives the way we want to. I’ve long said …

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10 Common Estate Planning Mistakes (and how to avoid them)

My Comments: As you can imagine, estate planning is not for the faint of heart. But it matters for some of us, who have spent years and years accumulating assets. While this happens, people get married, they get divorced, they have children, some of whom are considered responsible. I had a recent conversation with someone …

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The Conversation I Don’t Want to Have

My Comments: There are probably other conversations I don’t want to have but this is the one on todays agenda. It involves the problems all of us face as we grow older. The alternative to growing older is you have already died, which in itself is not a happy thought. A colleague in California penned …

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US Economy: Blame Misaligned Policies, Not Structural Flaws

My Comments: I recently engaged in what turned out to be a mindless discussion on LinkedIn that started with the question “Who Creates Inflation?” My comments and those of several others offered our thoughts that it was a “what” that creates inflation and not a “who”. It was soon apparent that the leader and some …

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