My Comment: Apart from apparently boundless resources, this country’s greatness can be attributed in part to the immigrants who came here looking for a better life than the one they left behind. Millions of immigrants, including me, built our lives in this country. Given the opportunity, I like to return to where I was born, …
Continue reading The Only Solution to Our Immigration “Crisis” That Matters
By Bob Seawright (Bob Seawright is chief investment and information officer for Madison Avenue Securities in San Diego.) On the day I write this column, I made my last payment towards the education of my children. Had I paid via actual paper draft rather than electronic transfer, I would have waited to receive the cancelled …
Continue reading Realistic Planning: There’s More to Life Than Retirement
For those of you who pay attention and want to time the market, here’s this weeks best summary:
My Comments: The source of this headline is a free weekly investment newsletter called Cognitive Concord. I don’t know what that means exactly and am unsure how the author came to be called what he claims to be his name. But the ideas are good ideas and well articulated. And since I don’t have the …
Nontraditional investments could grow to 10%-15% of mutual funds in 10 years, according to Cerulli My Comment: For at least 18 months, I’ve been including a program featuring “alternative investments” in my client portfolios. The logic behind this is/was to build portfolios that are less likely to tumble when interest rates finally start an upward …
Continue reading Alternatives Growing in Portfolios as Markets Stumble
“Save a little money each month, and at the end of the year, you’ll be surprised at how little you have.” Ernest Haskins Roughly four years ago, at this time, we began to feel the ground crumbling beneath our feet (metaphorically speaking) while we watched in amazement. The stock market lost over 1/3 of its …
My Comment: Whenever I read something in an investment magazine that talks about risk and it is never made clear what is meant by “risk”, I end up feeling cheated. Virtually everything we do in life has a “risk component. Driving to the store to buy milk, taking a vacation in Europe, forgetting your boss’s …
Continue reading How Much Risk Do Clients Really Need to Take?
The number of labor force participants over age 65 has increased about 22 percent in the past three years. My Comment: I have to confess to a “Duh” moment when I saw this headline. My plans for retirement went out the window starting sometime in 2008. Not that I had any real plans to start …
Continue reading Just Keep Working: the New Retirement Strategy
WSJ story and chart about how "Chinese applicants flood U.S. graduate schools." My Comment: I'm troubled by the pressures that appear from time to time that imply we should build up our military so we can effectivly counter the threat posed by China. Currently, I have a Chinese exchange student working with me as an …
My Comment: Long Term Care insurance is one of those topics agents like myself find difficult to deal with. I learned years ago to talk about life insurance in spite of the fact that the very idea repelled most people. After all, none of want to volunatarily deal with death, much less our own. But …
Continue reading Long-term-care Insurance May Go Way of the Dinosaur
Helping Define Your Financial Future 