The Power of Compounding Working Against You If you lived through the 1970s, you probably know the visceral fear that accompanies the word “inflation.” During that “Great Inflation” period, the rate of price increases surged to double-digit levels—reaching 14% by 1980. Businesses were destroyed; household budgets were shredded. Only by raising interest rates to a
Written plans help clear up fuzzy thinking when investors take a punch The boxer Mike Tyson famously said that every fighter has a plan until he gets punched in the face and that’s why written plans help clear up fuzzy thinking when investors take a punch from the markets. Tyson was referring to his opponents
Have you been measuring what matters most to your future financial success, or have you been focusing on the market’s day-to-day gyrations over the past several months? If you’ve been focusing on the market, you’re not alone. Like the crowd at a tennis match, investors have been looking back and forth, one moment at a
Goals-Based Wealth Management Tailors Everything To You Following a goals-based wealth management discipline will suit you. Imagine paying a visit to your tailor and ordering a suit. Your only instructions: It has to be bigger than your co-worker’s suit. That’s a ludicrous scenario, of course. Everyone appreciates that a suit tailored for you will be
Paycheck Replacement is the Key Issue in Retirement Investing For Most of Us For most of us, our working years are built around earning paychecks to pay for the necessities and luxuries of our life, so paycheck replacement is the key issue in retirement investing. Paychecks create confidence that we’ll be able to pay the
Much has been written about investment behavioral mistakes and whether financial advisors can help clients generate market-beating investment outperformance. Amid all of the activity that investors and their advisors pursue in hopeful expectations of outperforming the market, it’s easy to overlook the risk that those activities might create below-market returns. Underperformance can easily come from
Learning Lessons from the Market Correction Helps Us Become More Disciplined Investors The stock market’s plunge at the outset of the Covid-19 pandemic, when the S&P 500 index plunged 32% in five weeks, shook up a lot of investors and reminded all of us to refresh our memories of previous “lessons from the market correction.”
In Volatile Markets, Keep Your Bearings and Stay on Plan “In volatile markets, keep your bearings and stay on plan.” That’s always our guidance to clients when markets become unsettled, either to the upside or the downside. As of today, the S&P 500 has lost 17.7% in the five and one-half months since the beginning
You May Not Believe It Until You Read It, But It’s True. The shocking truth about index investing is that reality can be very different from theory. Index investing funds are wildly popular with Americans: As of year-end 2021, “passive” equity and fixed income index funds managed total net assets of $5.7 trillion, according to
Portfolios of high quality dividend growth stocks have fulfilled the need for a steady, sustainable and rising stream of income capable of keeping pace with inflation for decades. This is especially appealing of course for those who are building a portfolio of investments to sustain them for decades in retirement. The income from dividend growth
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