We’ve all had that friend who volunteers to help with a chore or a task and whose “help” only makes the situation worse. It’s the buddy who says he’ll help you move, but whose back problem mostly limits him to complaining. By the time you figure out the cost of accepting his help, it’s too …
I recently bumped into my friend Mike, a pilot and former lacrosse teammate who I hadn’t seen in years. After catching up about family and friends, he reminded me that our last conversation had included him asking about where to invest, to which I asked him “What is your greatest financial fear?” I had explained …
Linda and her husband Stan heard me as a guest on a podcast recently. They are retirees, living near Daytona Beach, Fla., unsure of “just what course to take with our monies.” Linda thought I sounded like “just what we are hoping to find, someone who speaks our language, who is honest, who can help …
More than half of Americans report that either no one taught them about money or that they learned how to handle finances on their own. Combine that lack of formal training with a desire to improve personal money management and you create as much potential for trouble as for profit. It’s hard to know who …
Welcome back to the intersection of fear and greed, the place that investors go to at times when stock markets are acting frothy and volatile and/or flirting with new highs. With both of those conditions currently in play, it’s the place where a lot of investors now find themselves. The question is whether they have …
The stock market has more than doubled since pandemic lows in March of 2020. It appears to have learned how to deal with coronavirus better than people have, shaking off every bit of bad news to stay positive and keep rolling despite real concerns. Even as hospitalizations and deaths related to Covid-19 have been climbing …
Two recent surveys highlight problems that American consumers and investors are having now, not with the market but with their own behavior. Finding the real lessons in each of these studies involves looking past the headlines and digging deeper, so let’s pick up the shovel and search for the hidden gems that people should really …
Americans are so busy working on retirement savings that most of them aren’t properly planning their retirement spending. The result is that they’re not living their best life, actually getting the gold out of their golden years, because they spend too little of the money they amass. As problems go, this is a nice one …
A lot of Americans improved their financial habits during the pandemic, cutting back on spending, recognizing the value and impact of emergency savings, and gaining a sense of how important it is to build a war chest to face the financial challenges of the future. All those good lessons will be put to the test …
It’s easy to overcomplicate your investments, and hard to fix that problem. Investment portfolios age, grow and change with their owners. Many people gather investments and amass a collection without managing positions, selling and trimming to concentrate on strategy. It might be easy to solve that problem if there were rules for everyone to follow, …
