I don’t remember the last time I celebrated one of my “half birthdays,” but it was almost certainly over a half century ago. Yet I couldn’t help but notice my most-recent half-birthday when it passed this week because for the first time since I was a youngster, it was noteworthy. I turned 59-and-a-half this week, …
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 …
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 …
On Monday [July 19], the stock market had its worst day thus far this year. The Dow Jones Industrial Average lost roughly 725 points, 2.1 percent, its biggest one-day loss since late October 2020. The Standard & Poor’s 500 lost 1.6 percent for the day; the Nasdaq Composite Index declined about 1.1 percent. It felt …
I recently reconnected with Dave, a former colleague who lost his job as the economy was reopening from the pandemic. He’s actually a few years younger than I am, but doesn’t think he can get another job that he’d enjoy in his field, nor does he want a job that forces him to commute and …
For the first time since I was a little kid, “the half’ is about to be important again. “The half” is something children care about that adults typically ignore. It’s the six months of age that kids include when telling you they are, say, “six and a half years old,” that grown-ups effectively discard the …
I recently congratulated an old friend on the announcement of his impending retirement, and he dropped me a response asking for a chat. Joe had done all of the math on his retirement savings and spending plans – which include some nice travels in the next few years – and was trying to figure out …
Financial milestones should be celebrated. The question is whether they can be believed, whether savers and investors who pass key numbers on their lifetime financial journeys can trust the point they have gotten to. I’m concerned about it now because the buoyant stock market of the last year has created a bunch of situations with …
The guy whose research taught investors to expect a 10 percent annualized average return from the stock market has been trying to teach a different lesson for years, namely that the next quarter century is going to see market returns be more modest. It would be just another market forecast – a forgettable opinion from …
One year ago this week, the shortest bear market on record bottomed out. Stocks lost 34 percent from the penthouse on February 20 to the outhouse on March 23, a span of just 33 days. The coronavirus in that time was going from a worry to a pandemic and, as a result, the economy was …
