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 …
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 …
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 …
At a time when many Americans seem obsessed with shutting out messages and viewpoints they don’t support and believe in, I found it refreshing last week to chat with a guy who most optimists and long-term investors either disbelieve or hate. Harry S. Dent Jr. has been a soothsayer of sadness and gloom for ages …
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 …
