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 …
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 …
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, …
Simplifying your finances isn’t so simple. That was clear from the response I got to a recent column on cleaning up a portfolio, consolidating accounts, getting rid of extraneous dribs and drabs of money and clearing out the clutter. And I got that big response without ever going into the nitty gritty of investment performance, …
I make a lot of plans and try to do a lot, but having a heart attack in my 40s was not part of any plan. With terrible family cardiac history and my own weight problem, I can’t say I never foresaw the possibility – even, perhaps, the probability – but it was the last …
Patricia Russell wanted to help. That’s what she wrote me in an e-mail offering to be a trusted, helpful resource for my work. She was a certified financial planner, and the founder of FinanceMarvel.com, a web site about getting out of debt, repairing and improving credit scores and more. I get a lot of offers …
Americans don’t save enough for retirement. Countless studies show that. There are a lot of causes to the problem, and none of them are coffee. Yet the seemingly constant banter when it comes to people’s finances is that individuals can save a boatload of money if they just give up paying for …
