There is No Such Thing as a Free Lunch

Investment expenses have always been a hot button issue within our organization. We’ve spent years stressing the importance of understanding and controlling the fees and expenses within investment strategies. The inability to compare fees across different investment products is one of my major complaints about the entire industry.

Is your financial advisor a fiduciary?

Over the last several years there has been a lot of focus on providing investors with a higher degree of protection by increasing the oversight of industry regulators. One very important term that sets advisors apart, is whether or not they are considered to be a fiduciary.

Moving Away from Plastic

As Online Banking has become more accessible and easy to use, I have found myself using my debit card more and more and rarely using cash. This is becoming a common trend among Americans. We are choosing to use plastic even for small purchases. Banks have capitalized on this trend by offering merchant services to small, medium, and large businesses and it is becoming very rare to find an established business that does not accept plastic.

Who Do I Trust?

For well over a decade, my unrelenting focus has been understanding financial risk and developing practical strategies for managing the risk created by job loss, illness or disability, bear markets and funding thirty years of retirement. Since 1997, I have watched the job of managing those risks become increasingly complex. One reason understanding and managing financial risk is more difficult …

On Randomness

One of the most fundamental and most difficult concepts for investors to wrap their brain around is the randomness of markets. This is most likely because, as Terry Burnham ably shows us, in Mean Markets and Lizard Brains, humans are just not wired to deal with probability and randomness. In the investing classic, A Random Walk Down Wall Street, Princeton …