Do You Need a Financial Advisor?

By: Shelley Seagler Do most of your friends or colleagues use financial advisors? Recently, more and more of my friends have expressed concerns over working with a financial advisor. They wonder: Are financial advisors really trustworthy? Do I have enough money? It sounds expensive, how much will it cost? Where to begin?   If you were to interview a few …

Investing is Not the Same Thing as Saving

A mistake far too many people make is to invest money they should be saving and save money that they should be investing. In our continuation of the discussion of Snider Advisors’ Guiding Principles, we will examine the principle that investing is not the same thing as saving. While saving and investing are certainly interrelated, they are also independent processes …

The Investor’s Christmas Wish List

What do you want for Christmas? This is a common question we likely all hear from friends and family this time of year. While I doubt any of us will be creating a Christmas list to send to Santa, we all have secret wishes or cravings that would put a smile on our face Christmas morning.

Two Strategies to Erase Credit Card Debt

Credit card debt can feel like a monster pounding at the front door, threatening to destroy any hope of a secure financial future. Although paying off your credit card accounts may seem overwhelming and can be challenging, there are steps you can take to help you accomplish this goal.

Emotional Risk?

You will often hear that investors are worried about the risks associated with investments. They are concerned about inflation risk, market risk, and liquidity risk. There is one type of risk that should be a major concern for you, but it is often ignored. Are you concerned about emotional risk? The risk that you make investment decisions based on fear, greed, or worse, doing what everyone else is doing.

Restoring Trust in the Investment Industry

The CFA Institute recently published “The Integrity List: 50 Ways to Restore Trust in the Investment Industry.” Wall Street has received a lot of bad press in the recent years. Whether it was the creation of destructive financial instruments, large bailouts, or a ‘failed’ Facebook IPO, Main Street has many reasons to feel upset. The root of many of these problems is the lack of understanding and education from the retail investor. Clearly, there was a fair share of people and companies who acted inappropriately, but too many other organizations and industry participants were categorized along with a small minority.

Time to hit the books

“You can blame the corrupt markets, evil hedge funds, or the big bad banks for your financial woes. You can even blame yours truly. Off-loading the blame may feel good at the time but it’s not going to build up your IRA or send your kids to college. Your finances are your responsibility and the best way to protect and grow your money isn’t a hot stock tip; it’s education.” I recently read this in an article on Breakout, a financial blog located on Yahoo.com and I couldn’t agree more.

Simple Resolutions for the New Year

With the each New Year we reflect upon the challenges we faced during the previous year while making resolutions for the next. Many of these resolutions I hear from family and friends are often either financial or health related goals as these seem to be the two areas in our lives that always seem as though they could be improved. I think the problem with most of the resolutions I hear made this time of year is that they are far too ambitions and often never end up being fulfilled. With this in mind I’ve compiled a list of simple financial do’s and don’ts for the coming year that can help you get your finances in order.

Risk Adjusted Return

A topic I haven’t covered in a long time (and, based on a comment left by someone yesterday, some people don’t get ) is risk adjusted return. We have been trained over our investing careers to obsess over portfolio performance when what we should be thinking about is outcomes. Forget the absolute number – will our portfolio do what we …

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 …