For better or for worse … when life changes

Think back on the seminal events in your life. How many would you say were fortunate? How many unfortunate? Financial planners have a term for those changes. We call them transition events. Examples of transition events include: marriage, retirement, career change, divorce, loss of a spouse or parent, a windfall or settlement, bankruptcy, the sale of a business and inheritance. …

Step #5 – Retirement Preparedness Checklist: Create Enough Cash Flow to Cover Retirement Expenses

Think about this. Most companies don’t go bankrupt because they are not profitable. They don’t go bankrupt because the value of their assets has declined. They go bankrupt because they do not have sufficient cash flow to pay their creditors and employees. A company can lose money, on paper, but stay in business indefinitely so long as it has sufficient …

Step #1 – Retirement Preparedness Checklist: Create Personal Financial Statements

No self-respecting Chief Financial Officer would dream of trying to run a company without a constantly updated set of financial statements. Neither should you. That is why the first step, in our Retirement Preparedness Checklist, is to create personal financial statements. The Purpose of Personal Financial Statements Personal financial statements serve several very important functions: 1) they tell you where …

The Retirement Preparedness Checklist

Heavyweight champion and prolific pitchman, George Foreman, said, “The question isn’t at what age I want to retire, it’s at what income.” Before you turn in the keys to your office for good, you need to make sure you are prepared financially for life without a paycheck. Use this handy Retirement Preparedness Checklist and correlating worksheets to make sure you …

Tools for surviving the investment income famine

UPDATED 2019: This article, originally published in 2010, continues to be one of our most popular posts. Please keep in mind that it is possible some of the facts offered have changed throughout the years.However, our sentiments have not. Scott Burns and I agree on many things. We agree that you cannot beat the market by picking stocks. We agree …

10 Items for Your Year-End To-Do List

Can you believe it? 2009 is almost over! The older I get, the faster they go! I thought I would put together a quick note to remind you of some helpful, year-end tasks you may want to consider: 1. Rebalance investment accounts – this is something few people do but I highly recommend. This involves bringing your investment accounts back …

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 …

Cutting through the confusion

There are a lot of financial talk shows on the radio every weekend. My show is one of nine on KRLD each Saturday and Sunday, and if you consider all the other stations in the area, you can get an idea of the variety of voices and opinions that confront the average investor each week. If I were someone who …

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 …