Your Awful Annuity Investment

Are you considering making an investment in an annuity? Do you truly understand the product and all the guarantees, fees, and expenses? In discussions with prospective clients looking to change their investment strategies many have been comparing our strategy with annuities. Even after our conversations, many investors still do not understand the disadvantages of these investments.

3 Ways to Maximize Social Security Benefits

With 10,000 baby boomers retiring every day, having a plan to maximize your social security benefits is an essential piece of your retirement plan. Most Americans believe that their options are limited in this area of financial planning, and I’m here to tell you that it’s quite the opposite.

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 …

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 …

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 …