7 Red Flags of a Shady Financial Advisor-Part 3

Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3 #5: They Prey on Social Circles Sadly, not all financial planners hold their fiduciary responsibility in the high regard they legally and ethically should. We’ll start the third and final part of this series by warning you to watch out for financial planners who commit ‘affinity fraud.’ Affinity fraud is an investment …

How Do You Define Wealth?

When you check your retirement account statements, what is the first thing you look at? Is it your current account value? If so, is that number how you currently define your wealth? Many of us will think about our wealth as the number at the top of our statement. However,  this is a “paper” number that fluctuates daily, unless you’re saving or investing for …

How to derail your retirement

Are you counting on 4%? For just a moment, think about retirement.  If you’re reading this at work, chances are retirement seems pretty darn appealing. How will you enjoy this part of your life? While retirement can be exciting to imagine, you must also think about how you will pay your bills. What withdrawal rate will you need to actually …

Solving the retirement cash flow dilemma

Let’s be real, planning for retirement can be a little tricky. You never know how long you’re going to be retired and you certainly can’t predict what’s going to happen during that time. Moreover, you’re still going to have bills to pay and a life to live. That’s why it’s vital to have cash flow coming in every month from …

Investors must understand risk

by Shelley Seagler “Risk comes from not knowing what you’re doing.” – Warren Buffett There are two approaches to risk. One is to ignore it completely and hope everything turns out okay. The second is to manage risk and reward as two interrelated pieces of an equation. But you must understand risk before you can effectively manage it. The problem …

Emotions are an investor’s worst enemy

We are hardwired to seek out predators and react to warning signals. While this innate behavior may have helped keep our ancestors alive, it also makes it almost impossible to make good investment decisions. Few things make us as emotional as the prospect of losing money. That’s why investing is a continual struggle between logic and emotion. “The more emotional …

Market timing is a lie

by Shelley Seagler “There are two kinds of investors, be they large or small: those who don’t know where the market is headed, and those who don’t know that they don’t know. Then again, there is a third type of investor – the investment professional, who indeed knows that he or she doesn’t know, but whose livelihood depends upon appearing …

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 …

You alone are accountable for your financial situation

The principle of accountability is fundamental to financial success. The bottom line is that no one cares more about your money than you do. Sure, it’s easy to point fingers, but it isn’t your broker, your CPA, the government, your parents, or even your spouse that is responsible for your current or future financial situation. It is you and you …

The Number One Job of Your Portfolio

by Shelley Seagler While many of us were still too young to know why we should care, the rules of retirement changed significantly. When Congress passed the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974, better known as ERISA, the burden and risk of providing income for retirement shifted away from your employer and directly onto you, and the inevitable and …