When someone engages an “advice-only” financial planner, the relationship often lasts for the client’s life. I have experienced this with numbers of clients over my 40-year career. One of the main concerns many of my elderly clients express to me is a need to be sure...
KISS: “Keep It Simple, Stupid.” It’s a catchy phrase, but what does “simple” actually mean? Does it mean to make complex topics understandable, or to not make simple communications overly complex, or to not oversimplify complex topics? Tim Mauer, CFP, author of Simple...
Is investing in the stock market akin to gambling? It certainly carries a reasonable amount of risk. Yet, done correctly, investing in the market is not remotely gambling. For comparison, consider games of chance. The best one to play is Blackjack. If you play every...
Transparency is a highly valued attribute that is routinely promised—and frequently undelivered. In fact, it often seems that the more loudly transparency is touted, the more opaqueness is practiced. Perhaps Shakespeare’s famous line from Hamlet, “The lady doth...
Encouraging a 20-something friend at my gym to attend a workshop I was giving on investing and financial planning, I quipped, “I’ll teach you how to be a millionaire.” “Really?” she responded. I quickly explained that, if someone her age invested $6,000 a year in...
In two recent columns, I suggested that consuming a politically unbalanced media diet could negatively affect your long-term investment returns. The more strongly people buy into the rhetoric of their political parties, the more difficult it is to be pragmatic about...
