Category: Financial Peace
Predicting the direction of the market is like predicting when you will hit the bulls-eye in a dart game. The majority of the time throughout market history, the markets have been rising. History shows that the chance of your money growing in a diversified portfolio of stocks and bonds is much like the odds of your next dart hitting any number on the dartboard... except the bulls-eye. If you are going to try and time the market by moving your money in and out, you have to ask yourself how confident are you that you can hit the bullseye when you do.
Whether you are brand new to investing and have never had an annual review, or you’ve had many annual reviews, you might be interested to find out a little bit more of what is done during the review process. The first step is obviously to see how your portfolio has performed in the past 12...
Recessions are painful, no doubt about it. But they are necessary to clean out the excesses of prior growth periods... “You can’t have such a sustained period of growth
without an occasional downturn to balance things out.”
Like most topics, who you speak to about credit cards drastically impacts the narrative of why you should or shouldn’t use them. So instead of trying to change your mind one way or the other, let’s just look at some facts about credit cards. How does the interest rate work on my credit card? The...
The S&P 500 or the Dow Jones Industrial Average are not reality. Reality is not price-to-earnings ratios and technical market studies. Symbols on the computer screen are not the real world. In the real world, companies create wealth. Stock certificates don’t. Stock certificates are simply proxies for reality.
If you haven’t used the SMART process for setting goals in your life or business, then you probably don’t know what the acronym means. S – Specific M – Measurable A – Attainable R – Relevant T – Time-bound Specific What exactly will be accomplished and by what means? Measurable How will your goal be...
The general economic model of a recession is that when unemployment rises, consumers are more likely to save than spend. This places pressure on businesses that rely on consumers’ income being spent. As a result, company earnings and stock prices decline, which can fuel a negative cycle of economic decline and negative expectations of returns.
I spoke with a client this week who was lucky enough to find money! Nope, he didn’t just spot a $20 stuck in a branch from the wind, he realized he had an old IRA he had lost track of. We rolled his old IRA over to his managed account with us with no penalties...
How much money is enough? For John D. Rockefeller the answer was “just a little bit more.” At the pinnacle of his success, Rockefeller had a net worth of about 1% of the entire US economy (about 1/3 of a trillion dollars). He owned 90% of all the oil & gas industry of his time....
When conversations navigate toward the topic of retirement, one of the most common subjects discussed is IRAs. If you are unaware, IRA stands for individual retirement account, meaning it is not offered through your employer, you made a choice to start saving into a retirement account on your own. Traditional IRAs are invested pre-tax, and...