Financial Planners
Ten years ago, we were in the middle of the Financial Crisis. Between October 2007 and March 2009, the S & P 500 lost 50% of its value. Home values plummeted. Banks and mortgage companies went from boom to bust seemingly overnight, and our entire f…
Paying for college creates a financial planning dilemma for many families: How can working parents save for their own retirement while also saving for their children’s educations? As a profession, financial planners have not always been as helpful as w…
If you have an IRA and are required to take annual distributions, and you are charitably inclined, listen up: the new tax law means you might want to consider Qualified Charitable Distributions as your means of making donations. A Qualified Charitable …
If you are putting away funds dedicated for your child’s higher education expenses, a 529 College Savings Plan is tough to beat. These plans allow parents and grandparents to put away funds for a child’s education, and the growth on the acc…
What a lousy week for the stock market. In case you were lucky enough to miss it, on Friday, the Dow and the S & P 500 dropped 3%, capping off an ugly four days. The market is down about 10% overall since the highs it hit in May. As advisors, we hate these times […]
On August 14, 2015, in his “Intelligent Investor” column for the Wall Street Journal, Jason Zweig wrote about the need to “Reassess Your Investments Before the Next Panic.” There is wisdom in his approach: most investors only take action when it is too late. They sell their investments after the damage has been done, and […]
This is a common scenario for the markets: The indices are chugging along, making some headway, and posting gains for a few months at a time. There are bits of data and global activities to worry about – a talking head on MSNBC talks about “valuations being extended,” and other talks about the impending rise […]
On August 6, 2011, Standard & Poor’s downgraded the United States credit rating from AAA to AA+, kicking off a very turbulent week for the markets. I wrote the article below at the end of that week but didn’t have a place to publish it at the time. While the last few days’ volatilities haven’t […]
Late last month, my wife and I went out to Seattle so I could attend the Financial Planning Association’s annual national conference. We followed the event with three days of hiking in Olympic National Park. Every mid-westerner knows that Seattle is as famous for its rain as Michigan’s Keweenaw region is for its snowfall. Just […]
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