Do you have visions of sugarplums or visions of the taxman dancing in your head during this time of the year? This season is a time when we take stock of how our investments have done throughout the year and it’s especially important to consider how our retirement investments are performing. Even if you prefer to take a “hands off” approach to investing, you need to keep pretty close tabs on how things are shaping up for your retirement because when that day arrives you don’t get any “do overs.” If you have any doubts that you’ll have the funds retire, let me...
Home ownership is at a nearly 50-year low. That’s bad news for the economy as a whole, but it’s even worse news for those individuals who typically would be home owners, but for some reason they aren’t yet. Many of these folks are renting. The money that should be building their real estate equity is building equity for a landlord. This has a negative impact in both the short term and long term. A robust construction industry is vital to the health of our communities and when people aren’t buying houses, that hurts construction – even when those first-time...
What do you do when conventional investment wisdom stops working? The S&P 500 has always been one of the best indicators of the health of the stock market. It’s broadly based, so a good cross section of our economy is represented. For years, one of the most popular pieces of conventional investment wisdom recommended buying an index fund that reflected the makeup of the S&P 500. However, when you have a week like we did recently, when the S&P 500 plunged 4 percent, it’s time to re-evaluate the conventional wisdom. Man’s “wisdom” vs economic reality...
Do you keep money in the bank? Is a real estate loan in your near or medium-term future? I think almost all of us would answer a resounding “yes” to at least one of those questions, and many of us would answer both in the positive. But if you’re a person who wants to make sound plans for your financial future, the recent news on interest rates would be confusing, at best. Fed Chair Janet Yellen earlier this month said that the Federal Reserve would consider pushing interest rates below zero – to a negative interest rate – if the U.S. economy went south. That...
I ran across the question posed in the headline of this article – What’s the ultimate passive income business? – while browsing an online forum the other day and it was fascinating to see how different people answered the query. How would you answer? I think almost all ambitious people search for passive income (income where you don’t have to do much or any work to bring it in) at one time or another during their lives. Sometimes it seems like an impossible dream and people just give up on the idea. Before I go any further, let me say that unless you’re...
