Blogs

When choosing a financial advisor, the public faces a challenge many are simply unaware they are facing.  There is no standard solution to any investment need! To help people in this process, I have come up with four very simple questions that will give the interviewer a window into understanding…

Tax Preparation usually doesn’t mean tax planning. Preface: My experience is that most tax-preparing CPAs and EAs look backwards, at the previous year’s tax experience.  It takes overt client requests to have them do forward tax planning.  As such, the more advanced financial advisor with a good understanding of the…

There is a cottage industry in the business of forecasting markets. It is meant for entertainment, not for advice. It began with newsletters, then with radio shows, then with televisions shows, even cable networks. Now websites. There are conferences dedicated to the subject. But, In the immortal words, of William…

Bonds or fixed income really have two purposes for the US individual investor: income and stability. Some will disagree with me. They would say that you might want to own bonds for appreciation. However, In order to achieve appreciation, you must have institutional investor scale. In my view this is…

Dave and I began working together in the early 1990s. From day one Dave was geared for growth. Over the years we comfortably doubled, even tripled the value of the IRA he wants to live off of once he retired. Two years are ago, Dave came to me, anticipating retirement…

Portfolio Manager Financial Advisors are inexpensive…maybe. First let’s be absolutely clear about one thing. Aside from simply buying very inexpensive ETFs, with which you get absolutely no advice from a seasoned portfolio manager/financial advisor, we believe we are the least expensive alternative for any client who wants professional help.  Advisors…

Bond Investing When we are selecting bonds for our portfolios, we have a range of factors we evaluate: Our first check is the price. As mentioned above, we will almost always buy bonds at or below their maturity or call price. There are two reasons for this. One is perception,…

Our version of buying bonds for income and stability is best demonstrated using the example of the Required Minimum Distribution. It is broadly known that at now 73—a few years ago it changed from 70 1⁄2 to 73—with very few exceptions investors must begin taking money out of their IRAs.…

We got burned years ago with an instrument called a closed-end fund. Let me spend a few minutes on closed end funds—some of which we still own. Market Opportunities and Investment Themes Idealistically, some Wall Street firm identifies market opportunities in the fixed income market to seemingly help clients build…

All throughout my career I have heard the mantra of “laddering portfolios.” Laddering maturities means to buy a series of bonds over time so that regardless of whether interest do, there will soon be a bond maturing and one can reinvest the proceeds at the new interest rates. This is cowardly. This…

It seems to me that, like many fad diets, the exercise of financial planning as it is marketed right now is in search of some magic elixir that will allow you to eat too much or exercise too little and then lose weight.  The dangerous thing about financial planning at…