Evaluating Seniors For Decision Making Capability

Evaluating Seniors For Decision Making Capability

Early in my financial planner career I worked for a firm with a 75-year old client who had become a recent widow. A phone scammer had gotten hold of her and was persuasive enough to convince her to send a hundred dollars in gift cards to an address in the Caribbean. That one indiscretion resulted…
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U.S. Life Expectancy Lowest Among Peer Countries

It’s well-documented that the U.S. had more deaths due to COVID than any other country on the planet (excluding authoritarian countries whose reporting is highly politicized). According to a study published by the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), U.S. life expectancy – which was previously lowest among 21 high-income advanced democracies with available…
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More Bad Advisors

It seems that during good times or bad there will always be financial advisors who violate the trust their clients place in them. Although the miscreants below actually represent only a tiny fraction of the many reputable and trustworthy CFPs out there, I am sharing their stories in the hope that it will make you…
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What Is Normal?

In 2009, after the so-called Great Recession clobbered stocks, one of the largest mutual fund companies (PIMCO) produced a set of economic and investment analyses that they named the “new normal.” Right now McKinsey & Company is currently promoting their viewpoint of post-COVID changes in the workplace and in the economy under the rubric of…
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Is The U.S. Media Overly Negative?

Researchers at Dartmouth College and Brown University recently discovered two interesting things about media coverage of events surrounding COVID-19 after reviewing all related news articles from major media sources worldwide since the beginning of 2020. The first is that their audience (us) – regardless of country – strongly prefers negative stories over positive ones. The…
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More of “Don’t Believe Everything You Believe”

Five years ago I wrote about Confirmation Bias (Don’t Believe Everything You Believe). This refers to our tendency as humans to seek only information that reinforces our previously-held beliefs, and the negative impact of applying that bias to our decision-making. It’s now 2021 and we are in the midst of some of the biggest examples…
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