Over my many years as a financial planner I’ve pretty much heard it all when it comes to investment beliefs and expectations. Here are five of the more interesting investment fallacies I’ve encountered. A stock split is a buy signal (false). A stock split is nothing more than a company’s attempt to reduce the price…
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It’s open enrollment time again. Ordinarily when someone turns age 65 they should sign up for Medicare, or else risk having a late enrollment penalty applied to future premiums. But the rules are quite different for people still working. I will attempt to simplify them as briefly as possible. First, here are some basic Medicare…
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There are two ways mutual funds can be managed. Actively-managed funds are those whose management teams attempt to generate a better return than the average return produced by the asset class in which the fund invests. Passively-managed funds simply try to achieve the average return. Because active funds require more analysts and/or complex software algorithms…
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After the so-called Great Recession of 2008, the Federal Reserve (Fed) began buying up large quantities of bonds and other securities. This policy of quantitative easing (QE), as it became known, was part of the “pump priming” effort by the government to increase liquidity and stabilize the financial system in order to get the economy…
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The pandemic relief law that the federal government passed in December included some significant changes to the college financial aid application process. Here is a very brief summary of some of the key provisions together with some implications for families with children or grandchildren approaching college age. Most will go into effect on July 1,…
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With mid-term elections just around the corner, the Washington blame game is heating up. Republicans are asserting that the upsurge in inflation we’ve been living with since the beginning of this year is all due to the Democrats’ American Rescue Plan that pumped billions of unnecessary dollars into the economy. Democrats counter that the inflation…
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