Retirement

The Differences Between a Traditional and Roth IRA

October 5, 2010

You may already know that IRA stands for Individual Retirement Arrangement (it was formerly called an Individual Retirement Account). It’s a special tax-advantaged investment vehicle that’s available to the vast majority of Americans. But do you know whether a traditional or a Roth IRA is best for you? I’ll explain the basic differences between the [...]

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The Pros and Cons of Investing in Mutual Funds

September 15, 2010

Everyone’s heard of mutual funds. They’re companies that pool money from many individual and institutional investors to buy and sell a variety of securities and assets, such as stocks, bonds, money markets, real estate, and precious metals. A mutual fund’s holdings are called its portfolio and each investor owns shares, which are a portion of [...]

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Retiring Happy

July 28, 2010

As I assist my clients and their families plan for retirement, we look at several different factors other than money. I ask my clients “What is important to you?” According to an article posted on YahooFinance titled “Secrets to a Happy Retirement”, money is listed as the very last item on their list of criteria [...]

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Funding Our Parents’ Retirement

July 15, 2010
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My friend Rosemary is a lawyer, and up until very recently she was a DINK. Rosemary is now happily married with a one year old son.  One day we were discussing our parent’s retirement, since we are both at the age where the baby boomers that are our parents start to retire. My father retired [...]

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The Secret to a Stable Retirement

June 1, 2010

A co-worker once told me that the key to a happy relationship is “The Big C”. “Commitment?” I asked. “No Kristina. Compromise.” She replied as she laughed at me. I guess the secret to the way you can retire as a couple in a stable marriage is the same way that you can retire financially [...]

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Financial Advisors are Investors too

May 19, 2010
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Let me tell you that working in the financial services industry does not make it any easier when trying to predict the future market conditions.  I don’t have a crystal ball that magically appears in my office after every fiscal crisis to predict what will happen next. First of all I don’t do that. I [...]

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Brett Farve and Delayed Retirement

January 28, 2010

In case you didn’t catch it, the Wall Street Journal had a great article that used Brett Farve as a role model for how we should approach retirement (“At What Age Should You Retire?“). Most bosses wouldn’t be as understanding if we changed our mind about retiring as many times as the Minnesota Vikings quarterback, [...]

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Can We Trust Social Security?

January 22, 2010

All of us have heard, at one time or another, that social security will not last; that eventually it will become unsustainable and implode. The root problem, that makes it unsustainable are demographics. Social Security Reform.org explains this demographic problem quite simply: The reason that Social Security’s deficits are inevitable is fairly simple. Demographics are [...]

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ROTH 401(k) v. 401(k)

December 22, 2009

Since we are at the end of the year and considering various tax implications, I thought I would mention to our readers some of the reasons why I choose to starting funding a ROTH 401(k) instead of a traditional 401(k) when my employer offered a new retirement plan. For those of your wondering about the [...]

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Target-Date Funds

December 9, 2009

When I first started working, the task of determining my 401(k) allocation was quite overwhelming. I was barely out of college and had hardly picked up a financial book and was thus in no position whatsoever to pick the set of funds that were right for me and my retirement goals. A colleague must have [...]

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