The 85% Fallacy
I frequently run across “advice” from financial planners, and salesmen who focus on mutual funds, annuities and similar items that suggest that retirees need 80-85% of their pre-retirement income to…
The Four Letter Work is R-I-S-K
It seems fair to say that the biggest single topic in the financial media related to investment management for the doit yourself investor is RISK. The Risk of outliving your…
Practice makes Perfect?
If you ever have a presentation or speech of more than 30 seconds, and you want to “get it right” you will have to practice. However, its not always clear…
A Simple Depiction of Compounding
It has often been reported that Albert Einstein once claimed that “Compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world,” or “compound interest is the most powerful force in the…
They’re Coming for Your Retirement Account!!!
The alarmist financial “News” voices are up in arms screaming that “the government is going to eliminate 401K accounts.” Aside from the fact that this is political suicide for anyone…
9 Things NOT to do in a Speaking Contest
I recently revisited this list of Do’s and Don’t’s for speech contests from StageTime University. Since this list is available in a number of places, it should be ok for…
The Good Old Days of Pension Security
There is a widely held believe belief along the lines of, “Everyone used to have a private pension. The golden years were secured by a monthly check that allowed retirees…
5 Things I Won’t Speak About:
As one looks to build a portfolio of “speaking gigs” as a process of developing a business or side hustle in this space, one will be asked to comment on…
We all hate/love/don’t understand Annuities
A famous research paper, written in 1965 (Yaari, 65) argued that rational individuals should convert all of their retirement wealth to an annuity at the point of retirement. The underlying…
Why Stock Picking Doesn’t Work – and Why You are Going to Try it Anyway
Whenever we find ourselves forced to make decisions with limited information, we are most likely to use a decision rule or heuristic based on prior experience. This approach is easy…