Finance

Consumers are the foundation of the U.S. economy and today's chart plots data (reflecting median spending, and adjusted for inflation) from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) for 12 different consumer categories over a period of nearly 75 years to show the changing way in which Americans spend their money.

I recently revisited the fascinating tactic Professor Sheena Iyengar of the Columbia Business School proposed at BlackRock’s recent Retirement Roundtable in New York to help investors save more for retirement [and what she proposes is easy to implement, and extremely effective].

Interest rates have bottomed and will rise substantially during the next decade OR interest rates won't rise because rising rates would crash governments, economies, derivatives, equity markets and more.

I’ve always said that personal finances are more important than portfolio management, but I still think there’s probably not enough people writing or providing education on the topic so I’m going to make a concerted effort to write more about personal finance in the coming year and, to that end, here’s my list of 20 personal finance rules:

There has been a need for clarification for how gold bullion can be used for investment purposes by Muslims for a long time and this uncertainty has kept Shariah-compliant offerings at a minimum, and many investors restricted by the type of gold bullion transactions they are able to partake in, with most focused on jewellery and coin offerings. The introduction of the Shariah Gold Standard now gives as many as 1.6 billion Muslims in the world, 25 per cent of the population, far greater access to the gold market than they have had since the birth of modern finance.

If you earn $250,000 a year does that mean you are rich? The answer is “no” – and it turns out that the actual statistical relationship between income and wealth is surprisingly low.

A financial tsunami is scheduled to hit the U.S. economy and taxpayers over the next several years and being fully aware of what will be happening should be one of the foundations of any retirement or financial planning process. Hopefully, this analysis proves helpful for you in that regard.

In the next 5 years most people will lose 75-90% of their wealth and some 100% but investors needn’t lose most of their money if they took a few measures to protect their fortune...

No matter where we are on the road to retirement, we have three tools at our disposal: contributions, time and investment returns. The question is, what can we do to improve our retirement equation?

Each and every day of the year I review hundreds of financial articles looking for the very few that are succinct, informative, thought-provoking and well written and bring them to my readers in a Market Intelligence Report. Below are today's best: