Personal Finance

Below is a summary of the criteria I would want to find in an Investment Advisor. It is a demanding "wish list" so if you know of such an individual please let me know. Words: 640

Understanding how financial advisors get paid and what your advisor fees are will help you make smarter decisions about your money. Here are a few of the different ways financial advisors get paid and what you need to know about advisor fees. Words: 538

Trust in the proven history of the only true money, gold and silver. The charts say there is still time to buy, but any event can trigger a panic and the physical metals will not be had at prices people can now afford.

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].

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:

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.

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...

When holding their stock picks for the year, banks were only 43% accurate with their predictions. That’s right! Flipping a coin would have been potentially more effective than buying bank stock picks, which ended up down -4.79% on the year. The S&P 500 finished down only -0.69%. Simply just making any interest in a savings account would have been more effective as well. [This article ranks] the banks, from best to worst, based on accuracy of their calls and also based on the performance of their recommendations.

Being a millionaire is overrated. Becoming a “millionaire” once meant being set for life and destined for early retirement - but that was then, and this is now. Today's infographic shows how things have changed over time, and that a million dollars of wealth ain’t what it used to be.