To help us keep things in perspective when markets are troubling, Larry Swedroe had an excellent bit of data points on market returns he got from a colleague, Dan Campbell, covering 89 years from 1926 to 2014. The following excerpt is from Larry Swedroe and his blog post “Keep Calm and Stay Forward”: If you’re prone to investment depression, one way to help avoid the downward spiral that many investors experience (which can lead to panicked selling) is to envision good outcomes. To help you do just that, I have gone to my trusty videotape and come up with some data that should not only be of interest, but should also enable you to envision positive outcomes. My thanks to my colleague, Dan Ca
While retirement can be a time for relaxation or days filled with travel, hobbies and family visits, there are some key dates that should be highlighted in your 2016 calendar. Here (below) is a list of important dates, which may be applicable to you. Now CLAIM SPOUSAL BENEFITS If you are 62 or older by Jan. 1, 2016, retain the right to claim only spousal benefits when you file for Social Security at age 66 or later, allowing your own retirement benefit to grow up to age 70, assuming your spouse has already filed for benefits. Under a new law, younger retirees lose this valuable claiming option. April 1 TAKE REQUIRED MINIMUM DISTRIBUTION If you turned 70 ½ in 2015, you must take your first
“You are entitled to your opinion. But you are not entitled to your own facts.” Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan It’s easy to express an opinion about the future. We all do it all of the time. But our opinions (and even so-called expert opinions) about the future rarely work out well. What we don’t want to do is to actually use opinions about the future to drive our investment strategies. Investing based on your (or someone else’s) stock picks, interest rate forecasts, economic growth or currency predictions, or basically any other financial indicator for which we want to be a fortune teller, isn’t a way to build wealth. Markets, the economy, interest rates, currencies, etc. just don’t b
The right investment strategy is the one that doesn’t bet on predicting the future, but rather is much less exciting, even boring, and requires far more discipline, and is much harder to do as we humans are not wired to do it. These early days of 2016 are testing investors like many have never been tested. Larry Swedroe a market researcher and author we respect calls what many investors are doing now to be “catastrophizing”. It means to focus on the negative, missing out on positive employment gains, low inflation and gas prices, which can force that investor to only see doom and gloom and be indecisive, or what we see often, is to panic sell. Another investor we all should respect and l
