They say that those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. The bad news is that the last 50 years have seen 5 major financial, market, or economic crises. The good news is that each crisis has lessons that you can apply today to help you build more wealth and feel…
Episode 46 of the NewRetirement podcast is an interview with Jerry Patterson — Principal Financial’s senior vice president of workplace savings and retirement solutions — and discusses how to make the most of your 401(k), workforce savings trends, financial independence and retirement income. Listen Now: Don’t miss out on future episodes: subscribe on iTunes subscribe…
We have a lot of choices about where to invest our money, both before and after retirement. Some options are clearly bad investments. Others seem like a good bet, but they probably aren’t. While we would all like to find a shortcut to massive wealth, a more steady approach is probably the best route to…
Saving for retirement is hard. However, when you are still working, creating a retirement investment plan can be relatively straightforward. The goal is to simply grow the money. But, when you retire, your investment goals become multi-faceted, layered, and downright complicated. You still want your money to grow, but you have a whole lot of…
Diversification should be one of your retirement mantras. After all, if you have all your eggs in one basket, they’re more likely to all break if something goes wrong. That is why you want to try to achieve the right asset allocation mix for your particular situation. Continue reading for some rules of thumb as…
Were you the kid in kindergarten that secretly ate paste in the corner? Or were you the one solving all the math equations from the end of the book on your first day in class? (I knew those kids. Both of them were in my class, and I’m not yet admitting to being one of…
Episode 44 of the NewRetirement podcast is an interview with Morgan Housel — a writer, former columnist at The Motley Fool and the Wall Street Journal, and a partner at the Collaborative Fund. He and Steve discuss Housel’s new book, The Psychology of Money: Timeless Lessons on Wealth, Greed, and Happiness, and his perspective on…
Ravee Mehta made a splash in 2012 when he published The Emotionally Intelligent Investor. The premise went against everything you learned about investing in the 20th century, like reason is better than emotion and that a few basic principles should guide all investors. While you never want to make an emotional decision with regards to…
Bonds can be a core, low-risk component of retirement portfolios. However, they do come with one significant risk factor: If interest rates go up, the bonds you already own will plummet in value. A bond ladder strategy can be a way to reduce that particular risk. What Is a Bond? A bond is a fairly…
You’ve spent your entire working career saving and investing for retirement. Now it’s time to develop a retirement withdrawals strategy. When you are thinking about withdrawing money from your retirement accounts, it’s important to come up with a strategy that ensures that your savings are going to last for a lifetime, are used efficiently,…
Your brain is not necessarily set up in a way that makes it easy to plan a secure retirement. You have cognitive biases — faulty ways of thinking that are unfortunately hardwired into your brain — that work against you. Behavioral finance and behavioral economics are the study of these phenomena. Understanding behavioral finance and…
Pensions have pretty much gone away. We spend 20 to 30 years in retirement. And Social Security covers only a fraction of our retirement expenses. This means we are pretty much responsible for saving everything we need for retirement on our own. This may seem like a daunting challenge; some people might consider the help…
Investing in ourselves doesn’t need to involve money. In fact, many of the best retirement investments do not involve greenbacks at all. Instead, they are investments that make the fullest use of our time, allow us to spend precious moments with the people we love, and enable us to focus on those things that make…
A retirement target-date fund is a professionally-managed mutual fund that is strategically reallocated over time to achieve both growth and security for your assets. The key goal for a target-date fund is that your money will be available for withdrawal on a targeted retirement date in the future. When you invest in a target-date fund,…
Robots: They answer the phones at our insurance agencies; they build cars in our factories. And if we are lucky enough to own a Roomba-brand vacuum, they even vacuum our floors. They now can now also make personalized investment decisions for you related to your retirement. Robo-advisors are a relatively new type of online investment…
Selling bogus investment products to older Americans is big business: In June 2018, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s Office of the Investor Advocate released a report on Elder Financial Exploitation. While they could not make a good estimate of total national financial costs to victims, in the state of New York, a rigorous study…
When you move from one place of employment to another, you’ll probably want to at least give some careful thought to taking the funds in your old 401(k) plan with you. In many cases, rolling them over into an IRA is the best choice. But then again, sometimes it’s better to leave your funds in…
The Roth 401(k) is like a regular 401(k) – only better (at least for a lot of people). The classic 401(k) retirement savings account is largely the same from employer to employer, although there are some subtle differences. The Roth option is a game-changer, and an increasing number of employees who have the choice are…
Bonds can be a valuable part of your retirement savings. Before investing in bonds, it is important to understand what they are and how they work so that you can make informed decisions while planning for retirement. Below, we discuss what bonds are and the advantages of adding them to your retirement portfolio. What Are…
If you’re leaving one job and moving to another, or if you’ve lost or quit a job, there’s a decision to make. Should you keep your money in your ex-employer’s retirement plan, or should you move it? The answer lies in whether the old plan is performing well, or whether you’d be better off cutting…
Managing investments through a bear market takes an alternate strategy that lets you weather the upcoming uncertainty. Few hope to see extraordinary returns in a bear market. But, if you play it smart and not too safe, you’ll still be gaining ground when the bull storms down the street again. Here are two ways to…
We all know that we need to save for retirement, but that is hard. However, it might be even harder to figure out how to invest for retirement.Investments are important for your future.Investing requires some level of expertise and a way of thinking about money that is not innate for most people. Furthermore, the way…
Using tools like your employer’s 401(k) or automatically taking money out of your paycheck are tried-and-true methods for successful retirement planning. But if you can look for less obvious ways to boost your retirement savings, you’ll reach your long-term goals much quicker. Here are some little, yet highly effective, ways to save extra money for…
On December 19, 2007, Warren Buffet, chairman of Berkshire Hathaway and one of the richest men in the world, made a bet with hedge fund investor Ted Seides that an S&P500 index fund invested for ten years would outperform an actively managed fund over ten years. Without going into the details of how the contest…
Much has been written about saving and accumulating enough for retirement. But that’s only half the battle. Once you reach retirement, it is important that you manage your retirement withdrawals from various accounts as tax-efficiently as possible. Taxes will likely be one of your biggest expenses in retirement. A tax-efficient withdrawal strategy can be the…