Posts tagged as:

investments

Middle Class: The Money Class? Part Two

July 29, 2010

Part one of our series on the Middle Class: The Money Class? can be found here. Who are you? The mutual fund industry has been asking that for decades and the answers still aren’t quite clear.  But they are getting closer to understanding that the vast majority (85%) of the owners of mutual funds are [...]

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Middle Class: The Money Class? Part One

July 28, 2010

According to the most recent Investment Company Institute Factbook, the fund industry, based on what they refer to as emergence of fund entrepreneurs have made the middle class the money class.  With 90 million households owning mutual funds, either in their 401(k)s or some other type of defined contribution plan available n the workplace or [...]

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Lifetime Payments Work Best for Women

July 27, 2010

Those who follow this site know that as a rule, I don’t like annuities. For most of us, this sort of  - and I hesitate to call it such – investment is something you purchase to guarantee income.  Part mutual fund, part insurance policy and wholly too expensive on both counts, annuities, for whatever reason [...]

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The Retirement Wonder Years

July 17, 2010

The older you get, the more apt you are to think about your retirement.  And according to some recent indicators, you are also thinking, perhaps even worrying about your children’s retirement.  The dilemma is not easy to answer and in some instances, will not truly unfold until many of are able to anything constructive to [...]

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What Happens When ETFs are Actively Managed?

July 13, 2010

For most of us, the exchange traded fund is an index fund dressed up like a stock.  It trades actively on the exchange.  Investors can purchase the fund throughout the day and many of these ame investors have found this security a good place to follow trends.  My only real concern with ETFs as they [...]

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Can There Be Guarantees in Retirement?

July 12, 2010

Can there be guarantees in retirement? Can we hope to be able to know how much retirement income we will need, whether we have invested enough in those retirement accounts to outlast our finite number of heartbeats and whether the costs while we are working will be worth the payoff in the end? In a [...]

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The Top Reason We Can’t Understand Retirement

July 11, 2010

Boo! There we got that out of the way. Are all financial writers actually horror writers who don’t know it?  Why does every conversation about retirement and investments and mutual funds and Wall Street, almost everything concerning money seemed tinged with fear, some unknown fright that is just around the corner, or ten years from [...]

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Cash, in Pocket

July 9, 2010

The opening lyrics to James Honeyman-Scott and Chrissie Hynde’s song Brass in Pocket could easily be changed to: “I’ve got [cash], in pocket; got [money],I’m gonna use it”.  Only the cash in pocket has become the huge economic threat of this financial crisis – one that still lingers several years after the fact. We all know [...]

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Crossroad Capitalism: Your Retirement Plans on Hold

July 7, 2010

Alex Raffe suggested that “you seldom sit at a crossroads and know its a crossroad”.  Yves Smith, author of the blog Naked Capitalism and “Econned: How Unenlightened Self-Interest Undermined Democracy and Corrupted Capitalism” along with Rob Parenteau, the head of a global financial advisory firm and the editor of The Richebächer Letter think we are [...]

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Investment Analysts: How to Happy Dance

July 6, 2010

There must be a class for it.  ”How to do the happy dance even if your bullish remarks continue to fall short” 101 would be an apt title.  But that would be too easy and too convenient to pin the blame on a college course.  So why are investment analysts still doing the happy dance [...]

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