The optimum asset allocation to physical gold and silver is 0%. Instead, we recommend you use resource stocks as an inflation hedge.
Read More...Best Of
These are some of our favorite blog posts from various categories. If you aren't sure where to begin reading, we suggest browsing this list.
Tax Planning
A dollar saved on taxes is worth more than a dollar earned. If you earn another dollar, they will just tax you again.
Read More...More Than 25% of Americans Are Making a Financial Mistake
If you look beyond the short term, making this move is pretty clearly worse than using a high-interest credit card to pay your bills.
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Financial Planning Lessons from Downton Abbey: Part 2
Lord Grantham, the master of Downton Abbey, continues to offer insightful financial lessons as he bumbles his wealth management responsibilities.
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Financial Planning Lessons from Downton Abbey
As a financial advisor, season 3 of Downton Abbey has become the most interesting as deep-level financial tension has begun to infiltrate the Crawley family drama.
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Live Long and Prosper
It’s not just Mister Spock who is living a long life. Japanese Jiroemon Kimura’s nearly 116 years, making him the oldest man in modern recorded history, is a reminder to have a retirement income plan that will last over the long haul.
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Seven Tax-Planning Strategies to Dodge the Tax Bullet
The victors in the recent election have declared it open hunting season on the rich, which they evidently believe will solve our spending problems. Tax hikes everywhere are aimed at the most productive members of society.
Read More...The Ring of Fire – Part 2
“Unless we begin to close this gap, then the inevitable result will be that our debt/GDP ratio will continue to rise, the Fed would print money to pay for the deficiency, inflation would follow, and the dollar would inevitably decline.”
Read More...Marshmallows and Investing?
Parents take note: Research on delayed gratification shows connections from children through adulthood.
Read More...Assuming a Will is All You Need–Mistake #2
Taking the time to create your estate documents may protect your interest as much while you are alive as they will after your death. No matter your age, in addition to a will, you need two additional documents.
Read More...Not Having an Estate Plan–Mistake #1
The worst thing you can do is to do nothing at all and assume everything will pan out in the end. No matter how much (or how little) money you have, you need at least a simple will.
Read More...How Much Should I Have Saved Toward Retirement?
Measuring progress regularly on the path toward retirement is critical. Fall too far behind, and you risk not being able to save enough to catch up. There is no downside to arriving early.
Read More...How Much Should I Save Toward Retirement If I’m Starting Late?
Knowing how much you should save for retirement is critical. But what if you are late getting started? The longer you delay, the shorter the time that compound interest can do its magic on your savings.
Read More...Suddenly Wealthy
Studies show that onetime windfalls can actually impoverish you. They make you feel rich, which inevitably leads to overspending. But wealth is what you save, not what you spend.
Read More...A Progressive Tax Code is Economically Destructive
Most Americans assume a progressive tax code is needed to promote equality and remove some of the burden of other taxes on those with the lowest income. But the progressive nature of the tax code changes behavior in many ways.
Read More...How Much Should I Save for Retirement?
You should save 15% of your take-home pay for retirement over your working career. As your situation varies, you must adjust your safe savings rate.
Read More...How keeping your money “safe” might lose half of it in 16 years.
“Anyone who’s bought gas, paid a medical bill or sent a child off to college recently knows that the Consumer Price Index doesn’t tell the whole story of inflation.”
Read More...Smart Tax Planning for the Gap Years
Many families seek financial planning advice specifically for retirement. But if they wait too long, they miss an important tax-planning opportunity. A great strategy is to take advantage of the time between retirement and Social Security at age 70, the so-called gap years.
Read More...Why We Don’t Rebalance
“Perfectly rational individuals exhibit changing risk aversion that makes it hard for them to rebalance into high-return assets that have had steep price declines.”
Read More...Fund a Teenager’s Million-Dollar Retirement
We teach teenagers a lot more about sexuality than we do about money. This can confuse them about what they should be learning. Give this article to a teenager and encourage him or her to start a Roth IRA.
Read More...Squirrel Away Money While You Can
Franco Modigliani won the Nobel Prize for a simple technique that squirrels know intuitively from birth. You have to squirrel away some nuts during times of plenty so you can survive during times of scarcity.
Read More...What Equality Should We Seek in Society?
Studies suggest that brains may be wired with either a utopian or a tragic view of the world, corresponding roughly to liberals and conservatives. We continue to talk past each other in political debates.
Read More...What Is Comprehensive Wealth Management?
Advisors who offer comprehensive wealth management are like financial concierges. Their only goal is to meet your needs. If you ask for fresh strawberries, they try to find them for you.
Read More...Tax Efficient Investing
It can be useful to maintain a grid where all of the available asset classes are arranged in order, by tax efficiency and potential return based on time horizon, so clients can clearly see when and where tax-deferral can offer the greatest benefits.
Read More...Are Investment Management Fees Tax Deductible?
I often get asked, “Are investment management fees tax deductible?” The answer is not a simple “yes” or “no.” Like many tax questions, the answer is “It depends.”
Read More...A fiduciary standard is good, old-fashioned common sense
“Unfortunately, some are also misleading the public by saying that a fiduciary standard would prevent the delivery of financial services to middle-American Main Street investors.”
Read More...How Do Financial Advisors Earn Their Fee?
Investment fees are generally about 1% of assets under management and drop as assets rise. The critical question to ask is “Where do financial advisors add value that might exceed the 1% fee they charge?”
Read More...What is an Accredited Investment Fiduciary?
Fi360 promotes a culture of fiduciary responsibility and improves the decision making processes of investment fiduciaries and other financial service providers.
Read More...Fee-Only Financial Planner: What’s the Difference?
Fee-only financial planners are registered investment advisors with a fiduciary responsibility to act in their clients’ best interest. They do not accept any fees or compensation based on product sales.
Read More...Securing Your Credit
A U.S. Public Interest Research Group report in 2004 found that one in four credit reports have serious errors that could significantly lower your chances of being approved.
Read More...Investing in gold and silver coins
A large number of people in the United States are worried about our profligate spending and the resulting devaluation of our currency. They are worried about politics and socialism and the economy.
Read More...Marotta’s 2012 Gone-Fishing Portfolio
A gone-fishing portfolio has a limited number of investments with a balanced asset allocation that should do well with dampened volatility. Its primary appeal is simplicity. As a secondary virtue, it avoids the worst mistakes of the financial services industry.
Read More...Marotta’s 2012 Gone-Fishing Portfolio Calculator
A gone-fishing portfolio has a limited number of investments with a balanced asset allocation that should do well with dampened volatility.
Read More...Using Dynamic Asset Allocation to Boost Returns
Think of static asset allocation as where to set your sails and dynamic asset allocation as a way to keep your balance as your boat glides and sometimes bounces through the waves.
Read More...The Shiller Ten-Year P/E Ratio
What we would really like to measure are the changes in price (P) that cause a company with a good long-term track record to look relatively cheap. Economist Robert Shiller created just such a measurement.
Read More...Style Boxes and the Efficient Frontier
The Marotta allocation method is a proportionally weighted allocation based on the square of each Sharpe ratio. Squaring the Sharpe ratio drastically reduces asset categories in proportion to their distance from the efficient frontier.
Read More...Asset Allocation and the Efficient Frontier
Crafting portfolio asset allocations is a combination of art and engineering. Just as a blending of colors can produce cerulean, so a blending of indexes produces a unique shade of risk and return.
Read More...Mailbag: Should I pay off my mortgage early?
Some say don’t make extra payments, take the tax deduction. Others say you need to be debt free.
Read More...The Efficient Frontier
The efficient frontier measures all investments on a scale of risk and return. Risk is commonly placed on the x-axis, and return is placed on the y-axis.
Read More...Value: The Third Factor of Investing
A stock’s valuation is measured on a continuum from “value” to “growth” In broad strokes, value stocks are cheap and growth stocks are expensive.
Read More...Size: The Second Factor of Investing
The second factor of investing is size as measured by a stock’s total capitalization. Over time small cap will outperform large cap even after factoring out measurements of volatility.
Read More...CAPM: The First Factor of Investing
Modeling investment returns seeks to find an equation to predict your expected returns as much as possible. The simplest equation for the markets would be “Return equals 11.71%.” This has been the average return from 1927 through 2010, the zero factor model.
Read More...Before You Say “I Do”: Money & Marriage Exercise 1
Couples that fail to prepare for a shared money maturity will likely experience longer and sharper growing pains.
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