-
Your Retirement Number
William P. Bengen, an aeronautical engineer turned financial advisor, first articulated the 4 percent safe withdrawal rule in a 1994 paper in the Journal of Financial Planning. But to his dismay, that rule transpired to become a…
-
The Three-Legged Stool
Post-World War II retirement planning was easy. We had pensions. There was income from Social Security. And we had our own savings. Those three things made up for a sturdy three-legged stool that took us…
-
The Magnificent Seven
Bank of America strategist Michael Hartnett coined the term “The Magnificent Seven” or Mag 7 for a group of stocks that have come to dominate the stock market lately1. These stocks are Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Nvidia,…
-
A Gradually Rising Standard Of Living
Imagine life without smartphones; no Google maps, no Uber, none of those things that bring the many conveniences into our lives. Imagine life without the internet. Or without personal computers. Or without televisions, microwaves, and…
-
How Estate Taxes Work & Why They Are A Good Thing
We pay estate taxes in this country. That means if you die with too much money, you (your estate) have to pay a wealth tax beyond all the taxes you have already paid while you…
-
The More Complex Your Investments, The More Likely They’ll Blow Up
Robert Stock earned a bachelor’s degree in physics from Princeton university and a doctorate from Carnegie Mellon. He spent nine years working as a researcher in the Directed Energy Group at MIT’s Lincoln lab where he…
-
If I Were A Millennial
Millennials have had it rough. Between student loans and an ever rising cost of living, there is nary a chance of having anything leftover to put towards long-term goals like retirement. The struggle is real…
-
An Investment’s Return vs. An Investor’s Return
The value of an investment today is the sum of all the cash flows that investment will generate over the life of that investment, discounted to the present at an appropriate discount rate. That applies…
-
Permission To Spend
Retirement is expensive. It is expensive because the longer we live, the more years we’ll spend in retirement than saving for it. The other way to put it is that we are likely to have…
-
Real Investing
Alice Schroeder in her book, The Snowball describes how Warren Buffett acquired shares in the Coca-Cola company. Buffett had been wanting to buy Coca-Cola shares for quite some time but couldn’t because they never got cheap enough for his taste. The 1987…