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An Active Retirement is Not Just Keeping Busy
Tweet Share on Facebook September 30, 2011 CommentAn active retirement is not just keeping busy, but engaging in quality activities that make your life worthwhile. If we attempt to fill our newly found free time with quick distractions rather than quality activities, we may eventually become bored. Here are some of the key ingredients of quality retirement activities to help guide your planning:
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Don’t Be Lured By Investment Pornography
Tweet Share on Facebook September 29, 2011 CommentIt is particularly insidious that so much of what passes for financial journalism is really financial pornography. It’s dispensed by distinguished looking experts who give opinions on a wide range of investing subjects. Sometimes they are right and sometimes they are wrong. They have no accountability.
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5 Surefire Ways to Ruin Your Retirement
Tweet Share on Facebook September 28, 2011 CommentSome pieces of retirement advice are misleading and confusing. Following retirement advice that you don’t fully understand or that doesn’t have data to back it up can hurt your retirement savings. Here are five ways you can wreck your retirement if you decide to follow such advice.
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Companies That Could Profit From Baby Boomers
Tweet Share on Facebook September 27, 2011 Comment (1)Forget the jokes about Viagra and adult diapers. And for the moment, put aside your skepticism about investing in the stock market at all. Just consider that there might be a way to profit from aging baby boomers.
More than three million Baby Boomers are turning 65 in 2011. The number of Americans reaching the ranks of the retired will increase for at least the next decade. By the time the proverbial pig has moved through the python, some 78 million Baby Boomers will have cashed billions of Social Security checks, swallowed trillions of Advil, and survived myriad hip replacements and heart transplants. Along the way they will be managing their finances through asset managers and mutual funds. And before it’s over, they will have bought long-term care insurance, done time in a senior citizen facility, and dropped an average of $8,000 per funeral.
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How to Overcome Your Greatest Retirement Fears
Tweet Share on Facebook September 26, 2011 Comment (1)Would-be retirees face serious dilemmas right now. Many people have lost much of their retirement savings through the recent market downturns and much of the equity they had been building in their homes—equity that they were perhaps counting on to help fund their retirement.
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4 Fears About Retirement
Tweet Share on Facebook September 23, 2011 Comment (7)Retirement scares me. Part of it is the financial side of things and the nagging question of will I have enough to last throughout my entire retirement. None of us is immune to this fear unless we have been fortunate enough somewhere along the way to hit it big and money is no object.
What scares me just as much is what will I do when I retire? How will I fill the days with exciting and worthwhile activities? Can I avoid boredom at a time when I finally have the ability to do whatever I want to do?
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4 Steps to Reach Your Retirement Goals
Tweet Share on Facebook September 23, 2011 CommentMany of us have dreams of volunteering, travel, or just sitting on the porch surrounded by family. Retirement goals vary from person to person. If you want to meet your own retirement objectives, though, you need to take a personalized approach, based on your specific priorities and interests. Here are four steps you can use as you strive to reach your retirement goals:
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5 Simple Steps to Help You Save for Retirement
Tweet Share on Facebook September 22, 2011 CommentMany of us put off saving for retirement. But the longer we put it off, the more difficult retirement will become. One of the most important things you can do is to write down your financial goals. Once your goals are written down, they are transformed from fleeting ideas into concrete projects. The written goals will help keep you on the path to retirement. Here are the steps to get started.
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The Big Myth: Active Managers Shine in Volatile Markets
Tweet Share on Facebook September 22, 2011 CommentThe vast majority of mutual funds are actively managed, which means the fund manager attempts to beat a designated benchmark. How difficult can this be? You would think the best and brightest MBAs from the top business schools in the world could easily best the returns generated by a computer that merely tracks the stocks in the index.
The data tells a far different story. Over a five year period, studies have shown that roughly two-thirds of actively managed funds fail to beat their benchmark index. Over longer periods of time, the number of outperforming actively managed funds is estimated to be as low as 5 percent.
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4 Misleading Pieces of Personal Finance Advice
Tweet Share on Facebook September 21, 2011 Comment (1)There are a few pieces of seemingly fail-proof advice that personal finance experts like to give when they are asked about important habits you should develop to retire well, but blindly following them can still get you in trouble. Here's why retirement isn’t a sure lock even if you follow these pieces of advice to the letter.
[See 10 Places to Buy a Retirement Home for Under $100,000.]
Don't buy a latte every day. Coined by author David Bach, the "latte factor" quite simply points you to the fact that investing $5 a day for 40 years will earn you close to $1 million if you manage to get a return of 10 percent. Yet not drinking coffee doesn’t mean you will become a millionaire automatically. If you can't hang on through the ups and downs of the market (even for decades at a time), you will never get the average annual return of the market. If you don't buy a latte but instead buy other things, you won't even save that $5 a day. And if you stop contributing once you feel like you are quite rich even before you become a millionaire, it's much harder to get there.
