It’s a fair question, so we’ll both ask and answer it. While we believe we add value to our clients in excess of managing their portfolios, it’s not always easy to quantify the value of the work that we do. In years past, companies like Vanguard have probed this subject. The most recent attempt to value a financial advisor comes from Russell Investments, as published in the 10th edition of their “Value of an Advisor” study.
Market performance over the past two months may have you assuming the market is headed for a down year. While how the market will finish the year is still unknown, downturns don’t always lead to down years. The reality is downturns are often part of the intra-year market cycle.
Older clients may recall a late 1950s/early 1960s TV show titled; “Who do you trust?” The show host – a task handled by Johnny Carson for a few years - would ask a husband and wife a question. The husband and wife would then decide who among them they trust to answer the question.
We often write about the benefits of diversification within a portfolio. Diversification entails building portfolios with multiple asset classes; asset classes that don’t all correlate with each other. Sometimes, one asset class, such as fixed income, will lose value while another asset class gains value.
Not only should you ask yourself that question, but you should also wonder about the security of the phones owned by those you love (especially seniors). An article in The Wall Street Journal provides a few useful questions you can ask when the opportunity for a conversation presents itself.
Gone are the days when the pleas of a Nigerian prince offering us millions in lottery winnings (via email, no less) were clearly too good to be true. Cybersecurity fraudsters continue to hone their skills on a daily basis. Once again, it's time to take note...this time, with a focus on AI, or artificial intelligence.
There's a lot of information out there about Social Security - let's separate the fact from fiction.
Go back even one generation and you’ll find that retirement was fairly well defined. After working for perhaps 40 or so years, retirees could look forward to an additional 10 or so years of retirement. While those numbers were certainly not absolutes, retirement ages and life expectancy were fairly common. If you fast forward to today, a lot has changed, for several reasons.
There’s an old Yiddish expression that rings true far too often in life: “Man plans, and God laughs.” The obvious meaning is that we all try to plan how our lives should unfold only to discover how much we don’t control.
When you’re in the business of financial planning, certainty is rarely an outcome. If someone were to retire with $10 million in investable assets, for example, while spending $50,000 per year, we could say with (almost) absolute certainty that they will never outlive their money. The truth is, however, that most of us have fewer assets, spend more each year, or some combination of the two. Thus, for the rest of us, the outcome of our financial plans falls into a range of probabilities.