My Mind on Mortgages

In case you missed it yesterday was the national Roth IRA Movement day where personal finance journalists and bloggers focused on educating the public on the Roth IRA.  As you know one of my professional core values is education so although I do not manage investments (IRA’s or otherwise) I love the idea of educating [...]

Mike over @ the Oblivious Investor blog sent out this post this morning regarding the application of asset allocation targets to multiple investment accounts.  It addresses the question of whether or not an investor needs to apply an asset allocation target to each and every investment account they own (i.e. IRA, 401K, and brokerage account) [...]

One interesting note in this morning’s Existing-Home Sales report from the National Association of Realtors is that the investors purchasing homes comprised of 23% of January’s total.  This is up from December’s figures.  Given that most of the low down payment investment property mortgage programs have been unavailable for a couple years I speculate that [...]

The WSJ’s marketbeat blog pointed me to THIS POST on visualizingeconomics.com.  The chart shows the inflation adjusted S&P 500 stock index back to 1871 and tracks it against the regression line.  This analysis reminds me a lot of Dr. Jeremy Siegel’s presentation that I attended here in Portland back in November 2009.  According to this [...]

The Employee Benefit Research Institute just released a report on employee-sponsored retirement plans and employee participation for 2009.  One would expect that during a recession fewer people would participate in their employer-sponsored retirement plans but I found some of the findings downright scary.  HERE is a link to to download the full report.  Here are [...]

I came across THIS POST earlier today.  I don’t consider myself a “trader” in the stock market (I prefer the term “investor”) but no matter what you call yourself there are some pearls of wisdom.  I’ll post a couple of the rules here but would encourage you to visit the post and read them all [...]

The Economist posted THIS today which compares the growth in the cost of college since 1978 to housing prices, wage growth, and consumer prices.  The bottom line? The cost of college has risen much quicker than wage growth.  If you’d like to help your kids with tuition expenses then you’re going to need to start [...]

I happen to be a fan of Contrarian Investment Strategies after reading David Dreman’s book on the topic.  If you also like the idea of picking up out-of-favor stocks and holding them for the long-term until the prospects improve then you may like this article in the WSJ that was published over the weekend.  It [...]

I mentioned last week that I was going to take some time over the weekend to read about last Thursday’s temporary 1,000 point plunge in the Dow Jones Industrial Average.  I thought NPR’s Planet Money did the best job of explaining it in layman’s terms.  Here is a link to the podcast.  The explanation starts [...]

I was studying for my upcoming CFP(R) exam last night and came across an interesting table that showed what percentage of a person’s gross income they’d need to save in order to create enough savings to provide enough income for their retirement years.  Keep in mind that these are just general estimates and each individual [...]