My Mind on Mortgages

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 [...]

Readers of this blog are probably well aware of the fact that mortgage rates have basically remained in a tight sideways range since mid-January.  Followers of the stock market know that the equity markets have effectively traded sideways over that time as well.  The WSJ published this article today summarizing two opposing views of stocks [...]

The WSJ ran this article today on WSJ.com.  I can’t tell if the author is trying to employ scare tactics or is genuinely trying to educate investors.  The thesis of the article is that when you factor in inflation to the returns of the Dow Jones Industrial Average the results are not as attractive.

This seems [...]

I had the pleasure of sitting in on a lecture yesterday by Dr. Jeremy Siegel (Thanks Gavin!).  If you’re not familiar with Dr. Siegel he is a professor, economist, author, and all around expert on the stock market.  He has degrees from Columbia University & MIT and has taught at the University of Chicago & [...]

Professor Jeremy Siegel wrote this opinion piece for the WSJ yesterday and I thought it was interesting.  In it, Siegel defends the Efficient Market Hypothesis by pointing out that the paradigm in which most Wall Street firms made decisions during the credit boom (which in hindsight look like bad decisions) were steeped in the Great [...]

While sitting in my financial planning class this weekend I learned something that I never knew before.  Did you know that if you are covered by an employer sponsored retirement plan (i.e. 401K) then your contribution to a traditional IRA may not be tax deductible?
In other words, let’s say that you contribute 5-10% of your [...]

As a participant in the Oregon 529 college savings program I was happy to read this post from the “It’s Only Money” blog.
This year the state of Oregon will allow you to deduct up to $2,085 (individuals) and $4,170 (joint filers) on your state income tax return for contributions made to the program.  Keep in [...]

Dan Ariely, a behavioral economist at Duke University, was on American Public Media’s “Marketplace” yesterday to discuss the pro’s and con’s of required 401K contributions.  According to the story:
“The White House wants to require companies that don’t offer 401k’s to start. And then to automatically deduct contributions from people’s paychecks.”
The objective of this proposed mandate [...]

Are you an active investor?  Do you go deep into company’s income statements, balance sheets, cash-flow statements to find undervalued stocks?
If so, this link on forbes.com is a must-read.
In this article Richard Wyman uncovers in great detail common accounting tricks that corporations use to make their financial standing appear better than it actually is.  These [...]