Baseball, apple pie, mom, Chevrolet, hot dogs, and home ownership. Americana. To question any of these things is un-American. And so it becomes a largely unquestioned truth that borrowing money to buy a home is "good debt." Home ownership, after all, is just living the American dream. But as a result of accepting this good debt [...]
You may have heard the news. Between October 1st and December 31st, the stock market delivered its worst quarter since 2008 to culminate its worst year since 2008. It was the stock market's worst December since 1931. What caused the stock market selloff? As we say often, there is rarely ever a definitive answer [...]
26 days into my professional career, something that had never happened before, happened. And it was not an unprecedented event that largely went unnoticed – like the time, early in my career, when I inadvertently wore different dress shoes on my left and right feet. While that remains memorable to at least one person, the [...]
Investing in the stock market probably does not feel boring in December 2018. Scary, volatile, unsettling, and capricious are terms that might be used to describe investing over the past few weeks. But not boring. Yet successful investing is boring. Beautifully boring. Famous hedge fund investor George Soros summed it up well: "If investing is [...]
Let's have an honest conversation about things that are rare. 1) A perfect game in baseball In over 210,000 Major League Baseball games spanning 140 years, there have been just 23 perfect games. 2) A full moon solstice According to the Old Farmer's Almanac, there have been 10 full moon winter solstices and 8 full [...]
The two most important reasons to own high quality bonds in a portfolio are to provide diversification and to provide capital preservation. A catchy opening line, if there ever was one. Several big finance words (like diversification and preservation), an unexciting topic (bonds), and a subjective statement that may not seem to have actionable implications [...]
In 1996, Thomas Stanley and William Danko co-wrote The Millionaire Next Door – an examination of millionaires in America and the common qualities that continuously appear among this demographic. They spent nearly 20 years interviewing Americans with a net worth of at least $1 million and compared the behavior of what they termed “UAWs” (Under [...]
An estimated 20 million Americans do not have access to Medicare, Medicaid, or employer provided insurance and will be left to purchase their own health insurance in 2019. If you’re among that 20 million, the news is relatively good. In most states, premiums next year will be relatively flat (or even down in some states), [...]
Paul Azinger is described by many as the best Ryder Cup captain ever. In 2008, he led what was arguably the least accomplished, least experienced, and least talented team of American golfers in the history of the Ryder Cup event – a 12-person team, missing the injured Tiger Woods and lacking a single player with [...]
The financial services industry has invented and promoted many ways to rip off people. Fake bank accounts, excessive and unauthorized account churning, non-traded REITs, cross-selling high fee products, pump and dump stock schemes, egregious variable annuity sales, and probably another financial abuse strategy exposed in the business section of this morning’s newspaper. In fairness, there [...]
