Hats off if you’re maximizing your 401k deferrals and reaching the federal employee contribution limit each calendar year: $19,000 in 2019 if you’re age 49 or younger or $25,000 in 2019 if you’re age 50 or over. Note: these limits have increased to $19,500 and $26,000 respectively for the tax year 2021. Additional congratulations if you’re [...]
I got a flu shot in the fall of 1999. It is a seemingly trivial detail of life that should be long-forgotten but was, instead, memorialized by what followed. A few weeks after receiving this influenza vaccine, I suffered through the historic changing of the calendar from 1999 to 2000 with a debilitating flu. That [...]
The Greek philosopher, Socrates, left no known writings. Only secondary sources exist for historians to piece together a recount of his work and teachings. The Platonic dialogues - roughly 30 dialogues written by Socrates' student, Plato - provide the source for much of what we know about Socrates. The dialogues generally involve Socrates as the [...]
Last week’s Astute Angle post explained some fallacies related to mortgage borrowing and how the free pass treatment of home mortgages as "good debt" leads to poor financial decision-making. In response to that post, I received a few questions related to the "good debt" label of student loans that prompted another debt-centric post. Three of [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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), [...]
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 [...]
It is a late-April morning and you are standing at the rim of the Grand Canyon, ready to hike down to the Inner Canyon. The temperature is a few degrees below freezing and an uncomfortably cold wind is blowing. You have come prepared and dressed appropriately to fend off the bitterly cold wind as you [...]
