Money Wisdom & Musings

Online Retirement Calculators May Fall Short

Recently a study of 36 online retirement planning tools found that most give misleading advice, often showing outcomes that are far more favorable than the results that would come out of retirement planning software used by financial planners. This could be very harmful to users who may think they are confidently on the path to retire when, in fact, they are not taking the necessary steps. The…

Hullabaloo around a “Fiduciary Rule”

The long-awaited Department of Labor’s ruling emerged in final form last week. This ruling is for the protection of the people and their retirement savings and requires those in the brokerage world to adopt a higher standard and to act as “fiduciaries”; that is, to put their clients’ interest first. And while many investors assumed their interests always did come first, that is not the…

Making Sense of the Market

The stock market so far this year has been up and down like a roller coaster. Year-to-date we have had 13 trading days when the S&P 500 Index was up or down at least 1% and the index is currently down about 5% for the year. Investors are feeling a bit whipsawed, and worried about their portfolios. Yet are the current market movements really so crazy? A relatively tranquil market since the 2008…

New Year; New Goal

The start of the New Year generally breeds great energy and enthusiasm for tackling ones goals. How about getting your estate documents in order for 2016? The term “Estate planning” sounds big and complicated and probably for rich people, right? Actually estate planning is applicable for everyone including college students, young families and on through the ages. It merely means that you have…

New Maine Law to Combat Identity Theft

With the holidays upon us and online shopping in full force it is good to remember one step that can help protect your identity – freeze your credit. A credit freeze prevents companies or individuals from accessing your credit report. This prevents new lines of credit from being issued in your name i.e. loans or credit cards. Any consumer can place a freeze on their credit by contacting each of…

Year-end Planning

With only 2 months remaining in 2015, anyone participating in an employer-sponsored retirement plan should evaluate their contributions year to date and confirm 1 or 2 items. First, if you intend to fully maximize the amount you can defer to your 401k, 403b or SIMPLE IRA, check that deductions from your wages over the next 8 weeks are sufficient to meet this goal.  2nd, be sure to space out…

You can’t get there from here

As a financial planner I am often asked ‘Any hot stock tips’? The answer most days is no. This encourages me to remind people ‘why’ they are investing and to put less focus on the actual investment or the daily market activities.  Carl Richards depicts this quite nicely. Investments are important but first you need to figure out where you want to go (the plan): what is most important to…

Read More

The Value of A Financial Advisor

Great article posted today on Marketwatch.com on the value of using a financial adviser. When the market gets tough we're here to hang on to!

US Markets are Bracing For a Downturn

Written by Jill Boynton August 24, 2015 As you may be aware, US markets are bracing for another downturn this morning, following last week’s steep losses. “Corrections,” defined as a loss of 10% in the broad stock index, generally occur about once every 18 months or so; the last time we experienced this was 4 years ago! The primary culprit is the Chinese stock market, which has been in a…

Car Buyers are Taking Longer Loans

A recent article in the Wall St Journal pointed out that auto loans with a term of 73 to 84 months (6-7 years) made up about 30% of all new vehicles financed in the first quarter of 2015 according to a report by Experian Automotive. Just 5 years ago they made up only 9% of auto purchases. That helped bring up the average term for new car loans to 67 months. Five years ago that number was 62 months…