Understanding What Drives Higher Prices Can Help Improve Retirement Planning According to the Employee Benefit Research Institute’s 2024 Retirement Confidence Survey, 83% of workers are concerned that the higher cost of living will make it harder to save as much as they want toward retirement. If you’re like most retirement savers, you’ve likely had concerns [...]
In the last several weeks, we have continued to face elevated uncertainty in financial markets due to high inflation and rising interest rates, and we thought it was an important time to take stock with the final quarter of 2022 just ahead. It has been a difficult year, not only for investors but also [...]
Like most financial markets, preferred securities have generated negative returns so far this year, however the value proposition remains. Preferreds offer generous yields, both absolute and after-tax, with their high income stream serving as a total return buffer against future spread volatility. “Preferred securities can be higher yielding alternatives to traditional core fixed income [...]
Earnings Season Ends With a Whimper - Where will stock market go from here? Mixed results from mostly retailers, pushed S&P 500 earnings growth down from 6.4% to 6.3% last week, though that growth rate is still 2.2 percentage points above the June 30 estimate. Energy, healthcare, and utilities have produced the biggest upside [...]
It even makes understanding inflation easier. “Bacon’s the best. Even the frying of bacon sounds like applause. Bacon bits are like the fairy dust of the food community.” – Jim Gaffigan Let’s face it: talking about bacon is always fun. It can even help illustrate a topic that has been in the financial media [...]
Master these Social Security lessons to get a more realistic view of your retirement. According to Nationwide’s 8th Annual Social Security Consumer Survey, more than half of Americans express confidence that they know exactly how to optimize their Social Security benefits. However, only 6% actually understand all the factors that determine the maximum benefit [...]
It’s tempting to predict runaway 1970s inflation as an April Fools’ Day joke. But at the risk of upsetting our friends in the compliance department, we’ll shoot straight here. With that important disclaimer out of the way, here we provide 10 reasons why we aren’t worried about inflation long term: Technological development. As we learned [...]
Solid holiday shopping season. Holiday sales grew 3%, beating forecasts for a 2.4% increase according to MasterCard’s SpendingPulse. Online sales rose 49% year over year. These results were impressive for a recessionary period—the comparable figure dropped 3.5% in 2008—and highlight the resiliency of the US consumer and benefits of stimulus. Daily Insights Stocks open higher [...]
The November reading for the Consumer Price Index (CPI), the most well-known measure of inflation, was released Thursday, December 12, and while both the headline and “core” readings (excluding food and energy) came in slightly higher than the Bloomberg-surveyed economists’ consensus, core inflation remains tame at 1.6% over the trailing year. Inflation is likely to [...]
There are many ways to teach your children good money sense. You can fall back on stories of how you used to earn, save and spend money all those years ago. You can fill their heads with lessons on how important it is to be careful and wise with their money. However, the bottom line is [...]
