Besides slowing the economy, higher rates affect your personal finances. Unless you live on another planet, you are fully aware of this thing called inflation — whether you’re at the grocery store, a gas station, buying clothes online, hiring a contractor or doing almost any other thing that requires spending money for something. Earlier [...]
We received our final reading on Consumer Price Index (CPI) inflation for 2022 this morning, which gave us the inflation numbers for December 2022. Helped by declining energy prices, the index fell 0.1% in December, in line with economists’ consensus expectation and the largest monthly decline since April 2020. Consumer inflation advanced less than [...]
Financial Planning - The Big Picture for You and Your Family Do you picture yourself owning a new home...starting a business... or retiring comfortably? These are a few of the financial goals that may be important to you, and each comes with a price tag. That's where financial planning comes in. Financial planning is [...]
Q: We know that emotion plays a role in money, and therefore retirement. What are some ways we can help employees offset less-than-rational emotion and thus make better decisions about their retirements? A: Behavioral economics have been the subject of much discussion in recent years, as you know. Money is a deeply personal subject for [...]
Retirement Income - Believe it or not, it's been 10 years since the Great Recession of 2008. That means we’ve had a whole decade to correct our financial missteps of the past, right? Unfortunately, there are some alarming stats that say otherwise. When the markets are up, it’s easy to forget about the hardships we [...]
It’s not getting in and out of the market — it’s adhering to a sensible investment strategy over time When the markets undergo stress, some investors worry that their net worth is diminishing permanently. Sometimes, these folks panic, selling at or near a market bottom, and then wait too long to get back in once [...]
Even though calculating a retirement savings goal is key to pursuing and maintaining a confident financial outlook, the Employee Benefit Research Institute reported in 2013 that just 46% of American workers have figured out how much money they will need to accumulate for retirement.1 And more than half admit that they are behind schedule when [...]
This 1990s retirement planning principle seems questionable today. Learn the 4% Rule In 1994, a financial advisor named Bill Bengen published research articulating the “4% rule”,which became a landmark of retirement planning. The 4% rule postulates that a retirement nest egg can last 30 years if a retireewithdraws 4% of it per year [...]
What’s good for the economy isn’t necessarily good for our future. Provided by Virtue Wealth Management Our parents & grandparents saved much more than we do. Most people who have read up on the economy for any length of time have heard of the personal saving rate (PSAVERT), which the Commerce Department calculates as the [...]
Patience & diversification matter in all manner of stock market climates. Stocks rise, fall ... and rise again. Volatility certainly came back to Wall Street during the first several weeks of 2014 in the form of a 7.2% descent for the Dow Jones Industrial Average and a 5.9% retreat for the NASDAQ. The declines gave [...]
