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Wednesday was my 36th Birthday and I’d like to take this opportunity to thank everyone for the kind words and messages. I received phone calls, texts and cards from many different people and it made me feel good.

FRIENDLY TIP: Try and remember the birthdays and anniversaries of those closest to you. It means more to them then you may think!

I’ll be off doing my Christmas shopping and spending time with family and friends over the next week, so the posting will be light. With that said… I’d like to wish everyone a very Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!

Continue Reading “Happy Holidays!”

In Tuesday’s post I took a closer look at target retirement funds; many GenXer’s are now offered these kind of investments in company sponsored retirement plans. Of course, you can always choose to buy one for yourself in a traditional or Roth IRA, as well.

Before blindly matching up your projected retirement date with a target fund, I think it’s important to consider your personal tolerance for risk; then you can jump in head first.

Some of you may already know your tolerance for investment risk, based on past experience. If you’ve been invested over the past 7 years, you’ve seen a lot of market swings and probably have a very good idea of what you can and can not handle.

For those that aren’t as familiar, let’s explore…

Continue Reading “Matching your risk tolerance profile to target retirement funds”

Over on Generation X Finance, Jeremy wrote a post titled What Asset Allocation Strategy Do You Use? He offered up three different allocation strategies for visitors to choose from.

I commented that IMO, most investors should stick to the strategic asset allocation, which my readers know I advocate here all the time. But where I think the discussion really heated up was in the comments section.

Continue Reading “A Closer Look at Target Retirement Funds and How They May Affect Your Investment Allocation”

Last week I wrote a post about cracking my knuckles and sadly it was my most popular post to date.

It’s funny actually, I write all these financial planning based pieces and the one that delivers the most traffic is the one about my knuckles.

Actually, I’m kidding about being sad about it, I love the fact that people enjoyed it. All work and no play is not the kind of approach that I want to take to this blog.

So I decided for every few on-topic posts, I want to mix it up a bit and write about something different. Which brings me to the topic of this post… these funky ear plugs.

Big things come in small packages

I get a lot of mail each week from different investment companies and sometimes they attach little gimmicky type gifts. On this day, there were two little orange ear plugs attached to the mailer in a plastic bag. The mailer said something like, ‘drown out the market noise.’

Continue Reading “These earplugs doubled my productivity!”

On Wednesday December 12th, Pinyo over at Moolanomy re-published a guest post he originally wrote for Get Rich Slowly late last year. In the post Pinyo talks about 12 investing mistakes he’s made, and how you can learn from them.

I found the post very interesting because I think many of the points he made were spot on. He addressed many of the issues that investors face. I thought this would be a good opportunity for me to highlight the different sections of his post and add my two cents to each. Continue Reading “‘My Two Cents’ on 12 Investing Mistakes and How You Can Learn From Them”

I’ve written a lot about why I love ETF’s and in the last paragraph of Tuesday’s post I advocated people think about using them to build out their entire investment portfolio.

Now I know there are investors, advisors, market pundits that may have a different opinion on that, but I believe that in the universe of possibilities this is a very viable alternative.

My entire business is built on ETF’s. Well, let me rephrase that, a great majority of the investment portfolios are ETF based. Please remember before putting these portfolios in place I always start with a financial plan. From there, I get all the answers I need to construct a customized investment portfolio, not the other way around.

Continue Reading “3 Ways To Build a Model Investment Portfolio Using ETF’s”

A lot of people don’t know what ETF’s are and sometimes it’s hard for them to wrap their minds around the concept.

For many of my ETF related posts, I often provide a link to a page that gives you a snapshot and a generic definition, but I’m not sure that’s enough.

So I want to go over a few key concepts when it comes to the mechanics behind ETF’s. Much of this will come from my personal experience with fielding ETF based questions.

Continue Reading “ETF’s, Superman and Popularity Contests”

Back on November 20th I wrote a piece called An ETF Tax Swap Idea for the holidays! In that post I talked about avoiding potential mutual fund capital gain distributions and moving into ETF’s.

As a part of that post, I included a link to a page detailing the 2007 capital gains distributions for ING, so as to provide further evidence of what a fund investor can expect.

One thing I did not do in that post was provide any information on the kind of year end distributions you can expect for owning an ETF in 2007.

So I’d like to address that…

Continue Reading “ETF Capital Gains Distributions are Virtually Non Existent”

I was just reading a post over on Moolanomy called Transforming Goals Into Action. It got me to thinking about my goals for this weblog, what I’ve accomplished to date, and where I’d like to be a year from now.

I started by looking at my tag cloud in the right column of this blog (which is a reflection of the topics I’ve posted on most frequently) and noticed that the big bold goes to topics like: Psychology behind Financial Planning, Financial Planning and Retirement and Mutual Funds. And that’s fine because those are all topics that are very important.

To a lesser degree you’ll see other favorite categories like ETF, the Roth IRA and ‘Down Home’ Financial Calculators. Originally, I would have thought these topics would have been the ones most bolded in my tag cloud, but that hasn’t been the case to date.

Continue Reading “Taking Stock of my Tag Cloud and the Future”

I find myself cracking my knuckles all the time. I can’t remember when I started doing this but I probably do it about once an hour or so.

Now, I’m double jointed and can bend the top part of my thumb back to parallel. When I show people this they make that bitter beer face and say it looks weird.

I guess they’re right, it does look kind of strange. I’m just so used to seeing it because it’s me and I thought it was normal.

And funny enough, its the knuckle I enjoy cracking the most, maybe because I don’t need any other fingers to assist. It makes a crisp little popping noise that makes me feel like my thumbs are ready to rock.

Continue Reading “I can’t stop cracking my knuckles!”