Subscribing to my site guarantees you don't miss any new content. Choose either E-Mail Feed or RSS Feed. Thanks for visiting!

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!”

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”

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 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”

Since this is a holiday shortened week I won’t be posting much. I plan to put up this mini post, another piece tomorrow, and maybe one more towards the end of the week.

Reassuring clients

Not to mention, there has been a tremendous amount of market volatility lately that has kept me very busy speaking with many of my clients, which brings me to the point of this post.

In my opinion, during rocky times like these, is when a good financial advisor earns his keep. A good financial advisor makes sure clients can always see the forest from the trees.

Continue Reading “Dealing with the ups and downs of this market”

Last Friday I met up with a good friend of mine for a few drinks. He’s been working in the investment management field for as long as I have and is very familiar with the psychology behind client behavior.

We got on to talking about the markets and I told him that I had recently lost a client. I told him, my client decided to trade stocks on her own, attempting to outperform the market. He looked at me and rolled his eyes and we both just smiled.

I knew, from his own client experiences, he was thinking the same thing I was… ‘another client making a poor decision, overcome by the emotions the markets can evoke.’ In this case- Greed. (A lot of time that emotion is Fear)

Continue Reading “An analogy to drive home the point”

Apples to apples, no load funds are by far the most cost effective way to own mutual funds, far more cost effective then load mutual funds.

Now, that fact and a subway token will get you on the subway.

Some people decide to buy luxury automobiles, some people are only interested in a car that gets them from point A to point B. Some people only shop when things are on sale, some people are willing to pay top dollar for the highest quality and a brand name.

As a mutual fund investor, you need to decide a few things for yourself:

1. if cost is going to be the overriding factor.
2. whether or not you want to incorporate all the financial services that exist, outside the provincial world of no load funds.

Continue Reading “The Real Cost of Investing in No Load Mutual Funds is…”

Sometimes I come across prospective clients that want to work with me, but don’t want to be charged advisory fees.

Either they are the kind of people that have an aversion to being charged any kind of fees or they’ve had a bad experience, after being charged a lot of commissions, somewhere in their investing past.

Inevitably, I still want to convert them to my way of thinking. I will go through the whole process of why I believe an ETF fee based approach is the best way to build an investment portfolio, but much of what I say will go in one ear and out the other.

(Please note I’m generally wary of these type of people and may not take them on as clients, as I understand my approach may not be for everyone)

Continue Reading “Trying to fight the good fight”

I’ve been writing alot about passive investing (which anyone can do) and detailing pretty much how I run my business. One may think I’m giving away all the secrets, giving away the shop.

Why would I want to do something like that? If you show clients how its done then clients won’t need you, right? If you’re taking a passive investment approach then what am I paying you to do? to choose investments that I can pick myself?

There certainly is surface risk here but there’s risk in everything. It also bears noting that anyone can piece most of this stuff together, from various media sources, but I hope what will differentiate this site is the fact that you can find a lot of it in one place, one stop shopping:)

Continue Reading “Giving away the shop gladly!”

In my last post, I ended by talking about relative performance. I kinda wanted to clarify a few things since I may not have been as clear as I wanted to be.

The investment portfolios I construct for client’s are (almost always) directly related to what the financial plan tells me we need to return, in order to achieve the client’s stated goals. Each situation is customizable and unique.

In the last post, I mentioned 8.9% as the hypothetical return needed. Typically, based on historical returns and plan assumptions, I will construct a portfolio of stocks, bonds, managed futures, etc. that will put us slightly above that 8.9% number.

Continue Reading “Relative performance can be relative”