Analysis Topic: Personal Finance
The analysis published under this topic are as follows.
Thursday, April 17, 2014
10 Ways to Screw up Your Retirement / Personal_Finance / Pensions & Retirement
By: Don_Miller
There are many creative ways to screw up your retirement. Let me show you how it’s done.
Supporting adult children. My wife Jo and I have friends with an unmarried, unemployed daughter who had a child. Our friends adopted their grandchild and are now in their late sixties raising a kid in grade school. The same daughter had a second child, and they adopted that one too. When she announced she was pregnant a third time, they finally said, “Enough! It’s time for a third-party adoption.”
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Tuesday, April 15, 2014
How I Intend to Survive the Meltdown of America / Personal_Finance / Social Issues
By: Casey_Research
By Louis James, Chief Metals & Mining Investment Strategist
It is with a troubled heart that I look at the continued fighting in eastern Ukraine. I worry about my friends and students in the country who may well be in physical danger soon, if the conflict escalates. As an investment analyst, it’s the financial war the Russians seem quite willing to wage that has my attention.
It should have yours as well.
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Thursday, April 10, 2014
Escape the Toy Trap / Personal_Finance / Shopping
By: Don_Miller
The toy trap: we all have friends who’ve fallen in. I received a wave of emails after publishing Debt: The Last Social Taboo?, all sharing similar sad stories. Author Dave Ramsey summed up the problem best: “We buy things we don’t need with money we don’t have to impress people we don’t like.”
Thursday, April 10, 2014
Puerto Rico's Tax Benefits—More than 'The Better Florida' / Personal_Finance / Investing 2014
By: The_Gold_Report
Puerto Rico promises to now do for Americans what Singapore and Hong Kong have done for bankers and businessmen from London. In this interview with The Gold Report, three experts with in-depth knowledge of the pros and cons of living and investing in Puerto Rico share what it is like on the ground for investors.InternationalMan.com Senior Editor Nick Giambruno and Casey Research Chief Technology Investor and Puerto Rico resident Alex Daley join Sterne Agee's Managing Director of Equity Research Todd Hagerman in clearing up some of the confusion about this "misunderstood" island and why the tax benefits for Americans make it "The Better Florida."
Sunday, March 30, 2014
Never Loan Money to Your Friends and Family / Personal_Finance / Debt & Loans
By: DailyWealth
"Never loan money to your friends. It's a good way to lose your money... and your friend."
A friend of mine owed me a lot of money...
I gave my friend Jack a personal loan a few years ago, as he was starting his own business.
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Wednesday, March 26, 2014
Newcastle BS Pulls 2.9% Fixed Cash ISA, Coventry and Leeds Currently Offer Best ISA's / Personal_Finance / ISA's
By: Nadeem_Walayat
Newcastle BS has pulled its market beating 2.9% 5 year fixed rate cash ISA that in my opinion amounted to the best cash account for some 18 months for the reason that it behaved more like a higher interest paying instant access rather than a typical fixed rate account.
Tuesday, March 25, 2014
The Three Stooges Debunk myRA Retirement Plans / Personal_Finance / Pensions & Retirement
By: Don_Miller
A little skit ran through my head the other day…
The house lights dimmed and the bright American flag glistened in the background. The crowd hushed as a tall man in a strange costume strode confidently onto the stage.
Curly turned to Larry and Moe and exclaimed, "Oh my, that's our favorite—Uncle Sam, our boyhood hero." Moe put his finger to his lips as if to say "Shhh!"
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Thursday, March 20, 2014
Pensions Annuity Freedom Prompts Vultures Stock Price Crash - Budget 2014 / Personal_Finance / Pensions & Retirement
By: Nadeem_Walayat
George Osbourne announced "Let me be clear, no one will have to buy an annuity. People who have worked hard and saved hard all their lives, and done the right thing, should be trusted with their own finances.", and with that statement the annuities vultures stock prices crashed by as much as 55% as time is now up for all of the pension funds financial blood sucking vampires as illustrated by life time accumulated savings being forced to be converted (lost) into annuities in return for a pittance in annual payments, which was the reason why for so many retirees annuities have amounted to nothing more than a scam where the pensions industry sales pitch promises never materialise.
Wednesday, March 19, 2014
Budget 2014 Cash ISA Allowance Near Tripled to £15,000, Current Best ISA / Personal_Finance / ISA's
By: Nadeem_Walayat
The Coalition government has finally acted to correct a huge disparity in the ISA market of savers being forced to split their annual ISA allowances between Cash and Shares ISA's by allowing savers now to use the whole of their annual allowance towards a cash ISA rather than the existing 50/50 split between cash and shares, as investing in shares has never been suitable for the vast majority of savers given that they are a high risk asset class that certainly never deserved a 50/50 portfolio allocation. Even for highly experienced stocks investors such as myself tend to experience sleepless nights when portfolio allocations approach 30% of assets let alone 50%. Therefore for most investors the stock market and floating bonds should never really go above an approx 15% allocation (including pension funds) with the bulk of the rest made up by property and cash (including fixed bonds).
Thursday, March 13, 2014
Why Unemployment Rates Matter to Your Retirement / Personal_Finance / Pensions & Retirement
By: Don_Miller
My biological clock is ticking—as is yours and everyone else's. With each passing day, you are either moving closer to or further past the day you quit working full time. Baby boomers are retiring at a rate of 10,000 per day and will continue to do so for the next 17 years. Whether you count yourself among that group or not, understanding where economic data—such as unemployment rates and inflation—come from will make you a better investor and savvier retiree.
Wednesday, March 12, 2014
Newcastle BS 2.9% Best Current Fixed Rate Cash ISA March, April 2014 / Personal_Finance / ISA's
By: Nadeem_Walayat
The zero interest rate catastrophe for savers including Cash ISA depositors continues to persist for as long as the Bank of England can get away with government debt monetization and support of the bankrupt banks (Co-op the current bank teetering on the brink of collapse) via unlimited funding scheme that is now approaching its 2nd full year of the collapse in savings interest rates that began in May 2012 and soon accelerated into sub inflation rates of systemic theft as illustrated by the table below which shows the cash ISA rates offered by apparently the often reported on best buy accounts of the Halifax mega-bank that in reality crashed in response to the Bank of England's Funding for Lending Scheme that started in July 2012.
Thursday, March 06, 2014
Maximizing Your Retirement Planning IRA / Personal_Finance / Pensions & Retirement
By: Don_Miller
As working folks get closer to hanging up their spurs, it is easy to become overwhelmed. When should you take Social Security? What type of insurance do you need? Should you buy an annuity? Do you need nursing home insurance? Should you roll over your 401(k) into an IRA? The list goes on and on.
Retirement planning requires many irreversible decisions. We each need to get it right; however, what is right for us is not always right for someone else. And, in addition to basic number-crunching, we each make assumptions about life and politics—sometimes without even realizing it.
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Thursday, February 27, 2014
The Ty Cobb Approach to Retirement Investing / Personal_Finance / Pensions & Retirement
By: Don_Miller
When baseball fans talk about players from the early 1900s, Babe Ruth is normally the first person mentioned. He was a great home-run hitter with 714 career home runs, a record that stood for almost 40 years. Only two men have surpassed it. Ruth struck out 1,330 times—a record that also stood for several decades.
Most people think of Ty Cobb as a gritty player who held the career stolen-base record for many years. But let’s look a bit deeper. Ty Cobb broke into major-league baseball in 1905 at the age of 19 and hit .240 his first season. For the next 23 seasons, he hit over .300.
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Thursday, February 13, 2014
Are Your Bank Savings Safe From Bail-Ins? / Personal_Finance / Credit Crisis 2014
By: Raul_I_Meijer
I know you thought you’d seen some crazy stuff, but it’s going to get better, promise!
On the one hand you have Greek politicians claiming their economy is doing so well, they’ll present the troika with a big feel good surprise. On the other, Greek unemployment reached a new high at 28%, with youth unemployment now at 61.4%. That’s almost 2/3 of young people. What is to become of them?
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Tuesday, February 11, 2014
Retirement Investing, Why 65 Is Not a Magic Number / Personal_Finance / Pensions & Retirement
By: Don_Miller
Is retirement really all it's cracked up to be? The answer depends on where you find yourself financially, emotionally, and health-wise come age 65 or so.
When we're young, we trade time for money and hope to stash away enough of it to later reverse the process and trade money for time. Ideally, we'd each have a few decades of independence before the grim reaper—or assisted living facility—comes knocking.
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