5 Steps to Derail your Retirement

Many of us look forward to a retirement full of travel and relaxation. But having a successful retirement requires a lot of early planning. You can’t just expect for all the pieces to fall into the right place if you aren’t taking proactive measures to improve your financial situation. Here are a few common planning errors that can drastically reduce your chances of retiring comfortably.

You and your emotions – friends or enemies?

Have you lost sleep over your investments lately? If so you are not alone.

With all the complexities and nondescript jargon surrounding the financial markets, it is easy to forget that they are still driven by the same thing they always have been; buyers and sellers. Each with their own opinion on what the market is going to do next. While in the long term, stock prices are primarily driven by earnings, in the short to medium term, stock prices are greatly controlled by the fear, hope, and greed of stock market participants

Are You Being Honest With Yourself?

Nature has equipped us with a lot of defense mechanisms. One of them is the ability to rationalize our feelings, thoughts, fears, and doubts. Evolution taught us to be story-tellers, and we tell ourselves story after story until we imagine one which explains the circumstances we find ourselves in.

10 Steps to Improve Your Finances at Any Age

A few simple steps can make all the difference when it comes to being prepared for retirement. While it’s never too early to start saving for retirement it’s also never too late to evaluate your financial situation and make sure you are making wise financial decisions. Research shows that these simple tasks can dramatically increase one’s chances of financial success

How Too Much Information Can Make You a Worse Investor

In the modern digital era we have access to up to the minute information 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Everything from stock quotes, news reports, sports scores, to weather half way around the world can be accessed in a matter of seconds from your smart phone. Information is a great tool, but in today’s digital era, too much data can also be impeding.

When Will You Retire?

In America the retirement age has been traditionally considered to be 65. Economic uncertainty, insufficient savings, and other factors are causing workers to postpone retirement longer than ever. The financial blog Lemon examined the results of Gallup’s recent Economy and Personal Finance poll about when today’s workers intend to retire. The results of this poll can be seen in the infographic at the bottom of this post.

Common, but Misleading Retirement Advice

Saving for retirement is one of the most daunting tasks the average person will face during his or her lifetime; because of this it comes as no surprise that everybody seems to have a different strategy for dealing with the problem. While there is no one correct solution for retirement planning, many widely accepted theories have been created that may not be entirely true. It is important to thoroughly analyze all the pieces to your retirement plan and make sure that your plan is build on a strong foundation. Here are a few widely acknowledged, yet often misleading pieces of retirement advice.

5 Sure Fire Ways to Hinder Your Retirement

Many of us look forward to a retirement full of travel and relaxation. But having a successful retirement requires a lot of early planning. You can’t just expect for all the pieces to fall into the right place if you aren’t taking proactive measures to improve your financial situation. Here are a few common planning errors that can drastically reduce your chances of retiring comfortably.

Questions Everyone Should Ask Before Retirement

With all the turmoil in the markets over the past several years many investors have been left questioning themselves whether they will have enough to retire the way they’ve always dreamed, or retire at all, for that matter. Whether your retirement years are right around the corner or many years off in the distance, there’s never a wrong time to evaluate your definition of retirement and what it means to you both ideologically and financially.

A Visual Guide to ETFs

After announcing the managed SIM-ETF portfolio we fielded a lot of phone calls from interested clients asking us to further explain exactly what ETF’s are. With over 1,400 exchange traded products on the market, it is not surprising that we regularly get this question, and as we have written before, not all ETFs are created equal.