Dave Ramsey has his opinion. Suze Orman has her opinion. Maybe you have an opinion on the reverse mortgage as well. I know that before I began to do research on the subject of reverse mortgages, I was fairly well indoctrinated that they were a bad idea. And trying to find out more about the pros and cons of reverse mortgages through Google searches or media articles didn't really help. It seems like, similar to annuities, people love to hate reverse mortgages. Whenever there seems to be … [Read more...]

If you’re in the early stages or retirement, or about to retire, you may think you’ve got everything sorted. You’ve saved and invested and you’ve done some research so what value could a retirement advisor possibly have for you? There are 3 big benefits that my clients get from working with me as their retirement advisor and these are often things that have been overlooked. 1. If you are currently preparing for retirement, or in the early stage of retirement, a retirement advisor can … [Read more...]

In my last post, I explained how commission-based investment advisors make their money since they don’t directly charge clients a fee. In this post, I’m going to explore if the difference in compensation models present any conflicts of interest between client and advisor and which is best for you. Let’s look at an imaginary investment advisor named John. If John sells an A Share Class fund, he is compensated right away and not much afterward. He gets an initial compensation of 5.75% of the … [Read more...]

One of the great things about having someone that does your taxes each year is… well… you don't have to do your taxes each year! Who wants to be an expert on federal and state income taxes?  The bad news is that most accountants and CPAs are incredibly busy each year attempting to finish everyone's return by the deadline. They aren't necessarily thinking to themselves, "how can I help this client save on taxes?". That's a shame because they are a wealth of knowledge which could be tapped if … [Read more...]

Have you ever heard this expression? “Good decisions come from experience, and experience comes from bad decisions” Don’t you wish you could just skip to the good decisions part?  Well the next best way to make good decisions aside from your own bad decisions is to learn from OTHER’S experience.  Being in my second decade of helping retirees, I see common patterns of mistakes that retirees can make and you can avoid. Using the same investment approach in your distribution … [Read more...]

In this post I wanted to discuss the plain vanilla Fixed Annuity option. A Fixed Annuity is offered by an insurance company and provides the owner a stated rate of interest each year during the contract. The closest equivalent investment would be a CD. Whereas CDs at a bank generally are offered for shorter time periods, Fixed Annuities provide slightly higher rates of interest by committing to longer investment horizons (2 – 10 years). Similar to CDs, surrendering the Fixed Annuity before … [Read more...]

There is a lot that has been written on the topic of diversification in investing. Generally diversification is understood to mean dividing your investment assets up among types that move in opposite or uncorrelated directions so that they’re all not moving up or down at the same time. Over the years as I’ve worked with prospective clients and even clients who are slower than others in moving all assets under our purview, I’ve noticed that some of them may have misunderstood proper … [Read more...]

I recently had a conversation with a client couple.  The wife indicated that she planned to take her Social Security of $1,500 this upcoming October when she reached full retirement age.  She and her husband are still working, but she wanted the money because she didn’t want to wait and wasn’t sure how long she would live. She reasoned that since she was full retirement age there would be no reduction, which is true. But she didn’t think through the full ramifications of how much … [Read more...]