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...]