Author Archive
Refinancing for a 32% Increase in Income
My wife and I just completed a couple big “refinancing” retirement moves last month. One may ask, “Why would someone do any refinancing in our current higher interest rate environment?” If you are refinancing a mortgage or some other debt you owe, you would not. But if you are “refinancing” a Delayed Income Annuity (DIA), […]
Should I Purchase an Annuity Today?
In the summer of 2020, I wrote a blog post about why we decided to purchase two annuities. Recently, a friend asked me if we were glad we made the purchases and if I thought purchasing an annuity today was still a good idea. The answer, as with everything in financial planning is, “it depends.”
How much of your Social Security Benefit is actually taxable in retirement?
As someone who knows a lot about financial planning in general, and how retirement income is taxed in particular, this past year I discovered there was one area of the tax law that I was not knowledgeable of all the details. That is, how much of your social security benefit will be taxed. I am […]
Revisiting Portfolio Risk Tolerance…..Again
With the recent market volatility during 2022, I thought I would add a quick update to my blog site. What caused me to do this was a recent conversation I had with a family member. Like all of us, the recent down-draft in the stock and bond markets has been very unsettling to this person. […]
Over-valued Stock Market, What Should an Investor Do?
Today’s investment markets are extremely difficult. Safe fixed-income assets pay near zero interest and the stock market is at an historically high valuation. So what is a conservative investor to do, especially someone who is retired or is nearing retirement?
Should I Own Bitcoin?
In the last few months I have been asked by many friends, “What do you think of Bitcoin?” The real question I think these people are asking is, “Should I own Bitcoin?” When I delve deeper, these friends are mostly concerned about all the mind-boggling US federal government spending that has occurred in 2020-2021. They […]
REVISITING YOUR RISK TOLERANCE
I have been reading in my investor newsletters as well as several other authoritative sources that the markets, especially the US stock market are, at present, extremely overvalued. Some of these sources presented data that, they believe, clearly indicate we are in the final stages of a “market melt up,” similar to the the tech […]
Revisiting the 4% Rule
In the last couple years, I have been pondering this question, whether the 4% rule was still valid in the new investment environment going forward in the 2020s. I first wrote about the 4% rule in one of my first posts on this site in 2011 (you can read that post here). If you do […]
Should you Delay Collecting your Social Security Benefits?
Recently, I have received a few emails on my recent post (read it here) that I advised, in considering whether to buy a commercial income annuity, one should first delay collecting their social security benefits until age 70. These emailers believe this is the wrong advice for collecting social security. One of their concerns is […]
The Deferral Trap
My wife follows Twitter and sent me the below attached piece from Bloomberg about 401(k)s. I did not believe the title at first, but the article does make some valid points about the changes in tax laws and the availability of low cost funds to the general public since 401(k)s were created in the late […]
