Recency Bias
Recency bias is not a term you often hear in the investment world, but I have read about it and seen other people experience this thought process when it comes to investing in the markets. I believe recency bias is one of the causes of why so many people sabotage their investments by “buying high and selling low.”
The Art of the Deal
This post may be a little off topic, but since I have written several posts on real estate investing, I thought it might be helpful to explain one of the most important skills I have developed over the years. This post will be about the basics of how I negotiate real estate transactions.
A Tool to Help Monitor Your Investments
If you are like me, after years of working and saving money, you have several retirement related accounts spread around different financial institutions. In this post I will introduce you to a free online software tool that can help make monitoring your investments much easier.
Why Did We sell Our home? (Part 2)
This post is a follow-up to my last post on why we sold our home. In that post I discussed the opportunity to sell our home at a premium price and, despite the fact we loved our home, we concluded that selling our home would better enable my wife and me to change our lifestyle to include more travel. In this post I will outline how selling our home changes our financial picture to support this goal of more travel. For people nearing retirement, whether you plan to sell your home or not, this post should provide some ideas to think about.
Why Did We Sell Our Home?
In my last post I mentioned that my wife and I recently sold our primary residence. This action would appear to be in direct conflict to the statement I made in my last post concerning real estate. I stated that real estate is at the best value it has been in over a decade and that anyone interested should consider investing in income producing residential real estate for the long term. This begs the question: if today is a good time to purchase real estate, why would we sell our home?
My First Real Estate Investment in 13 Years
In a recent post I described in detail a real estate investment of a single family home I have owned for 20 years. In my opinion it has been a pretty good investment for us. In this post I will describe my first real estate purchase in 13 years.
The impact of Stock Dividends on Total Return
In many posts I have stressed the importance of the income an investment provides as much as any capital appreciation you may hope to gain from the investment. In my last post I described a real estate investment I have held for the past 20 years and the income it provides. The importance of income in a real estate investment is rather obvious as real estate has a lot of ongoing expenses associated with it. But I think it is just as important to seek income in your stock investments as well. In this post I will again illustrate the importance of income in regards to stock investment.
A Real Estate Investment After 20 Years; Was it Worth It?
Next month marks the 20 year anniversary of the purchase of my first long-term real estate investment. In this post I thought it might be instructive to describe the actual transaction I made 20 years ago, the major events during the life of this investment, and the financial benefits my wife and I enjoy today. The reason I think this may be helpful is I will talk about some of the decisions I made as well as the aggravations I experienced along the way. For a new real estate investor it is important to be able to see the end game to keep yourself motivated when you encounter the inevitable frustrations. Also going over some of the important events of this investment will shed some light on some of the choices my wife and I made over the years and the impact it had on our lives. You can decide for yourself whether the investment was worth the time and money.
Paying for Investment Advice
Generally, I believe the average person does not need to pay for any investment advisory services to achieve their retirement goals. The most important steps to reach your retirement goals is to be disciplined in your saving and investing over a long period of time as discussed in the posts in this blog. However, some people want to have another opinion before making an investment. I can understand this feeling. When so much about investing is uncertain, sometimes it is comforting to know that there are professional people who see the markets and/or individual investments the same way you do.
Is Your Bank and Your Insurance Company Financially Healthy?
If you remember back a few years ago, the three large credit rating agencies, S&P, Moody’s, and Fitch, completely missed the 2008-2009 financial crisis. They each gave several companies investment-grade credit ratings just a few months before they went bankrupt. The most famous “rating miss” was a “AAA rating” that one of the agencies’ still had for AIG the day they went belly up and were bailed out by the federal government.