I had an interesting conversation with my family the other day where I was debating making a major purchase and they kept reminding me “you only live once.” They were implying I should “go for it”, “have fun” and “take the risk”. But what does this saying really mean? While I agree “you only live once”, to me, as a [...]

I read an article recently in AARP that I thought might interest you. It referenced a safety-first approach which is something we have always believed in. A safety-first approach relates to the idea of covering all of your essential expenses with guaranteed sources of money meaning sources like Social Security, pensions and annuities that pay you an income you can’t [...]

I read an article last week that got me thinking. The article reminded the reader about the fact that whether you are approaching retirement age or are decades away, you need to be thinking about what they called “the safest places to stash your cash”. Too many times retirees are left empty-handed because they put all of their savings into a risky [...]

Life insurance can be complicated. There are several different types of life insurance, and finding the right type for your needs is important. Term life insurance, where coverage expires after a certain number of years, is one type, meanwhile, permanent insurance, like whole and universal life insurance policies, keep coverage in place no matter how long you live, and can [...]

I read an article last week about the benefits of thinking about yourself in future terms. The idea being that many of us feel little connection to the person we will be years from now, and that leads to a shortsighted behavior that actually hurts us in the long run. It is an interesting hypothesis. In one study the article [...]

We often hear the phrase “The market is up” or “The market is down” and we think we have either made money [or lost out on making money] or we have lost money. The problem is the phrase is rarely connected to anything that has real meaning to us personally. Why is that? Because ‘up’ and ‘down’ are relative only [...]

There has been an uptick in what regulators call Romance Fraud schemes and studies have been done to try to pinpoint when seniors are most vulnerable. Not surprisingly it is between twelve and twenty-four months after losing a loved one, moving or becoming less mobile and less able to get out and about to visit friends.  We all need to [...]

Perhaps there is more truth to this saying than we want to admit. This year has been tumultuous, with markets declining and interest rates increasing. Were we all soothsayers we would be rich beyond our dreams. But we aren’t and it is disingenuous to think about the money we ‘could have made’ when interest rates increase, and to forget what [...]

We’ve spoken in the past about the benefits of saving money for retirement by having automatic transfers from your checking account into a savings account, but what is often forgotten is that workplace retirement account when you leave one job and move on to another. If you leave a job, consider rolling that money from the former employer’s plan into [...]

I read an article the other day that suggested one way to save money consistently is to arrange automatic transfers from your checking to your savings account on payday. That idea can be applied to RMDs as we get older. While we may be forced to take required minimum distributions out of qualified accounts, there are no restrictions on how [...]