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Feb 9, 2012
Home repairs: Which jobs come first?
Spend your money and time where it will do the most good
Lean times call for budgetary triage. But while you should clearly opt for orthodontics before Disneyland, the choice is tougher when it comes to home maintenance.
Should you get a paint job or a new furnace? "There's no homeowner's manual that tells you when to do what," says Naperville, Ill., home inspector and structural engineer Mark Waldman.
Emergencies aside, the project that could cause the most damage and expense if left unfixed is the priority. Below, the order in which to tackle your biggest repair needs. More info...
Feb 5, 2012
How To Evaluate Performance of Your Mutual Fund
Mindy Crary
When it comes to mutual fund investing, many people ask me how to evaluate the performance and quality of their mutual funds in their brokerage account, 401(k) IRAs, etc. Simply evaluating performance in terms of rates of return can be disappointing in our current environment; additionally, it doesn’t speak to an overall investment philosophy or guideline that you can refer to when times are tough. Therefore, when I help clients with their mutual fund investing, I use these four guidelines to help them decide how to move forward when building their investment portfolio: More info...
Feb 5, 2012
January: A Good Month For Hated Stocks
Stock Prices
January 2012 was a great month for contrarian stock pickers. A month is certainly not a sufficient time period to make any sort of forecast, but so far, 2012 has been very good to some of the most hated stocks in the most depressed industries.
Financials
Interestingly enough, the market decided that the arbitrary date from December 31, 2011 into January 1, 2012 was enough to give financials a boost. On the first trading day of 2012, financials began to rally and haven't looked back. Apparently investors wanted to own in January 2012 what they wanted to sell a few weeks prior. One of worst performing stocks in 2011, Bank of America (NYSE:BAC), has been one of the best, and is up over 30% so far in 2012. While the financial chaos in Europe can still cause volatility to financials here in the U.S., BofA's depressed valuation has attracted deep value hunters. Another bank people love to hate, Goldman Sachs (NYSE:GS), has been very kind to investors in 2012 with a 25% advance. In fact, financials as a whole have been the place to be in 2012, with the SPDR Financials (NYSE:SLF) up nearly 10% year to date, more than doubling the return by the S&P 500. (For related reading, see The Rise Of The Modern Investment Bank.)
More info...
Feb 3, 2012
Don't Renew your Auto Insurance Until You Have Shopped Esurance
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Feb 2, 2012
More winter? The groundhog says...
Punxsutawney Phil.
A huge crowd gathered at Gobbler's Knob, the tiny hill from which Phil makes his prediction on Feb. 2.
The Punxsutawney Groundhog Club made their decree Thursday morning in central Pennsylvania: Punxsutawney Phil saw his shadow, and there'll be six more weeks of winter. The announcement was met with boos from the enormous crowd gathered in Punxsutawney.
Folks in the East and elsewhere gave a collective shrug, as temperatures have been unseasonably warm. "But it's the winter we've been having, so that's like spring anyway," said Matt Lauer on TODAY after the news broke. More info...
Jan 29, 2012
Financial Security upon Retirement
Betterment
It's smart investing made easy. Betterment puts a personal investment account in your hands by blending the simplicity of an online bank account with the higher long-term returns associated with investing in stocks and bonds. The best part? You don't have to spend nights and weekends researching—that's our job. More info...
Jan 27, 2012
Thrifty Car Rental
Rent a Compact Car for $25.99/day or $135.99 week through Feb 11. 2012
More info...
Jan 26, 2012
Revisiting the American Dream: Is the U.S. Providing Fewer Opportunities to Get Ahead?The widening income gap has become a controversial issue in the United States, as liberals decry the decline of the middle class and conservatives argue that a healthy market economy must reward effort, enterprise and risk taking. But on the related issue of economic mobility, or individuals’ ability to move up the income ladder, most people appear to agree: Upward mobility is good.
Indeed, conservatives often cite economic mobility as the reason not to worry about widening income inequality. As long as people can rise, it doesn’t matter that some are very rich and others are many rungs below: Economic mobility means people are not trapped where they started.
But a growing body of evidence shows that economic mobility is not as attainable in the United States as many people think. Moreover, various studies show that economic mobility declines as income inequality increases, indicating that in coming years, it could become harder for people to move from poverty to the middle class, or from the middle class to the top. More info...
Jan 26, 2012
Is Your Financial Planner Who They Say They Are?
You’ve heard the saying, “Listen to what I say, not what I do.” Well it turns out many financial planners are asking you to do just that – they hold themselves out as financial planners when in actuality what they do is different. Recent research from Cerulli Associates Inc. found that 59% of investment professionals call themselves financial planners, implying they offer comprehensive financial planning services. When matching what they actually spend their time doing, it was found that only 30% did comprehensive financial planning. Most advisors, 56%, actually did investment planning but only 22% identified themselves as investment planners. These days it is challenging enough to actually retire, put kids through college and save for other goals, but to find out the course you’ve been taking may have been incomplete is disconcerting. Not only did you have the wrong captain but you may have been on the wrong ship in the first place. More info...
Jan 26, 2012
Laid off and making the retirement savings last
Susan and Ed Parker
Ed Parker never planned on retiring early. But in 2009, at age 61, he was laid off from his job as a manager at a Caterpillar dealership and realized he was ready to end full-time work. His wife, Roxann, had retired a decade earlier from her job at a department store, and travel plans beckoned. More info...
