The author of today’s article calls it “one of the more underutilized strategies for taxable investment accounts”. That strategy? Tax-loss harvesting, whereby poor performers are sold at a loss in order to offset that year’s capital gains – and lessen one’s tax burden. The author proceeds to identify areas that may offer the best opportunities to exploit the tax-loss harvesting…
The energy sector has had a rough year – and the five energy-focused closed-end funds highlighted in today’s article have gotten beaten up right along with it. For the contrarian investor, then, the author of today’s article advises that “if you think 2018 is going to be oil’s year and you want a big income stream while you wait for…
How do you compare to the average American when it comes to your household income (and household debt), charitable giving, 401(k) balance, personal savings rate, and other key financial metrics? Today’s article outlines “10 Financial Statistics of the Average American” – including the aforementioned five – so that you can find out. To see where you are financially average, above…
The accumulation stage of retirement planning (during one’s working years) can certainly be stressful enough in and of itself, but the decumulation stage (once in retirement) may be even more so. Get it wrong and you may run out of money before you run out of life (which happens to be a major fear of nearly two-thirds of Americans!). As…
The author of today’s article used to joke that he had “the most depressing job in America”: writing about issues surrounding retirement. In fact, he argues that no progress has been made over the last two decades in improving the retirement picture for Americans, despite a variety of new laws and financial products introduced over this period that sought to…
The market’s sequence of returns matters – having weaker returns come early in one’s life cycle (when the amount invested is smaller) and stronger returns come later in one’s life cycle (when the amount invested is much larger) puts one in a much better position going into retirement than the reverse scenario. Unfortunately, while the sequence of returns matters a…
With the average life expectancy in the U.S. approaching 80 years, the long-advised strategy of shifting away from riskier (but higher-returning) assets like stocks and towards safer (but lower-returning) assets like bonds as you near retirement is not without its own risk: the risk of running out of money. The trick to navigating this risk/reward quandary, according to today’s article,…
“We’ve invented a new approach to money management,” claims Matt Fellowes, Founder and CEO of United Income – which is pitching itself as a one-stop shop for helping Americans tackle all of the difficult financial questions that surround retirement. What does United Income’s comprehensive, personalized, “big data” approach to retirement planning offer that other firms, online retirement calculators and financial…
There is a cobra that could potentially poison your retirement – and that cobra is bonds. The author of today’s article highlights the so-called cobra effect – how “individuals making decisions to cause one outcome to occur can accidentally cause the opposite” – and explains how this phenomenon can occur with retirees and bonds, increasing the probability that they will…
How much money will you need in order to keep living like you live today in retirement? Various formulas for coming up with this number have been devised, but today’s article outlines one particularly simple rule of thumb that can be used in making this determination: the Rule of 300. How does the Rule of 300 work, how much does…