Here is a lesson to keep repeating to your children and grandchildren: it is easier to save $381 per month toward retirement than to save $5,778 per month. Seems simple, doesn’t it? Yet it might be the hardest financial chore a young person can undertake. The reward, however, is a secure retirement, rather than a decision to keep working or live […]
Month: December 2013
Marriage and wealth determine whether retirement is a success
What is the secret to leading a financially successful and healthy retirement? Accumulate wealth while you are working and stay married in retirement. And, for the best individual outcome, die before your spouse does. Those are some of the findings of a study done by three economics professors at MIT, Dartmouth, and Harvard. It seems obvious that accumulating wealth is one of the keys to […]
Simplicity and Sophistication
The Chinese philosopher Confucius once said that life is very simple, but we insist on making it complicated. You could say the same thing about investing. Complexity in investing often comes with a lack of transparency. The highly engineered and multilayered financial derivatives that contributed to the global financial crisis five years ago are a case in point. For many […]
Rate Expectations
Interest rates around the world are at historic lows. They can only go in one direction from here, right? And aren’t rising interest rates bad for bond investors? The truth might surprise you. Central banks in developed economies have injected extraordinary stimulus into the system since the recession arising from the global financial crisis five years ago. The stimulus has […]
