Retirement Articles
Found 3639 Articles.
Get access to 4376 articles by subscribing to Retirement Watch and Retirement Watch Spotlight Series.
New 2014 Estate, Income Tax Levels for Estate Planning
Most of the inflation-indexing adjustments that will affect Estate Planning for 2014 were announced in November 2013. The estate tax exemption for 2014 is $5,340,000 per person. This applies to a combination of lifetime gifts and the estate value. It is an increase from $5,250,000 in 2013. 2014 Gift Tax Exclusion Affecting Estate Planning The […]
Explaining the Bubble in Commodity Prices
Commodity prices soared for several years until collapsing over the last couple of years. The puzzle has been why prices soared. Was it manipulation? Cartels? Insiders and speculators? There’s an interesting paper digested in FTAlphaville blog that makes a good case. It says the price signals of the commodity markets were distorted. Investors in other […]
Estimating Retirement Spending
The estimate of retirement spending is the linchpin of most retirement plans. You have to determine the cost of the lifestyle you want and use that to assess how much money you need from then nest egg each year. If your nest egg can’t sustain that level of spending, you need to modify the expected […]
Tarnishing the Efficient Market Theory
You’ll find lots of entertaining and enlightening things in the latest quarterly shareholder letter from GMO, the large institutional investment manager. Co-Founder of the firm, Jeremy Grantham, enjoys criticizing this year’s co-winner of the Nobel Prize for Economics, Eugene Fama, for the efficient market theory and all that follows from it. Grantham says the theory […]
SUBSCRIBE TO Lifetime Retirement Protection Program
Bob’s exclusive new service gives members the tools and knowledge to maximize their retirement finances for the rest of their lives. The Lifetime Retirement Protection Program includes all monthly issues of Bob’s Retirement Watch newsletter, all monthly video webinars in his Retirement Watch Spotlight service, every one of Bob’s premium reports and white papers (past and future), complete access to RetirementWatch.com, and 90 days’ membership in Eagle Financial’s DividendInvestor.com. Click here now to access all of Bob Carlson’s research.
The Tax-Exempt Bond Opportunity
Tax-exempt bonds crashed earlier in 2013. First there was all the talk of the Fed reducing its bond buying, known as tapering. Then, there was the bankruptcy of Detroit. I said in Retirement Watch that the crash created opportunities and recommended a portfolio position to capture them. Now, James Tisch, CEO of Loewe’s, said he […]
The Best Stock Index Valuation Indicator
After the stock surge of 2013, stocks suddenly aren’t cheap and a lot of people are wondering if they are overvalued or in bubble territory. There are a number of indicators of stock market valuation, but they aren’t infallible. Stock markets can stay undervalued or overvalued for a long time after the indicators trigger an […]
Is Your Investment Portfolio Really Diversified?
In recent years a number of investors realized they weren’t really diversified with a traditional stock and bond portfolio. So, they started to add other assets and strategies. But once the Fed started manipulating markets with quantitative easing, the diversification of many of these investments disappeared. Morningstar recently revisited some of the more popular diversifiers […]
Life Expectancy in the U.S.
One of the criticisms of the medical system in the U.S. is that despite all the money we spend, we don’t have great results. Life expectancy is considered the prime way of measuring the effectiveness of medical care. Most of the time the U.S. ranks 19th or 20th when developed countries are ranked for life […]
