Essential vs. Discretionary Spending: Planning Your Retirement Budget
Not all of your spending is created equal. And it would help if you didn’t pretend like it is. But it’s distressingly common for people to simply decide they want a certain amount of income each year in retirement and leave it at that. Even leaving aside how our spending changes throughout retirement, it’s essential […]
What to Do in Retirement: Finding Purpose Beyond the Numbers
There’s a lot of focus on the “numbers” in retirement planning. And there’s a lot of focus on the specific tools and techniques that you can use. But there’s not much focus on actually being retired. But that’s what all of the spreadsheets, and research, and calculations are there to support. And all of the […]
How Useful is Historical Data in Predicting Future Returns?
Effectively all of our understanding of finance and investing is based, at least to some degree, on historical returns. But how good of a guide is the past? Is it actually different this time? We’ve already talked about the limitations of models in how we understand investing, and how we use statistics to analyze what’s […]
What is the Role of Bonds in Your Portfolio?
A lot of the time, investors view each of their investments in isolation. They focus on how this fund or that fund did. But this is a fundamentally wrong headed approach. Just like your investment portfolio only really matters – and can only be evaluated – in the context of your overall retirement plan, you […]
What is the Efficient Market Hypothesis? And What Does it Mean for You?
Navigating the financial markets can often feel like you’re in a labyrinth, with news outlets, analysts, and every ‘guru’ on the internet vying for your attention, each one painting a picture of the market landscape teeming with endless opportunities for extraordinary gains (or horrific losses). But there’s an easy way for investors (whether you’re focused […]
Choosing Between Individual Bonds and Bond Funds in Your Investment Portfolio
When investors are looking at their bonds, one of the most common questions is whether they should use individual bonds or bond funds (either in the form of mutual funds or ETFs) in their investment portfolio. Interest rates have come up over the past few years, so the yields on bonds have also come up. […]
Home Sweet Home Bias: Overweighting US Stocks in Your Portfolio
Investing is deceptively simple. Until it’s not. As investors, we want to start with the market portfolio—that is, by definition, the most efficient portfolio. But we’ll also want to customize our investments to address our specific situation. For instance, the global bond market is substantially bigger than the global stock market, but most retirement-focused investors’ […]
Do Stocks Get Safer The Longer You Own Them?
There are a lot of cliches in retirement planning. And a lot of them are cliches for a good reason – they’re good advice. But not always, and more than a few of them are right for the wrong reasons.
One of those cliches is that with investing you need to focus on the long term to reduce the risks from investing. It is absolutely true that investing is a long-term activity, but is that second part true? Do stocks (and other types of investments) get safer the longer you hold onto them?
How to Generate Inflation Adjusted Income in Retirement
Inflation is a fact of life. It’s also not so great for retirees. In fact, it’s one of the biggest risks that retirees face. By constantly eating away at the value of our savings and income, inflation will slowly reduce our purchasing power in retirement – if we don’t do anything about it.
You Can’t Time the Markets
The appeal of market timing is obvious. Who wouldn’t want to get in and out of the market at the best time every time? We’ve talked a lot about market timing in the past – timing risk premiums, trying to time the markets on a daily basis, and the importance of staying disciplined even when it seems obvious the markets are going to go down.
