Retirement Watch Weekly
The Buckets Strategy in Practice
The most difficult issues in retirement planning might be deciding how to spend your money and how to invest it during the spending years. One strategy that attracts people is know generally as the buckets strategy. This is when assign different amounts of your portfolio to different spending buckets and invest according to the bucket. […]
Another View of the Savings Rate
The U.S. savings rate is too low. That’s been a consensus view for some time. But is it inaccurate? This post argues that it is. It argues that the personal savings rate is only part of the U.S. savings. Businesses also save, and they’ve been saving quite a bit for some time. In fact, business […]
The Truth About Frauds and Scams
The Wall Street Journal had a good series of articles recently about financial frauds and particularly how the elderly are targets for them. (Subscription might be required for some or all of these articles.) This article explains the extent to which the elderly are the targets of most frauds and make up most of the […]
A Case Study in Estate Planning Mistakes
Probably more estate planning mistakes are mistakes of omission instead of commission. Failing to take action or make the hard decisions causes a lot of problems. Here’s a case study from Forbes, though the family fortunately still has time to correct the mistakes. It involves the descendants of the creator of the children’s book character […]
Beware Asset Protection Trusts
Asset protection planners and several states have worked for the last couple of decades to develop trusts that will protect assets from creditors. The ideas were to make asset protection more affordable and also to keep in the U.S. assets that were being transferred to overseas trusts in jurisdictions with strong asset protection reputations. But […]
Saving Too Much For Retirement
More of the retirement planning industry is catching on. For decades, retirement plans revolved around simple rules of thumb such as that you’ll spend about 80% of your pre-retirement income during retirement. At Retirement Watch we’ve warned for decades about these simple rules of thumb. They likely cause you to save too much or too […]
More on Stock Market Valuation – The Shiller PE Ratio / CAPE Ratio
I’ve been covering the recent debate about how high stock market valuations are with special attention to the Shiller P-E ratio, also known as the CAPE (cyclically-adjusted price-earnings ratio). The ratio uses 10-year inflation-adjusted earnings instead of just one year’s earnings to value the stock market. Advocates believe that historically it’s been very good at […]
What Happened to Emerging Markets Investing
The emerging economies, and especially their stock markets, were leaders after the global economic bottom in 2009. Their stock indexes rose much more than developed economy indexes. Most analysts said those economies would have permanently higher growth rates and that their stock returns would be higher than developed market stocks. All that changed over the […]
