Bob's Journal
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Bob’s Journal for 4/1/21
Margin Calls Roil Markets Again The best investment plans can be upended by the actions of an aggressive hedge fund or other leveraged investors you hadn’t heard of previously. We learned that lesson again in the last week. Archegos Capital Management is a family office of a former hedge fund manager. Archegos had large stock […]
Bob’s Journal for 3/25/21
The SECURE Act 2.0 is on the way In December 2019, Congress shocked many people by passing the Setting Every Community Up For Retirement Enhancement (SECURE) Act quickly and by a wide margin. There were a lot of positive provisions in the SECURE Act that were designed to make it easier for people to save […]
Major Tax Increases Are in The Works
Shortly after the $1.9 trillion stimulus law was enacted, President Biden’s aides began publicly discussing the coming tax increases. But, in fact, the tax increases have already started. Three tax increases were slipped into the stimulus law. They have been estimated to raise tax bills by about $60 billion. One increase limited the amount of […]
Bob’s Journal for 3/11/21
The Big Rotation in Stocks The winners and losers in U.S. stocks were stable, until recently. For years, U.S. growth stocks, especially technology stocks, regularly outperformed other categories of stocks. Investing in the large U.S. indexes, such as the S&P 500, was an easy, inexpensive way to earn high returns. Those trends started to shift […]
Bob’s Journal for 3/4/21
Tips Retirees Need for 2020 Tax Returns Many retirees and people who took COVID-related retirement plan distributions might need some extra time to work through their 2020 tax returns. Those who took distributions from traditional IRAs at any point during 2020 will receive a Form 1099-R reporting the distributions to them and the Internal Revenue […]
Bob’s Journal for 2/25/21
Some Notable Events That Grabbed My Attention This Week I’ll answer a few more questions this week that were raised by a number of listeners during the subscriber teleconference we had two weeks ago. (A replay is available here.) Question 1: I was planning to delay Social Security benefits until at least full retirement age. […]
Bob’s Journal for 2/18/21
Some Notable Events That Grabbed My Attention This Week We had a very successful conference call last week with thousands of subscribers. (A replay is available here.) As I mentioned in last week’s Bob’s Journal, many questions were submitted in advance by email and a number of listeners wanted to ask questions on the call. […]
Bob’s Journal for 2/11/21
Some Notable Events That Grabbed My Attention This Week We had another successful teleconference with our subscribers yesterday afternoon. Many questions were submitted in advance via email, and there was a long queue of callers with questions during the event. We could deal with only a fraction of the questions during the call, so I’m […]
