A recently-released book titled How to Retire is a goldmine for those in or near retirement. Christine Benz is the director of personal finance and retirement planning at Morningstar, and for this book, she conducted interviews with 20 experts, covering every corner of retirement planning. The [...]
How to Conduct a Mid-Year Portfolio Review
The midpoint of the year is approaching, and the market is on track for its second year in a row of above-average returns. This has many investors asking about rebalancing. Below are some commonly asked questions on this topic. What is rebalancing? Suppose that to balance risk and return in your [...]
Stories We Tell
In his book Narrative Economics, Yale economist Robert Shiller argues that storytelling has more of an impact on economic events than we might assume. In a domain that seems like it ought to be driven by facts and data, stories often take on a life of their own. Many stock market bubbles—and [...]
The irony of retirement
An irony of personal finance is that retirement can take work. More than once I’ve heard a retiree express this sentiment: “Working was easy. Retirement is complicated.” There is, I think, a lot of truth to this, because when retirement appears on the horizon, a number of new questions enter the [...]
How Much?
“How much can I withdraw from my portfolio each year?” It’s one of the most common questions retirees ask. In the past, I’ve talked about the so-called 4% rule, a popular tool for addressing this question. Among the reasons it’s so popular is because it’s so simple: In the first year of [...]
