Retirement Stocks
You want to be paid well for investing in this market. Young Research’s 32-stock Retirement Compounders portfolio average dividend yield pays 5%. Compound that for 15 or 16 years and you double your money. Run your finger along the black line, the performance of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, beginning... Read the full story
Vanguard Wellesley Up 7.7%
Your risk tolerance probably isn’t as high as you think. Go back to September of this year or 2008 and be honest with yourself about how you felt. Did you lose sleep worrying about your portfolio? One back-of-the-napkin approach to getting a handle on your risk is to put your age in bonds. If... Read the full story
A Pathetic Payday
Doing less, with less, is one way to describe retirement on a fixed income today. This sad truth is illustrated by Young Research’s proprietary Payday Indicator, the average of the Dow Jones Industrial Average yield plus the three-month Treasury bill yield. In the history of the series, it has never... Read the full story
Got Jobs?
You want to retire to a state where there are jobs. Not because you might need one someday, though you might. I’m thinking for insurance reasons. States without jobs are states without revenue. And they may be eyeballing your nest egg someday like a ravenous rodent. It’s not a bad idea to have the... Read the full story
A Country in Decline
Newport, Rhode Island, is a wonderful place to visit this time of year. The crisp air is rejuvenating. The sun reflects brilliantly off the water. And after the craziness of summer, the less crowded streets make it a great port of call. A new ship seems to be here daily—like the beautiful Queen Elizabeth... Read the full story
Rollover that 401k
My first job after Babson College was with Fidelity Investments. I worked at Fidelity Institutional Retirement Services Company (FIRSCO). It managed the 401(k)s of large companies. On big up or down days in the stock market, phone volume would pick up exponentially. Everyone had to help answer calls—including... Read the full story
Twisted Risk to Savers, Pensions, and Annuities
The Federal Reserve has left savers, pensions, and annuities twisting in the wind. Buying long-term Treasuries has resulted in the 10-year bond yielding less than 2%.If we take into account inflation, especially of items needed for survival like food and energy, investors are essentially paying to lend... Read the full story
The Unvarnished Truth of Higher Dividends
The last few months have been brutal—but much more so for some stocks than others. Earlier this year, stock pickers spouted off about the merits of bank stocks. An article in one financial daily said, “Yield-starved investors soon may have another place to reap higher dividends: bank stocks.” That... Read the full story
Pay Risk for Pensions and Annuities
High interest rates are not the problem with the real-estate market. Anyone who bought a house in the ’70s or ’80s can attest to that. The actual problems? Weak appraisals, 20–30% cash at closing, high labor costs, and high input costs for basic materials top my list. So the Federal Reserve’s... Read the full story
What the Franc!
Julia Child made cooking look easy. The same cannot be said about U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and monetary policy. He makes it look painful. On Thursday, the U.S. Federal Reserve decided it’s in everyone’s best interest, particularly that of French banks, to increase U.S. dollar liquidity... Read the full story
