“So where have we retired? The local airport is our retirement home and will be for the next 10-years,” wrote my new friend Nancy in response to my “Your Retirement Life” series. “My husband just retired at 70 from pastoring a local small church for 35 years. For many years it was full time work, on a part time salary. I still work part time as a nurse locally and we homeschooled 6 of the 7 children K-12. We now have 23 grandchildren in 4 far away states. Ideally we’d ALL like to live closer…but those jobs!!!!” I emailed Nancy, to thank her for sharing her story, and asked if she would have … [Read more...]
Want to Pay Low Taxes and Enjoy a Glamorous Lifestyle?
The place to be, as Mansion Global tells readers, is Monaco. Debbie and I were in Monaco a few years ago and can report that the principality is undoubtedly the wealthiest spot on earth as well as the safest! House prices in Monaco jumped by more than a quarter over the past five years as the tiny principality continues to attract wealthy buyers from around the world with its low taxes and glamorous lifestyle. “Prices are among the highest in the world, with its super-prime now touching €100,000 ($112,050) per square meter,” said Edward de Mallet Morgan, head of Knight Frank’s Monaco … [Read more...]
Does Your Wealth Management Plan Need an Easy Simplification?
Vanguard founder Jack Bogle recently told Money that investors need to protect themselves against their “own weaknesses.” In that short statement, Bogle cuts to the bone. Individual investors can’t know everything they need to about the market. Like all “Do-it-yourself” activities, individual investors managing their own portfolios are prone to getting in over their heads. Complicated strategies lead to complicated outcomes. Bogle stresses making simplicity the pillar of any strategy. Money quotes Bogle as saying: “One thing you have to do is protect yourself against your own weaknesses,” … [Read more...]
One of the Hottest Niche Investments of the Past Decade
I still have my original baseball card collection, some of the cards from as far back as the 1948 Bowmans. Here, The Wall Street Journal gives readers a glimpse of one of the ultimate rarities in the history of baseball card collecting. In 1960, Topps Co. cleared space in its cramped Brooklyn warehouse by renting a barge, loading it with boxes of baseball cards that had sold poorly and dumping them in the Atlantic Ocean. Nearly 60 years later, that renegade housecleaning maneuver has inadvertently created one of the hottest niche investments of the past decade: the 1952 Topps Mickey Mantle … [Read more...]
Is Your Zip Code Sabotaging Your Portfolio?
You may have heard of home bias in investing. If you haven’t, home bias is the tendency of investors to own a large amount of domestic securities, despite the vastly greater number of opportunities available in foreign markets. The U.S. stock and bond markets only account for about two-thirds of the global total, but U.S. investors allocate almost 75% of their portfolios to the U.S. Favoring domestic versus foreign markets isn’t the only bias among investors though. According to J.P. Morgan, there is also a regional bias in investing. A regional bias? Indeed, the chart below from J.P. … [Read more...]
Warren Buffet’s Dishonest “My Secretary’s Tax Rate Higher than Mine”
The problem with “the problem” many pundits are having with Donald Trump’s taxes, or non-taxes, is that they are talking about a tax on “income.” And living off “income” does not fit with those who do not live off “income,” but rather live off assets, explains Francis Menton in Manhattan Contrarian. What is considered “income” is relatively easy to figure out. You work for a year; you get paid in cash for a year. That’s your income for that year, of which you are required to pay the stated proportion of it in taxes. But many people who are neither rich nor wealthy do not live off income. … [Read more...]
Is the British Pound a Good Buy Today?
The biggest casualty of the Brexit vote thus far has not been the stock market or the bond market as many predicted, but the market for British pounds. The pound sold-off yesterday and is now trading at a more than two-decade low. Technical analysts would likely tell you that charts don’t offer much in the way of support for the world’s former premier reserve currency. Based on the charts, a move toward parity looks possible, though we wouldn’t say probable. For some perspective, I’ve included a long-term chart (yes really, really, long) on the pound / dollar exchange rate. The pound is … [Read more...]
Liberty Media Outflanks Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway
Barron’s informs readers: Few people have made more money for investors over the past three decades than John Malone. The billionaire cable-TV investor and operator parlayed a small group of cable systems, originally assembled in the 1970s, into Tele-Communications Inc., before selling it to AT&T in 1999 for $48 billion. Starting over with a handful of former TCI assets, Malone has, through an often mind-bending series of financial maneuvers, built another cable and media empire, Liberty Media. And together with Greg Maffei, Liberty’s CEO since 2005, he’s still building. Investors … [Read more...]
Are the Days of Walking into Your Local Bank Ending?
Swissinfo.ch warns readers that the days of over-the-counter banking are in permanent descent, and that other trends are quickly emerging. Being able to walk into a bank and speak to someone over a counter is a disappearing service in Switzerland. The number of branches has almost halved from around 4,500 at the beginning of the 1990s to some 2,500 today. The reason for the 20% annual drop in branches is that more and more people are using e-banking: paying bills and keeping track of their finances online. Geneva: doing business post-banking secrecy … [Read more...]
Alert: Buy Ratings to the Highest Bidder
This is a disturbing trend. Bloomberg BusinessWeek reports that some companies are now paying brokerage clients to cover them. This is similar to the credit rating agency model that has been criticized so often for the conflicted advice it produces, but this is worse, much worse. Here’s more from BusinessWeek (emphasis is mine) With brokers increasingly unable to subsidize research with indirect payments, France’s Natixis SA is pioneering a novel approach: charge clients for coverage, a model that has proved fraught with conflicts for debt-rating companies. Analysts Jean-Jacques Le Fur and … [Read more...]
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