In America we can always find things for sale that we do not need, and for most people longevity insurance may well fall into that category. A retiree who can manage investments and control spending should be able to provide his own longevity insurance. Continue reading
Tag Archives: investments
Understanding QE3—The Federal Reserve’s Latest Policy
Bad weather outside, rainy, dark, dismal—I’m thinking about economics. A retired friend asked about QE3, the acronym for Quantitive Easing 3—the Federal Reserve’s (Fed’s) newest effort to boost the economy. There have been two related efforts in the past few years, hence this new one is number 3. “I don’t understand it—is there anything in it for me?” he asked.
When Should You Retire?
Retired with an antique car—1927 Flint Roadster
When I ask people why they retired, or if still working, when they will retire, I often hear one or two reasons. Almost no one tells a complex story. The particular experiences vary among people, but not the degree of complexity. Continue reading
Active Investing: Secrecy, Special Arrangements and Ethical Problems
Photo by PicketAces, Thomas Picard, Brooklyn, N.Y.
Active retail investors earn lower returns than their passive counterparts—it is a major theme here at Later Living. Today I’ll add one more argument for passive investing: active investing exposes retirees and others to greater likelihoods of dishonesty and conflicts of interest. Continue reading
How Much Does Active Investing Cost Retirees?
An active investor. Photo from Celal Teber, Teber Photography, United Kingdom
A great deal!—to answer the title question. Three examples will illustrate the loss associated with active investing, or, stated positively, the gain from passive investing. The examples build on last week when I showed that active and passive investing had to achieve the same average gross returns. Yet active investing costs more, so in the end, the net returns to retirees are smaller with active investing.
Active investing links retirees with financial planners, brokers and actively managed mutual funds. Active investors believe they can identify low-priced stocks to buy, or that they can predict which stocks will drop in price so they can sell. In addition to individual stocks and bonds, they often buy actively managed mutual funds where a fund manager does the buying and selling. Continue reading
Who Wins—Active or Passive Investors?
The Investment Race
Many retirees invest passively by buying shares in low-cost index funds that are designed to track selected markets. I have illustrated that approach in previous posts.
Many other retirees, and many younger investors, actively manage their investments. Some retirees do their own research and analyses while others hire brokers, financial planners or other advisers to manage their investments. They hope to achieve superior performance—to beat the market—by relying on extra effort, knowledge and skill. Continue reading
Rounding Out Your Retirement Portfolio
Last week we added Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) to a retirement portfolio, and this week we add international investments. The completed portfolio will now have domestic stocks, domestic bonds, REITs, and international stocks. Just these four investments can carry a retiree a long way into efficient, reasonably stable returns.
Why international investments? Diversification and growth are the best answers. Fifty years ago the United States dominated the world of investment opportunities, but today many countries have growing economies, well-run innovative companies, and good opportunities for investing. Continue reading
Invest in REITs As Well As Stocks and Bonds
Good investment literature always recommends diversification. It counsels investors to forget about trying to pick the next Apple or Microsoft. That is a guessing game, and the odds are against small investors. Here at Later Living, I have followed the literature and used example portfolios consisting of broadly diversified stock and bond index funds. Today I will include real estate, or REITs, in the retirement portfolio.
REITs are real estate investment trusts, and they owe their modern form to legislation enacted in 1960 and subsequently modified. REITs provide investors easy ways to participate in investments like apartments, office buildings, shopping centers, timberland, and others types of income-producing real estate. Continue reading
An Added Burden For Boomers: Your Children’s Retirements
The Huffington Post published the following piece on May 25. The idea—parents saving for their children’s retirements—left several readers frustrated. Yet parents have always been leaving bequests for their children; this piece recommends a specific type of bequest—a retirement account or annuity, left at death. I am reprinting it here as this week’s post.
The economy is not clicking along like it should—the recovery of the last few years is slow, halting, and uncertain. The United States now has a large cadre of long-term unemployed, and many of them are in their twenties and early thirties. Continue reading
Later Living in Investment News
Warren was recently interviewed for a short piece in Investment News about empowering individuals to manage their own investments.
Read the full article here. Free registration required, but if you don’t want to register, you can bypass registration by clicking here to Google search for “Warren Flick Investment News” and then clicking on the first result.