Set it and forget it,” infomercial marketer extraordinaire Ron Popeil used to say. That might have worked for Ron’s easy-to-use chicken rotisserie — but it’s not a good approach for your retirement portfolio. Even the best-built retirement plan needs a periodic check-up, so my column at Reuters Money this week offers seven tips, tweaks and [...] [...more]
Retirement investors have struggled with a Jekyll and Hyde economy these past two years, where Dr. Jekyll lives very well on Wall Street while Mr. Hyde runs roughshod over a terrified Main Street. On Main Street, the jobless rate tops 9 percent and 14 million residential mortgages are underwater – a figure Deutsche Bank thinks [...] [...more]
Self-directed retirement saving has come up short in many ways when it comes to building long-term retirement security. But one of the most damaging trends has been the tendency among savers to make early withdrawals from their accounts. Most experts aggressively discourage withdrawals, since they come with penalties and damage your long-term returns. The Internal [...] [...more]
In the wake of the 2008 market crash, lawmakers and policy experts have been scrambling for ways to improve on investor protections. Nothing’s happened yet, mainly due to Congressional pre-occupation with health care reform. But 2010 could be the year for reforms that affect retirement investors, including fee disclosures, required annual projections on lifetime income [...] [...more]
The author of the investing classic A Random Walk Down Wall Street is back with more on how to keep it simple when it comes to investing, even in tough times. Burton G. Malkiel and co-author Charles D. Ellis recently published The Elements of Investing, a small volume that lays of principals worthy of your [...] [...more]
