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Newsletters

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Social Security Planning: The Basics

When to file for Social Security seems to be an easy decision, one should just file at their “Full Retirement Age,” right?  That can be the correct answer, but there are many nuances to filing for Social Security that can have long range implications on how much Social Security income you receive over your lifetime. …

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Can Your Tax Returns Help with Future Financial Planning?

Tax returns are a pain point for most of us.  The process of gathering the needed documentation, handing the data to your accountant, or inputting the data into a program yourself, culminating with the common result of “you owe money” is unpleasant for all of us.  From our perspective, a further negative is that all…

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What Does Retirement Mean to YOU?

The Transamerica Center for Retirement Studies conducted a survey to explore the fundamental question, “What does retirement mean to you?”  In selecting from a series of words associated with retirement, Baby Boomer, Generation X, and Millennial respondents alike cited “freedom,” “enjoyment,” and “stress-free” as their top picks. However, despite this shared vision of retirement, the…

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Dare to Believe?

2015 Investment Report: Dare to Believe? Looking back on 2014, people are going to say it was a great year to be an investor. They won’t remember how uncertain the journey felt right up to the last day of a year that saw the S&P 500 close at a record level on 53 different days. …

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Volatility is up. So what?

Volatility is up.  So what?Professional investors know something that most people find impossible to believe: that the threat of scary ups and downs in the markets is by far the best friend of the long-term investor.  Why?  Because over the long term, stocks have provided returns far higher than bonds or cash.  If it weren’t…

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Moving Into Choppy Waters

Third Quarter Investment Report: Moving Into Choppy Waters You could say that the markets took a breather in the third quarter of 2014, but you would come to that conclusion only if you looked at the overall returns and ignored the drama of the past 30 days.  The markets experienced a difficult month of September,…

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Bond King’s Messy Exit

Bond King’s Messy Exit Financial advisors and the investment community were shocked this past Friday when Bill Gross, sometimes referred to as “the bond king” resigned from Pimco, a firm he founded in 1971 that rose to become one of the largest mutual fund management firms in the world.  Gross also served as fund manager…

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Don’t Fear the Correction

Don’t Fear the CorrectionAt of the end of June, the Standard & Poors 500 index has completed 32 full months without a correction of 10% or more.  We are living in a remarkably long bull market; the average time span without a full-blown correction is just 18 months.  Since the last correction in September of…

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Fiscal Cliff?

The subject of The Fiscal Cliff has been inescapable since the day after the Presidential Election. The media is feeding the emotion of fear and fueling the jitters in the stock market. To be sure, the possibility that the combination of increasing tax rates and decreasing government spending hitting simultaneously is very serious for our…

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Jobs Perspective

Although the markets have recovered significantly in June, we are still experiencing a fair amount of turbulence. The recent jobs report was pretty tough on the market. The following article points out that the jobs report, while pretty miserable, does have a cyclical nature to it and encourages us to hang on and not get…

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The Great May Swoon

Negative equity markets are becoming quite tiresome. At times, it is hard to believe that the long term prospects for any investment is positive, especially with the extreme market moves investors have endured over the past decade. In 2001 the euphoria of buying a stock to watch it double quickly gave way to the reality…

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The Last Greek Headline??

After about a year of news about Greece playing havoc on our investment portfolios, especially the international portion, it looks like the news from Greece will finally calm down. The biggest fear in the market was not that Greece was “too big to fail,” but that the catalyst of our own credit crisis, the credit…

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