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Trading is bad for your wealth. The data is monstrously clear on this. This article singles out ETFs, but really it’s anything. Yes, ETFs have made it easier to make bets on what different pieces of the market will do, but it’s not like anyone was lacking in ways to trade before ETFs came along.…

We see these types of articles every year, and there’s a reason for that. A tax refund is not free money. In fact, it’s returning free money that you gave to the government. It’s the difference between what you actually owed and what was withheld from your paycheck. You could (and should) have had access…

There’s been a lot of talk about the “Trump Rally,” and just how historic it’s been. MarketWatch called it  “the best 50-day performance for a GOP commander-in-chief ever[.]” The media loves to overstate things, and it made me want to dig in and figure out what is actually going on. Before we dive in, I…

There’s some good advice in this article – with one glaring exception. Most of the article covers some of the common mistakes people make when retiring – things like not getting the most out of Social Security, missing Medicare deadlines, or not knowing what you actually want to do in retirement. Those are great reminders, but…

Articles like this one really bug me. They bug me because someone acted on what the author told them to do – and their retirement may very well depend on getting it right. This article is particularly egregious because both the presentation, as well as the actual content, are going to hurt people. Let’s start with…

A TIPS ladder can be constructed similarly to a Treasury strips ladder, using the same date from the Wall Street Journal Market Data Center, which provides a daily report of wholesale prices from the secondary markets for all outstanding TIPS issues. On January 3, 2017, there were forty outstanding TIPS available, with maturity dates ranging…

Building bond ladders for retirement income is an important but understudied topic. Especially since we are at a point in time when many are worried about future interest rate increases, bond mutual funds risk locking in capital losses when shares are sold to meet expenses, while a bond ladder will still provide the obligated cash…

All too often, when people think about retirement planning, they’re really thinking about investing. While investing is (often) a really important part of retirement planning, it’s only a piece of the puzzle. Retirement planning covers pretty much everything – it’s figuring out what you want to accomplish in retirement, and how you’re going to pay…

It’s really easy to forget the underlying purpose of the stock market. Everyone always looks at it essentially as a horse race or a measure of how well a company is doing. But the reason the stock market exists is for companies to raise money. That’s the whole point of issuing (in other words, selling)…