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Simple Strategies for Beefing up Your Savings
If you’re like most Americans, no matter how old you may be, you’ve had the importance of saving money beat into your head ever since childhood. Even now, as an adult, you can almost hear your parents voicing didactic phrases like, “A penny saved is a penny earned,” “Money doesn’t grow on trees,” or “A…
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How Retirement is Changing
Fast Forward: How Retirement is Changing Predicting the future is a rough sort of business to find yourself in, particularly with a world that’s begun changing more and more rapidly with every passing day. Unfortunately a lot of people on all sides of retirement find themselves having to do this very thing, having to try…
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The Tax Season Is Here: Putting your refund to work for you.
With tax season just around the corner and the IRS having just released information that it plans to issue refunds about as quickly as it did last year (9 out of 10 refunds released in under 21 days (www.irs.gov)), now is the time to start considering what you’re going to do with your refund. While…
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Stockpicking?
There are so many unknown variables when picking individual stocks (literally trillions), that is why it is impossible to consistently guess which ones are going to go up or when they are going to go down. The lure for stock speculators is similar to the gambler… the excitement that is felt and experienced when they…
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Wednesday Wisdom from Mark Matson
Should investors try to predict the future? “I always have to remind investors to stop playing God. Specifically that means stop trying to predict the market, and stop trying to forecast the market. Above all, it means stop trying to find anyone else who says they can do these things, because anyone who tells you…
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Mark Matson on Prudent Investing
The complexity of investing and the overwhelming tendency to perpetuate self-destructive investing behavior make it seem only natural to seek professional help. Many Americans turn to financial planners, brokers, or fee-based money managers. But are these professionals as a whole any better than Main Street investors when it comes to following the simple rules of…
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Matson on Investor Courage
Trying to play God with the financial markets is highly destructive. So don’t try it. In the end, you will guess wrong. Instead, have the long-term courage to take the long view and stick to your plan. Know that courage doesn’t meant the absence of fear. Courage means feeling the fear and doing the right…
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Matson on Investor Emotions
You will often hear so-called investment experts say things like, “You have to eliminate feelings from the investment process.” There is only one problem with that: It is impossible. No one can completely eliminate feelings and emotions from the investing process, because everyone is human. Pretending otherwise and believing your emotions won’t come into play…
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Matson On Dysfunction Loves Secrecy
Most of us have been taught that investing is a solitary experience; that what we do is we go and meet with our financial planner or our financial advisor, and don’t talk about money with others, don’t share what is going on, and certainly don’t share your fear, or your apprehension, or your goals, or…
