Insights

The federal tax bill was signed by the president last week, squeezed in just before year-end. That gives you an extremely short window to take advantage of the greater value of losses or expenses this year. Tax brackets are dropping in January (next week), standard...

Earlier I posted comments on the bitcoin phenomenon and mentioned its meteoric rise this year, which was then 17 times and went up shortly afterwards to roughly 19 times. As a follow-up, bitcoin is down this week from nearly 19,000 to about 13,200 and is down 15%...

Why All the Excitement Over Bitcoins? Bitcoins are maybe the most unique and potentially revolutionary financial instrument to come along in a very long time. While to many people they are an esoteric, extremely complex instrument they have only barely heard of and...

Congratulations on a nice growth in retirement plan assets in 2016 and 2017. Now, how much did your fees go up? If you have a single provider for your retirement plan and your plan assets are under $25 million, chances are very high that your plan fees went up at...

Recently, the Wall St. Journal, the most wisely read financial newspaper in the U.S. ran a long research article very critical of the Morningstar rating rating system that awards funds 1 to 5 stars. The ratings are very widely followed and are the basis for a great...

So many smaller 401ks (under $10 million in assets) don't pay enough attention to 401(k) fees. But having total fees that are 1% higher can make a huge difference in your retirement funds.   For example, if you currently have $50,000 in your 401(k), earn $50,000 a...

Well, there is a whirlwind in the oval office these days, and one of the recent actions was to put the new DOL fiduciary rule on hold as part of a review ordered on the reasonableness of provisions in the enormous Dodd-Frank bill passed in 2009. The fiduciary rule was...

It's been two weeks since the election and it is pretty clear what the stock and markets think will happen under President-elect Trump - faster economic growth from spending on infrastructure and significant cuts in the corporate income tax rate, as well as making it...

For a while now, I've been using lower forecasts for stock and bond market returns over the next 10 years than the long-term historical averages. I think financial planners, advisors and brokers do their clients a disservice by using the Ibbottson average returns...