Check out this latest survey on the financial aspirations of Gen X and the Millennial generation.
According to a recent online survey conducted by the Northwestern Mutual Foundation, among the respondents age 30 and older, 60% indicated that they would need (want?) $1 million in order to retire comfortably.
Call it the democratization of wealth.
In this same […]
What to make of UBS (formerly Union Bank of Switzerland) caving in to U.S. demands to identify their American secret bank account clients?
Well…obviously….this is not your father’s Switzerland.
The first wave of expatriated wealth transferred to Switzerland from America was ignited by the confiscation of private gold holdings during the first activist days of the new […]
Surely there must be a more viable model of adviser compensation that aligns the interest of both adviser and client.
Here are three options worth considering.
1. Hourly fee consultation
This is ideal for discrete and limited advisory services, such as a plan for college funding, or retirement account rollovers.
This option makes sense for the mass affluent, who […]
It’s high time that someone pointed out the perpetual blind spot that most investment professionals…and their clients…overlook.
As any introductory course in accounting will teach you in the first lesson plan…
There are two sides to the balance sheet of any going concern…
…be it a business or a family.
On the left side we list assets, starting […]
Step one was making sure that your current designations on your workplace retirement savings accounts were in order.
Step two involves some more sophisticated estate planning…
…a task that takes on an entirely new dimension when you have heirs spanning one or two generations.
Start with the idea that there are two kinds of retirement accounts:
Those that […]
On reflection, we may be able to muddle our way through…and thread the needle between deflation and inflation.
It won’t be easy. Free money is addictive and corrupting.
Once everyone understands that wealth makes you a target…and need makes you a favored constituency, the structure for incentives is skewed and distorted.
If I had to lay down the […]
There are many perplexing phenomena that remain unexplained despite our best efforts at understanding…
How the Monarch Butterflies are able to return to their parents’ exact origin in Mexico, even though they were born in California.
How the U. S. Hockey team beat the Russians in the 1980 Winter Olympics, despite all odds.
Most confounding of all…how is […]
Here’s a riddle worth solving.
How can real estate qualify as one of the two perpetual sources of family wealth, now that reckless real estate lending has crippled the global economy?
There are two prisms through which we can examine real estate:
Single family housing versus income producing real estate
Private ownership versus Wall Street ownership
We all know what […]
