Sa For Fas

I previously commented on the dilemma of one who has too much cash and not enough risk-based investments, yet is deterred from investing because of high valuations. I suggested that buying value stocks would be logical, as it would reduce cash levels and presumably skirt the valuation problem. However, a reader wondered if an annuity purchase would address the “too much cash” problem. I explain how it actually might do so.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Last week, the Alliance for Lifetime Income introduced a new online tool for assessing your retirement income readiness, akin to your credit score. Also last week, the Treasury Department issued its Social Security Trustees Reports, showing that just 16 years from now, Social Security’s funds will be insufficient to meet its obligations. The coincidence is relevant for anyone for whom Social Security will be an important part of their income in 2035 and beyond.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Physicians since at least Hippocrates and Galen, up to the authors of a comprehensive study published this month by the Lancet, have credited a proper diet to health outcomes. Does a proper portfolio then influence wealth outcomes? For example, the Lancet study suggests the need to allocate eating across a variety of nutrition sources and not overconcentrate. Does that sound applicable to investors?Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Bread-deprived during Passover, your humble correspondent offers thoughts for investors on the connection between bread and money. Bread satiates and sustains our bodies just as money makes our world go round. Making money is the core of the struggle for our material existence, in a way surprisingly akin to the struggle to make bread. To earn money, and save it for our futures, we need to invest blood, sweat, toil and tears – in the same way we produce bread.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Investing can be grim. Each day’s news and analysis merely add to our list of worries. But the father of Modern Portfolio Theory, Harry Markowitz, offers a rare upbeat image of investing, through Antonio in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice. BlackRock’s annual Global Investor Pulse survey tell a similar story.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The popular media’s image of retirement as a period of continuous partying is not reality, nor could it be. Joseph Coughlin, the head of MIT’s Age Lab, observes that today’s two-decade retirements equal about 8,000 days, or one-third of one’s adult life. That unit of time marks completely different eras in an individual’s life. Thinking about how to ideally fill the pages of the final chapter of your life’s story should be an uplifting experience.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The ninth annual survey of boomer retirement preparedness by the Insured Retirement Institute finds that 45% of boomers have zero savings for retirement. That’s not news to most people nowadays, but I share two points I think are. The first was not included in the report, but mentioned in a press call; the second was one interesting statistic. The upshot is that some retirees have resources not reflected in the statistics and that others lacking resources are being quite rational about it. I conclude with the story of a Chilean waterside enclave to underscore the key point I believe this survey brings out.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Bank of Mom and Dad is apparently one of the nation’s largest financial institutions, providing over a quarter of the FHA’s mortgage volume last year. The question arises as to how parents should financially structure their support: through outright gifts; via formalized loans, as guarantors or as co-borrowers. This podcast also considers the question of how much to give.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

From a big-picture point of view, none of the primary sources of retirement income is working well for the public, on average, today. We look at data on private savings, employer-based plans (both defined-benefit and defined-contribution), and Social Security. Given these shaky foundations, individually and collectively, we offer a rational perspective on what nevertheless can be done to secure our financial futures.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A cyclone storm that has left at least 1 million acres of prime Midwestern farmland underwater has not particularly agitated traders. Live cattle futures pricing, the USDA Prospective Plantings report and other data are essentially telling us there is not much to worry about. But if NOAA is correct about above-average rain over the next two months, then it’s hard to see how farmers will be able to plant corn on time. Also, farmers stored a record amount of corn and soybeans as a result of the U.S.-China trade dispute. Those supplies have washed away.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

York University Professor Moshe Milevsky, today’s foremost authority on retirement finance, discusses his new book, “Longevity Insurance for a Biological Age,” which provocatively asks: “What if the number of years planet earth has circled the sun with you as a passenger is the wrong metric?” Milevsky thinks chronological age is indeed a poor metric, which distorts one’s work strategy, asset allocation and everything else that in actuality keys off one’s biological age. He says a shift to biological thinking will one day make annuities as “legitimate” as life insurance now is. He recounts his rationale for purchasing a deferred income annuity and the strong negative reaction it induced in others, and explains the difference between investment and insurance, and why both are needed.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Because market dynamism rejiggers portfolios with each new year, a little spring cleaning can ensure they hold up for the duration of your retirement. The standard advice focusing on portfolio overlap may require unneeded or unwanted portfolio surgery. Most retirees don’t need an exhausting overhaul; a simple tweak to your annual spending based on current portfolio value will do. We also offer two practical suggestions for those not yet retired, but concerned about keeping things tidy when the winter of their work years thaws.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The City of San Diego appears to be going through a sort of retirement version of Brexit. Employees hired after the passage of Proposition B in 2012 have been receiving 401(k)-style defined contribution benefits rather than the pensions that earlier hires receive. But the California Supreme Court ruled the ballot measure illegal, and this week, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to get involved. That leaves the city and unions to reconcile a situation complicated by a 2009 agreement to reduce future benefits, meaning workers wouldn’t benefit from a reinstatement of pensions in any event. But the unions see value in guaranteed income, which is precisely the obligation the city wants to avoid.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

U.S. investors are undersaved; financial education doesn’t have a great track record. Is there something fundamental that we’re missing? We propose there may be a natural and ideal time to start one’s investing career, and that we are missing that boat. Young people are willing to take risks at age-appropriate times. Parents and educators should capitalize on this natural process of development by encouraging their charges at the optimal time developmentally.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Larry Swedroe, a prolific writer on investing topics and Director of Research of Buckingham Strategic Wealth, discusses his latest book, “Your Complete Guide To A Secure And Successful Retirement.”  Among topics discussed: the importance of retirement planning – beyond the numbers; why financing one’s post-work life is more challenging than saving and investing ahead of this life phase; the relative merits of a pot of money vs. a stream of income; Social Security, Medicare and professional financial advice.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Intel’s drones chief forecasts flying cars in five years, in an interview published Sunday. That change is coming to cars seems evident by the fact that Intel plunked the not small sum of $15.3 billion for Mobileye two years ago. The trend toward self-driving vehicles will create winners and losers, impacting car companies, real estate, insurance, energy, local government and the job market.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is my nonpartisan take on the swelter of tax-hike proposals bubbling up today from Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Kirsten Gillibrand and more. These politicians have their reasons for their levies, like universal child care, which they counterpose against President Trump’s tax cuts on corporations, which they argue has favored the rich. But the debate glides over the fact that these promises and policy preferences sit on top of a mountain of IOUs that politicians have been accumulating for a generation now. I go through the numbers, and implications.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Nobel Prize winning economist Bill Sharpe has been simulating various income paths through a variety of strategies, including fixed withdrawal rates and annuity approaches. He tells Investment Advisor  magazine that fixed withdrawal approaches, like the 4% rule, are inefficient because you either spend too much and go bust or spend too little and leave more to heirs than you planned. Sharpe thinks annuities increase efficiency, by letting you spend more. Noting that a period-certain annuity is like a bond ladder, he suggests that retirees can see which is cheaper, net of fees, buy that and tack a deferred annuity at the end.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Roger Salus writes what I think is some of the most clear, creative and original economic analyses on Seeking Alpha. In this brief interview, Salus helps us understand what contributes to making a country more prosperous. He also elaborates on his “two-economy world” thesis – the notion that the world’s most developed economies have become increasingly stratified between those for whom the traditional economy is working and those for whom it is not.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

ING has looked at savings behavior in generally affluent countries and found grave inadequacy to be the unifying element. Half of current retirees admit to having a lower standard of living in retirement. More than half of Europeans who have not yet retired expect they’ll have to join the gig economy in order to supplement their income in retirement. More than a quarter of Europeans and Americans have no savings whatsoever. This podcast explains why a lemming-like confusion is leading majorities of affluent populations off a financial cliff.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices