Though many retirement savers will be pleased with their retirement plan 2017 investment results, the outlook for market returns over the next 10-15 years remains less than inspiring. J.P. Morgan Asset Management’s Anne Lester and Daniel Oldroyd discuss how to take steps towards a secure retirement in a low-return world.…Read More
Millennials – people born 1981-2001 – are a force to be reckoned with. Millennials, all 75 million of them, grew up in the midst of our country’s greatest financial crisis. The roles the Millennial generation now play – and will play – as consumers, workers, educators, and future leaders is what makes this group so interesting.…Read More
Now that I’m retired, I’m finding that my wife and I are engaging in different financial conversations with our advisors than we did earlier in life. I believe that this new perspective should drive how a successful advisor talks to us, as well as many other older couples and individuals.…Read More
Brokers, financial advice providers, and many others need to test peoples’ ability to manage their money. Nevertheless, there are some who debate such tests arguing that they aren’t useful for predicting behavior. But our work has confirmed that there actually IS a short and very effective diagnostic financial literacy test that can be used to measure financial know-how and predict behavior.…Read More
Since 2000, the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) coordinated by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OEDC) has assessed the reading, math, and science knowledge of 15-year-olds around the world every three years. More recently, since 2012, the program has also measured teen’s financial literacy. The latest findings just released by the OECDs provided small – but consequential – reasons for celebration.…Read More
In the world of financial advice, we are seeing a welcome trend toward goals-based investing. This trend puts a greater focus on the goals that investors want to achieve with their savings —such as retirement security, paying for college or purchasing a house — and uses these goals to drive investment strategy and monitor progress.…Read More
Ask yourself these questions:
Do you want a guaranteed retirement income stream as long as you live, to protect you against outliving your assets?
Are you nearing retirement?
Are you in a defined contribution pension – either an employer-sponsored 401(k) or 403(b) plan, or an individual Roth or regular IRA?
If the answer to any of these questions is “yes,” reading this post could save you money!…Read More
Interest rates are nothing more than the cost of spending money today instead of saving it. And a main tool of monetary policy has always been controlling interest rates as a means of stimulating or cooling off economic activity. When central bankers lower interest rates, they encourage people to spend more today. This is because lowering the return on saving encourages firms to hire and invest to meet the increased demand and boosts economic activity.…Read More
Today’s release of the latest National Financial Capability Study shows that we’re doing better protecting ourselves against financial emergencies than in the past. We’re also doing a better job cutting our high-interest debt than previously. Yet our personal finances, particularly the amount of debt we’re taking on, is still troubling.…Read More
When average Americans confront the complicated problem of how much to save for retirement, they often use so-called “rules of thumb,” or greatly-simplified approaches, to figure out how much to save and how to invest. It turns out that many of the computer programs created to help with retirement income planning do exactly the same thing: use rules of thumb.…Read More
