"Free Advice" Unraveled

Clark Howard does a great job in this article describing the fallacies surrounded so called "free advice" from brokers and others that often turns out to be costly indeed. His depiction of some of the popular financial products such as variable annuities is also good.

Debt Kills Growth

Saw this piece yesterday in NYT on the impact of debt levels on economic growth . It indeed appears that we are in the midst of a very,very slow climb and some elements of the economy will never be the same. We need clarity of vision but that is not to be found.

Whole Brain Investing

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How an Economy Grows

An outstanding piece today in WSJ with the thoughts of Professor Robert Lucas of University of Chicago on how economies grow. He talks about the European model and how the carrying cost of their debt/governmental structures has detrimentally impacted their growth rates the past 40 years or so. The U.S. is close to the tipping point towards that model at present . Reduced output (or "work effort" as Lucas puts it) is not a good result.

Housing Utility vs. Investment

The tone of this article is a bit sour but nonetheless on point for the main. Towards the end he touches what might be the real issue- the utility of housing versus housing as an investment. Despite perceptions to the contrary, residential housing has over time been a reasonable storehouse of value but not great. Perhaps the rate of inflation +/- 1% per year. Even so, the utility derived from the house accounts a good amount of psychic income.

Retirement Perspectives Differ

This is a great short article on retirement perspectives and how they differ substantially between spouses. Where to retire differs as much as when. The survey says 58% work with a financial advisor but only 1 spouse participates. We see this as well and it can become a huge issue compounding problems over time. Happy 4th America !

The Real Risks in Investing

The next issue of our, bi -weekly newsletter, STAT is available. You can access it here If you'd like to receive our email newsletter, you can click the "Sign up for our Email Newsletter" link on the right of this page.