Independent Wealth Management
Who scrutinizes your investments, designs and tests your retirement and education plan, searches for new investment ideas, patrols insurance agents and mortgage brokers, shows you strategies designed to reduce your investment costs and income taxes, monitors your 401(k), promptly responds to your email, provides one monthly statement, day-to-day net performance across all of your accounts and does all of your paperwork...We do!
Investors Behaving Badly
Behavioral Finance explores the way investors make decisions. Economists presume we are rational human beings, coldly weighing the pros and cons of our decisions. The reality is that we don’t behave that way, we have bias’ and emotional attachments. Here are three psychological tendencies that, if you can avoid, will probably lead to better investment decisions.
Anchoring – The idea that investors put too much emphasis on irrelevant data. An example is the break-even fallacy. Often investors realize they have made a mistake...
Rafael Velez
College Savings Options
529 Plan - These investment programs are designed with one basic purpose in mind – providing families with an easy and effective means to save for future college costs. But they also have tax, retirement and estate planning implications that extend far beyond this basic purpose. Unlike most other tax-advantaged programs, 529 plans are open to everyone; no matter what their income level or the age of their children or grandchildren.
You won’t get a federal tax deduction for your contribution to a 529 plan, but you will receive the benefit of tax-deferred earnings. Any growth in your account...
Thinking Out of the Style Box
As portfolio construction has become increasingly complex, many investors (and advisors) have turned to a simple and convenient tool to bring structure and discipline to their portfolios — the style box. Style boxes have become so widely used that the familiar grid has become the standard representation of asset allocation and diversification. While it’s hard to question the utility of boxes, there is growing evidence that the interests of investors might not be best served by rigid adherence to the common application; style-box investing.
The Long and Winding Road
Enduring financial principles, like music, can last generations. Benjamin Franklin gave us many examples such as, “a penny saved is a penny earned” and “early to bed, early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.” Thomas Jefferson would tell us, “never spend your money before you have it,” and Miguel de Cervantes would warn that, “all that glitters is not gold.”
I have also learned firsthand that “The Beatles” are still selling millions of albums every year. Interestingly, my ten-year old daughter is obsessed with the group. She has...
