When it comes to investing our hard-earned savings, it’s difficult to remove emotion from our decision making, especially as those savings fluctuate up and down with the market. For most people these assets are grown over decades through saving and hard work – how could we not be emotionally attached? Especially when considering retirement assets, a portfolio can feel like a member of the family; they’ve seen the good times and the bad, from the job we loved to the one we didn’t, from our youngest child’s wedding to our first health scare. However long you’ve been invested, it’s likely that you know the feeling of watching the markets drop and the inevitable sinking stomach feeling. Perhaps that feeling and the corresponding worry stayed with us longer than it took for the market and our portfolios to recover and now informs our current financial decision-making. Why then, can few of us mark the moments in time when our investments grew significantly and we celebrated their success?
Deciding Whether an Early Retirement is Right for You
We’ll admit it, we’ve dreamed of early retirement, but who hasn’t? It’s not necessarily related to job satisfaction, but imagining how you would spend your days if you were footloose and fancy-free can be an entertaining exercise. And we know we’re not alone: the recent FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early) movement is symbolic of the increased desire by some individuals to minimize their number of working years. The FIRE movement encourages living in a highly frugal manner in order to save early in life, and then retire with a minimalist lifestyle.
Life Transitions – Navigating Divorce
People are living longer now than ever before. This is surely something to celebrate, however, one of the unintended consequences of our additional longevity is that divorce is on the rise for people over 50. In fact, divorce rates for people 50 and older have almost doubled since the 1990s. Divorce is typically not something you plan for in advance but there are things you can do to prepare for the wide range of emotional and financial implications both before and after it is finalized.
All About Financial Advisor Qualifications
Selecting a financial advisor can be both confusing and daunting – we get it.
What’s the difference between an advisor working at a firm like Morgan Stanley and an advisor working for a local, independent firm? There are actually many differences, but one place to start is understanding the various financial advisor qualifications associated with investment management and financial planning.
10 Critical Factors to Consider When Hiring a Financial Advisor
Imagine if your doctor followed this standard when recommending medical treatment: you need a treatment for a serious ailment and the doctor recommends a “suitable” treatment. Not the best or most appropriate treatment, but a suitable one. He could offer you superior treatment, but instead he recommends a treatment using a pharmaceutical company that, in fact, pays him a good deal of money for such recommendations.
