What Beneficiaries Need To Know What do you do when an account owner passes away? If your loved ones have invested, saved or insured themselves to any degree, you may be named as a beneficiary to one or more of their accounts, policies or assets in the event of their deaths. While we all hope “that day” never comes, we do need to know what to do financially if and when it does. Legally, just who is a beneficiary? IRAs, [...]
Taking Taxes Into Account When Saving & Investing It isn’t always top of mind, but it should be. How many of us save and invest with an eye on tax implications? Not that many of us, according to a recent survey from Russell Investments (the global asset manager overseeing the Russell 2000). In the opening quarter of 2014, Russell polled financial services professionals and asked them how many of their clients had inquired about tax-sensitive investment strategies. Just 35% of [...]
Classic Investing Mistakes How many can you prevent yourself from making? Year after year, in bull and bear markets, investors make some all-too-common blunders. They have been written about, talked about, and critiqued at some length – and yet they are still made. You can chalk them up to psychology, human nature, perhaps even a degree of peer pressure. You just don’t want to find yourself making them more than once. #1: Caving into emotion. The deVere Group, which consults [...]
Why the Poor Q1 GDP Is No Big Deal Economists aren’t alarmed. Investors shouldn’t be either. Blame it on winter, not the consumer. The second estimate of first-quarter growth arrived on May 29, and according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis there was no growth at all. For the first quarter in three years, the economy contracted: U.S. real GDP was revised down to -1.0%. Wall Street shrugged when it heard the news, and the S&P 500 actually gained 0.54% [...]
Coping With College Loans Paying them down, managing their financial impact. Are student loans holding our economy back? Certainly America has recovered from the last recession, but this is an interesting question nonetheless. In a November 2013 address before the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Assistant Director Rohit Chopra expressed that college loan debt “may prove to be one of the more painful aftershocks of the Great Recession.” In fact, outstanding education debt in America [...]