Financial Planning Topics
Fitting an Income Annuity into your Retirement Plan
In my last post I discussed my thinking about why I decided to purchase an annuity from an insurance company. This post will discuss how I arrived at the type of income annuity and how much to purchase.
Retirement Planning: Managing the Biggest Risk
If you are near or in retirement, there are several risks that can derail your retirement plans. These risks all need to be addressed in some way and some are easier to manage than others.
Retirement Planning….Market Volatility What to Do?
Late last year the equity markets experienced much volatility causing a lot of angst among investors, especially retirement investors. It is during uneasy times like this that many people start to have feelings of panic and forget the basics of investing. So, I thought I would use this post to remind investors about a couple […]
What Do We Do in the Abacos?
I got a question from a reader about what we do to pass the time while living six months every year in the Abacos. Our life may seem a bit boring to some, but we like it. Rather than write about what we do to pass the time, I thought I would post some pictures […]
The Biggest Financial Surprise in Retirement that I did not Expect before Retirement
One reader recently asked a question, “What was the biggest financial surprise in retirement?” You might guess that my answer might be the high costs of health care. But I had done a lot of research concerning health insurance before I retired, so I knew all the options and costs associated with this expense.
Retiring Early – Our Story
This post is about how my wife and I managed to retire about ten years earlier than the typical retirement age of 65. Some of the things we did will seem inconceivable to some readers, but the choices people make early in their working lives ultimately determine when they will be able to retire. Perhaps […]
Recency Bias
Recency bias is not a term you often hear in the investment world, but I have read about it and seen other people experience this thought process when it comes to investing in the markets. I believe recency bias is one of the causes of why so many people sabotage their investments by “buying high […]
A Tool to Help Monitor Your Investments
If you are like me, after years of working and saving money, you have several retirement related accounts spread around different financial institutions. In this post I will introduce you to a free online software tool that can help make monitoring your investments much easier.
Why Did We sell Our home? (Part 2)
This post is a follow-up to my last post on why we sold our home. In that post I discussed the opportunity to sell our home at a premium price and, despite the fact we loved our home, we concluded that selling our home would better enable my wife and me to change our lifestyle […]
Is Your Bank and Your Insurance Company Financially Healthy?
If you remember back a few years ago, the three large credit rating agencies, S&P, Moody’s, and Fitch, completely missed the 2008-2009 financial crisis. They each gave several companies investment-grade credit ratings just a few months before they went bankrupt. The most famous “rating miss” was a “AAA rating” that one of the agencies’ still […]
