Maybe it’s just a sign of the times, but in recent years we’ve seen a spate of articles dealing with early withdrawals from retirement plans. People are out of work, expenses are going up, and few people still have rainy day funds that they can tap. In general it seems that the proverbial ends have […]
Profit is good. Unless, of course, it’s not. Here’s the deal. Everybody responds to incentives, and one of the top incentives is the ability to put a few bucks in your pocket. That’s why you go to work, that’s why people produce products for you to buy, and that’s why mothers still qvell over “my […]
It’s one thing to break the law. It’s quite another to do it under IRS guidance. In a recent WSJ article by ace Laura Sanders, we find out all the details about how the IRS actually paved the way for an infraction of U.S. tax law. Here’s how it went down. It started with a […]
Quick! Your money and your retirement rely on giving the correct answer to the following question. Which of the following is just a passing fad: Social Media Search Engines Smart Phones Streaming Video There are a number of major blue chip companies that are betting on each of these products continuing their hot ubiquity. You […]
3 Truths for the Proactive Investor from the World of Weather Forecasting A recent article in the Wall Street Journal by Ben Eisen highlighted ten things that a person may not know about weather forecasting. This article was obviously easy pickings for the writer. The average joe around town knows more about the now inexplicably […]
Government intervention has always resided in the nether world of Sisyphean dilemmas. On one hand the intervention itself is almost certainly going to do more harm than good. The problems addressed by government are too large, systemic, and chaotic to allow some policy wonk’s solution any reasonable chance of success. On the other hand, without […]
A while ago, 401(k) fees were all the rage in the media. Big articles were written, big legislation was produced, and the big fees themselves were supposed to become a little more transparent. Apparently the companies providing the 401(k) plans were making BOATLOADS of money off of the fees, and (surprise!) they weren’t exactly being […]
Recently, the 2013 Nobel Prize in Economics was given to three professors for “their empirical analysis of asset prices”. Eugene Fama, Lars Peter Hansen, and Robert Shiller were awarded the prize for their groundwork in determining that stock prices are hard to predict in the short time, easier in the long term, and have already […]