I wanted to write a short post this week letting our readers know that even though the majority of them may not be located in the state of Illinois, we are generally still able to help and work with you should you want to use or services. Here are a few ways that we can make your experience working with us as “local” and as professional as possible. We use email – a lot. This is arguably the main way we communicate with clients. It’s not that we’re above using the phone, but with our schedules we are frequently out of the office. Email lets us stay in contact with you regardless of where we’re at. We use video conferencing. Whether we’re in the office or traveling for business we can easily have a face to face conversation with you if you’d like to put a face with the name. […]
fiduciary
De-stress Your Investing
Over your working career is possible you’ll accumulate multiple retirement accounts if you switch jobs frequently and there’s also the possibility that you’ll have multiple IRAs depending on if you’ve moved switched advisers, or wanted to give a fledgling adviser their first sale. Eventually, annual statements start pouring in from all of these accounts and it can be difficult and stressful to keep track of all of the accounts and where your money is being held. For example, you may have to 401(k) plans from two previous employers in addition to the plan you have with your current employer. You may also have two or three IRAs that you’ve opened over the years and whether or not their traditional or Roth can complicate things even more. Here’s a way to organize your retirement account and reduce your stress when it’s time to receive statements. Consider combining your old 401(k) plans […]
Share, tweet, print, email, like or pin this post:
I Have the CFP®, Now What?
This week, several anxious individuals will sit in front of a computer screen at a testing center and will answer 170 questions over a six hour span. These folks are sitting for the national CFP® exam that’s given every March, July, and November. Question topics range from life insurance and annuities to taxation, investment planning, estate planning and ethics. Successful exams takers will be allowed to use the prestigious marks (assuming all other requirements are met). If you’re one of these folks – first of all congratulations! You put in a lot of hard work, studying, and relinquished personal time in order to be successful. You should be proud. But I would also encourage you to not fall to the temptation of thinking, “you’ve made it.” In other words, I hope the exam has taught you that there’s so much we don’t know as planners and the CFP® is merely […]
Share, tweet, print, email, like or pin this post:
How to Choose a Financial Planner
Before you sign a contract or buy a product consider the following before choosing your financial planner. Make sure they’re a CFP®. At the very minimum, a CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER™ has the met the education, exam, ethics and experience requirements in order to be qualified to discuss your financial planning needs. Anyone can call themselves a financial planner, but not everyone is a CFP®. This should be the starting point of your search. Just because the planner is a CFP®, doesn’t mean you should automatically work with them.
Share, tweet, print, email, like or pin this post:
How to Easily Maximize Your IRA
Recently I had a chance to have some fun with some of my undergraduate students. Polling my entire class I asked them to make a list of wants (not needs) that they frequently spent money on. Answers varied from smartphones (and the respective bill), cable and satellite TV, dining out, coffee shops, beverages (you know which ones), and appearance (spending extra to dye hair, pedicures, etc.). Here’s a list of how each expense was broken down as told by the students. In other words, it was their numbers not mine.
Share, tweet, print, email, like or pin this post:
One of the Best Investments to Make
Traditionally when we think of investing our minds turn to stocks, bonds, mutual funds or real estate. While these may or may not be the best investments for an individual’s portfolio there is one investment that is almost always the right choice for any individual – human capital. Human capital is an individual’s worth of their own potential. Coined by economist Theodore Schultz, human capital can be invested in like any other asset in order to add value to an individual’s life through earnings, health, and quality of life.
Share, tweet, print, email, like or pin this post:
Asset Allocation Vs Diversification
Asset allocation and diversification are not the same. Perhaps some readers may benefit from a brief explanation of the two and how it may impact your investments. An investor may have excellent diversification but poor asset allocation and vice versa. Let’s start with asset allocation. When we speak of asset allocation we’re talking about how we’re going to invest in a particular category of investments called asset classes. That is, we are choosing which assets are going to be in our portfolio. Generally, assets classes that investors may choose from are stocks (equities), bonds (fixed income), cash, commodities, and real estate.
Share, tweet, print, email, like or pin this post:
Stay Away From This Asset Class in 2015
Admittedly, this is a pretty deceiving headline. We see headlines like these every day in the newspapers, TV and from colleagues at work. The truth of the matter is that there are certainly going to be assets classes that will behave horribly while other asset classes do extremely well. The point is, neither you nor I (or anyone else) will accurately be able to predict which ones will do better than others. For every person that says stocks will have a meteoric rise in 2015 there will be just as many that will say to avoid them. You’ll have others saying that bonds are doomed while others will sing their praises. Buy gold, sell gold; buy real estate, sell real estate. The point is no one knows which asset classes will do well and which ones will fall.
Share, tweet, print, email, like or pin this post:
Make SMART Goals as You Plan
Goal planning is the real “meat” of financial planning. That is to say, once you’ve covered the issues of organizing your information, developing and improving your net worth, and providing for the safety issues, it is now time to consider exactly what you would like to do with your money and your life. This is a very personal set of decisions – no one person makes the same choices. Perhaps you’d like to open your own business, and become your own boss. Maybe all you’d like to do is to finish working after 30 years and spend your time playing with your grandchildren. Or maybe you’ve finished up college and now you’re beginning to earn some money, and so you’re planning on starting a family and buying a home. Setting your goals is very important as you begin a savings and investing plan, because without a goal in mind, it […]
Share, tweet, print, email, like or pin this post:
An Exception to the RMD Rule
For many folks, attaining age 70 ½ means the beginning of required minimum distributions (RMDs) from their 401k, 403b as well as traditional IRAs. There are however, some individuals that will continue to work because they want to or (unfortunately) have to and still want to save some of their income. At age 70 ½ individuals can no longer make traditional IRA contributions. They are allowed to make contributions to a Roth IRA as long as they still have earned income. Earned income is generally W2 wages or self-employment income. It is not pension income, annuity income or RMD income.
Share, tweet, print, email, like or pin this post:
Wants and Needs
Sometimes when we need more money for a specific goal in the future such as retirement, college, a down payment on a home or an emergency fund we may feel that before these things can happen we need to make more money. We may feel that once our incomes are up to a certain level that we’ll be able to afford to save for those goals. It may not be necessary to earn more in order to achieve the above goals. For many folks the solution is simply to prioritize between wants and needs. In other words, learning to distinguish between the wants and the needs in your life and then reallocating your money to fund retirement or college goals without having to ask for a raise or get a second job.
Share, tweet, print, email, like or pin this post:
Financial Advice to Ignore, Even if it Comes From Your Mother!
Listed below are a few time-honored maxims that we’ve all heard. Perhaps we’ve even heard these from very trusted sources – like our Mothers. As you’ll see, it’s not always good advice… In the interest of full disclosure, my own Mother did not give me any of this advice. She tended to stay with the “wait an hour after eating to go swimming” variety of advice. One of my favorites was always given as I was leaving the house during my younger years: “Have fun. Behave!” I once pointed out to her the fallacy involved there but she didn’t see the humor. :-) At any rate, those rules have served me well through the years – thanks, Mom!
Share, tweet, print, email, like or pin this post:
Apples and Oranges
When considering investing with a particular financial planning firm or mutual fund consider looking at what benchmark they’re comparing their returns (disclosure: the funds we use are the benchmarks). It’s pretty easy for a mutual fund company or adviser to tout their funds when they have beaten the benchmark over a certain period of time. For example, I had the opportunity to look at a client’s investment performance report that they had with another company. Written across the top in the adviser’s handwriting was the phrase, “Looks like we beat the benchmark.”
Share, tweet, print, email, like or pin this post:
To Roll or Not to Roll?
At some point in almost everyone’s lifetime they have gone through the process of changing jobs. Many times those jobs offered retirement plans such as 401(k)s 403(b)s, etc. Conventional wisdom would say that for most employees it may make sense to roll their employer sponsored plan into an IRA. Based on a request from a reader (thanks David!), I thought I would go over some of the issues to consider before rolling your employer sponsored plan to an IRA.
Share, tweet, print, email, like or pin this post:
Why You Should Consider Long Term Care Insurance
Long term care insurance is insurance that will pay in the event that an individual needs caregiving due to a number of afflictions or diseases. For example, if an individual is suffering from Alzheimer’s disease or dementia they made needs round the clock care. Generally, that care is provided by family members, with the majority of caregivers being daughters and spouses of caregiver. The costs for needing long term care can be expensive. Depending on the area of the country, care can range from $50,000 to $80,000 per year to stay in a nursing home and may run in the range of $20 to $30 per hour for care outside of the home. Based on the numbers above, long term care expenses can quickly drain an individual’s retirement savings, or other assets that were planned for other uses.
Share, tweet, print, email, like or pin this post:
The Benefits of Financial Planning
If you’re wondering about whether or not you need to do some financial planning, either on your own, using resources on the internet, or by hiring a financial planner, you might want to know what the benefits of financial planning are. From my perspective of many years providing financial planning and advice to folks, there are three primary benefits of financial planning: Organization, Efficiency, and Discipline. We’ll talk about each of these in order. Organization One of the most important benefits of financial planning is ORGANIZATION. Statistics tell us that fewer than 25% of Americans know their financial net worth. In addition, (prepare to be astounded) the average individual’s credit card debt is over $8,000. Think about that for a moment…
Share, tweet, print, email, like or pin this post:
Should You Worry About the Dow?
The last few weeks have shown that the market is certainly volatile. Once at a peak of over 17,000 the market has pulled back to just over 16,000. While this certainly makes for news (notice how I didn’t say interesting news) I wanted to give our readers a little perspective on why I (nor they) shouldn’t care.
Share, tweet, print, email, like or pin this post:
Yoda Would Suggest a Low-Cost Index
Recently a colleague told me that he’d “give that a try”. I responded (tongue in cheek of course) “Try not. Do or do not. There is no try.” In case you don’t recognize it, that’s a line that Yoda gives to Luke Skywalker in the Star Wars “Empire Strikes Back” movie. Yoda was pointing out to Luke that if he simply “tries” to undertake the action, he will not succeed. I think it shows that Yoda would also suggest a low-cost index mutual fund for investing. If you think back to the excellent article that Sterling wrote a few weeks ago, “Not All Index Funds are Created Equal”, Sterling used a particular load mutual fund as an example. The objective of the fund (paraphrasing here): Seeks to match the performance of the benchmark… Let’s analyze that objective. The “benchmark” in question is an index, in particular the S&P 500 index. […]
Sterling Raskie, MSFS, CFP®, ChFC®
The latest in our Owner’s Manual series, A 401(k) Owner’s Manual, was published in January 2020 and is available on 
A Medicare Owner’s Manual, is updated with 2020 facts and figures. This manual is available on 
Social Security for the Suddenly Single can be found on Amazon at 
Sterling’s first book, Lose Weight Save Money, can be 
An IRA Owner’s Manual, 2nd Edition is available for purchase on Amazon. Click the link to choose the 
Jim’s book – A Social Security Owner’s Manual, is now available on Amazon. Click this link for the 
And if you’ve come here to learn about queuing waterfowl, I apologize for the confusion. You may want to discuss your question with Lester, my loyal watchduck and self-proclaimed “advisor’s advisor”.