Nothing about the news cycle these days is remotely “normal,” which is understandable considering events in Europe. So you probably missed the most recent letter to investors from Warren Buffett. Usually, his annual missive to shareholders in his holding company, Berkshire Hathaway, is front page news for a few days each year. It is a… Continue reading →

A goal is a dream with a plan and a deadline, as the saying goes. So what does your dream of retirement life look like, and I mean really look like? Making a commitment to your retirement goals requires getting your financial life in order today. That means writing down a financial plan, and I… Continue reading →

The Great Resignation, the Big Quit, the Extraordinary Exodus — whatever you want to call it, 4.5 million Americans voluntarily left their jobs this year, according to current government data, while job openings hover around 10.6 million. A recent analysis of 4,000 companies identified mid-career professionals as the most prolific quitters, a trend that held… Continue reading →

How each generation invests is a fascinating topic.  For instance, the generation that grew up in the Great Depression is known for over-the-top frugality. What people today might call “life hacks” often are nothing more than the way great-grandma and great-granddad got by. Vegetable gardening, sewing old clothes, fixing things instead of replacing them, sharing… Continue reading →

Investors of a certain age, almost all, remember the last bout we faced as a country in terms of serious inflation, back in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Those years of rising prices baked into the economy came to head with double-digit price increases and, shortly after, a rapid increase in interest rates in… Continue reading →

Over the past decade or so, a lot of well-meaning investment writers have tried to explain what is “special” or “different” about index investing. After all, American savers have put literally trillions of dollars to work in index funds over the years. There must be something going on, right? There must be some reason legacy… Continue reading →

Big investment funds have a public face, a famous money manager who is constantly “talking up his fund” on financial television shows. By contrast, index fund investing is hard to comprehend. The Financial Times journalist Robin Wigglesworth got curious about those “missing faces” and wrote a fascinating history of how indexing got started. The resulting… Continue reading →

My firm, Rebalance, recently celebrated a milestone — $1 billion in assets under management. It is an easy figure to misunderstand. The firm is not “bigger” or “more important” than a few years ago. What has changed is that an increasing number of people trust us with their investments, and those investments have grown. That… Continue reading →

Back in 2006, a couple of U.S. Senators took it upon themselves to create a national retirement security awareness week, set for the third week in October. As you can imagine, the intervening twists and turns in the stock market — the 2008 Great Recession and the Covid crash in 2020 — only served to… Continue reading →