Whether you’re wealthy or not, and whether your estate planning issues are complicated or simple, if you have a child under age 18, you need a Will, because you should nominate a guardian for your child. The guardian will act for your child (the “ward”) with the range of parental responsibilities and authority you’d have, […]
People often decide between renting or buying a place to live based on preferences and instinct: What do you want to do? If they are incrementally more analytical, they may explore “how much house” they can “afford”. This approach is grounded in capabilities. What can you do? I think the most useful approach to important financial […]
Whether or not to get a prenuptial agreement before getting married isn’t an easy decision. The advisability of a prenup turns in large part on whether the default law that will govern the marriage if it ends by death or divorce is agreeable. If you can live with the default rules, a prenup might not […]
The announcement this week of the closure of Sweet Briar College after the end of this semester was significant and sad news. Sweet Briar was pressured by declining enrollment and a deterioration in pricing power. The board’s decision to yield to this trend while the college still has a large endowment to help fund an […]
I believe effective life cycle estate and financial planning is anchored in the Quadrant of Facts, Forecasts, Life Stages, and Unexpected Events. Over the past several weeks, ten posts covered a lot of territory about Facts and Forecasts. This is a pivot point at which we begin exploring planning issues in the first of several Life […]
Our previous post explored a model of the cost of the promise you make to yourself to fund your retirement, but that model omitted a very important real-world risk: volatile equity markets. Most recently, the 2008 stock market crash changed many retirement plans for the worse. A 2009 study by the Urban Institute, “What the 2008 Stock […]
Pause and reflect on what a pension is: income for life after you retire, intended to replace part of all of your employment income. For retirees in the “Greatest Generation,” pensions were common. For a host of reasons (presented well by Jacob Hacker in his 2006 book The Great Risk Shift) structural changes in the American […]
Most people know (at least in the abstract) that choices have consequences. Choices you make to manage your behavioral tendencies (or not) and about your investment costs may have tremendous consequences for when you can retire. I built a model to explore the tradeoffs between retirement age, investment costs, and behavioral tendencies. Like any model, […]
Successful investing presents practical and emotional difficulties. Reducing those difficulties as much as possible turns on your answers to two questions: Do you believe markets are efficient? Can you manage your behavioral tendencies? After you have thoughtful answers to those two questions, it’s easier to make good decisions for you about choosing an investment style […]
We live in a world of nearly infinite, nearly free information. That includes financial information, commentary, journalism, and forecasts. Among this clutter, it can be very hard to decide what deserves attention, what’s worthwhile, and what to believe. Print, television, and Internet journalism thrives on readers and viewers. In a media landscape that is so […]
Spy Game (2001) is all about retirement: Nathan Muir’s last day at work at the CIA. Muir (Robert Redford) has a protege, Bishop (Brad Pitt), who’s been thrown into a very unpleasant prison in coastal China. Muir calls his broker and tells him to sell all of his assets, raising $282,000 to bribe a Chinese official […]
The Right Stuff (1983) is a movie that’s begun to be fully appreciated only recently. One of its best scenes is when the iconic test pilot Chuck Yeager (played by Sam Shepard) takes a very dangerous flight in an NF-104 Starfighter in December 1963, attempting to break the world altitude record. At the edge of space above the […]