My blog provides valuable insights into Nobel Prize-winning financial strategies for investors. By utilizing decades of worldwide peer-reviewed capital markets research and analysis, I demonstrate how to build better investment portfolios with lower risks. I also examine common financial media misinformation and how investors can make better financial decisions.
Fund the HSA deductible, as Indiana and Whole Foods do, and put real prices on everything
As the Democratic presidential candidates argue about “Medicare for All” versus a “public option,” two simple policy changes could slash U.S. health-care costs by 75% while increasing access and improving the quality of care.
These policies have been proven to work by ingenious companies like Whole Foods and innovative governments like the state of Indiana and Singapore. If they were rolled out nationally, the United States would save $2.4 trillion per year across individuals, businesses, and the government.
Many people dream of leaving the office as soon as they can. But the evidence suggests a lot of downsides. It may be time to rethink those dreams.
Most people look forward to retirement, a reward for decades of hard work. But like many other pleasures, it may be bad for your health. It may even kill you. How can that be? How can working longer be good for your health? After all, many people dream of—and plan for—retiring early. Strenuous, stressful work can wear people down and damage their health.
On the other hand, retirees can relax and reinvigorate themselves. They have time to follow their passions and pursue activities that enrich their lives. But in our rush to leave the office, we don’t realize that retirement also has a downside, especially over the long term.
Everyone needs to keep certain personal financial files more or less permanently. But which files should you keep, and why do you need to keep them? How long should you keep them and in what format?
This article serves as a brief guide to organizing your personal paperwork.
In this article
Why Keep All Those Papers?
A Structure You Can Use
Consider These Real-World Issues
Roadmap for Heirs
Why Keep All Those Papers?
You need to maintain personal financial files in order to prepare for any number of contingencies. These include:
Tax Audits and Calculations: Your tax return might be audited. Tax authorities at both the federal and state levels have the right to reopen your tax return at any time if there is a suspicion of fraud. However, most audits are designed to resolve less troubling discrepancies, with various audit deadlines typically set to occur within seven years. This audit risk creates the need to keep tax and supporting documentation in general for seven years.
When politicians hide the cost of government, ‘free college’ and ‘Medicare for all’ sound like bargains.
Steve H. Hanke and Stephen J.K. Walters
Margaret Thatcher famously said the problem with socialism is that you “always run out of other people’s money.” The trouble with resisting socialism is that until the money runs out, free-spending progressive policies are remarkably seductive. Their appeal comes from what economists call lying prices: advertised prices that don’t reflect the full cost of what you’re buying.
‘Modern monetary theory’ rests on dangerous, false premises. The U.S. won’t grow its way out of the red.
By: Desmond Lachman
Do deficits matter? Between Republican tax cuts and Democratic spending proposals, U.S. lawmakers act as if the answer is no. Lately, academic economists have echoed the sentiment, advocating large, unfunded infrastructure spending programs—the main thrust of former International Monetary Fund chief economist Olivier Blanchard’s recent presidential address to the American Economic Association. “Put bluntly,” Mr. Blanchard said, “public debt may have no fiscal cost.”
This view, known as modern monetary theory, rests on false premises. One is that the U.S. government will likely be able to borrow at low rates indefinitely. Another is that so long as the U.S. nominal growth rate is greater than the rate at which its government borrows, America can always grow its way out of debt problems.
David Jones Head of Financial Advisor Services, EMEA and Vice President Dimensional Fund Advisors Ltd.
As much as I value the unfettered access to information the internet provides, I recognize the potential harm that too much information can cause.
Take, for example, a friend of mine, who was experiencing some troubling medical symptoms. Typing her symptoms into a search engine led to an evening of research and mounting consternation. By the end of the night, the vast quantity of unfiltered information led her to conclude that something was seriously wrong. One of the key characteristics that distinguishes an expert is their ability to filter information and make increasingly refined distinctions about the situation at hand.
For example, you might describe your troubling symptoms to a doctor simply as a pain in the chest, but a trained physician will be able to ask questions and test several hypotheses before reaching the conclusion that rather than having the cardiac arrest you suspected, you have something completely different. While many of us may have the capacity to elevate our understanding to a high level within a chosen field, reaching this point takes time, dedication, and experience. My friend, having convinced herself that something was seriously wrong, booked an appointment with a physician. The doctor asked several pertinent questions, performed some straightforward tests, and recommended the following treatment plan: reassurance and education.
The names, addresses, contact information and passport numbers of over 300 million people who stayed at a Starwood hotel property may have been accessed in a major data hack, Marriott hotels reported Friday. Marriott's data team confirmed that the Starwood guest reservation database — which contains up to 500 million accounts — had been compromised, and the hacking may have been ongoing since 2014.
Unfortunately, there may not be a lot of individuals can do to completely protect themselves in response. Even a credit freeze may not a comprehensive solution.
It has been more than 50 years since the idea of stock prices containing all relevant information was put forth. Information might come in the form of data from a company’s financial statements, news about a new product, a change in the regulatory environment, or simply a shift of investors’ tastes and preferences toward owning different investments.
Information is incorporated into security prices through the buying and selling process. While fair prices may not depend on a certain level of trading, over $400 billion of stocks traded on average each day in the world equity markets suggests that a great deal of information is incorporated into stock prices.1
