Mighty Oaks from Little Acorns Grow: Chickens, Spare Change, and Micro Investing. My grandmother had a chipped gravy boat in her kitchen cupboard. My grandparents operated a small farm in South Dakota. My grandfather looked after the cattle, hogs and crops. My grandmother oversaw the chickens, did the books and a million other tasks. She had hundreds of laying hens and once a week the egg truck would come and take most of the eggs. But she held some back to barter with and sell on the side. For years she paid her hairdresser with eggs! Her side egg money and spare change went into the chipped gravy boat. Every time we visited, my sister and I would get the gravy boat …
Investing
Teenager Got a Job? Now they need a ROTH!
Did your teen get a summer job? Mine did - in the dining room of a local assisted living facility. Prerequisite: Ability to speak loudly and slowly. One conversation reportedly went like this: "Tonight's special is spaghetti with marinara sauce." "MARIJUANA sauce?!" "No, marinARA sauce!" After more banter to establish the lack of psychoactive substances in the sauce the resident went with grilled cheese. Good choice. Teens earning money is a beautiful thing! Now's the time to salt away some of those earnings to a ROTH IRA and they won't have to share with Uncle Sam. No tax now, no tax later. It doesn't get much more beautiful than that. TEN things to know about …
Cash and the Single Woman – What does the Survey Say?
I specialize in helping single women make sense of their money and their taxes. So I was very interested when Fidelity* recently came out with a study exploring the financial planning and investing habits of single women - they surveyed 1,503 women who never married, are divorced or widowed as well as single men and married men and women. Kathleen Murphy, president of personal investing at Fidelity said of the study ".....it's critical that women be actively involved and invested in the financial choices that can enable them to live the lives they deserve." There are a lot of interesting things in this study. I could write a bunch of newsletters about it. In fact, maybe I …
Tune Out the Noise and Prosper
This month I feature a wonderful 2 minute video "Tuning out the Noise" by Dimensional- a mutual fund company I use. As Warren Buffett says: "The stock market is a device for transferring money from the impatient to the patient." If you invested $10,000 in the S&P 500 twenty years ago in March of 1998, held and reinvested dividends, you would have $36,244 in March of 2018. This despite two significant intervening market meltdowns. Even my oldest clients likely have a 20+ year time horizon. Heck, one of my clients in her mid-70's works out like Ruth Bader Ginsburg and can do one-armed planks.She's invested for the long term. And you should be too. Save. Invest. Repeat. The …
Thou Shalt Diversify – A Commandment For All Investors
Having a diversified portfolio is easy to understand. As illustrated nearby it essentially means "Don't put all your eggs in one basket!" I set aside my deep dislike of chickens to use this illustration. Being diversified means that at any given time there is something in your portfolio that is lagging and something in your portfolio that is doing well. This is where the emotions can get in the way. It is human nature to look at whatever is on fire and think "I gotta get more of that!" Conversely it's natural to look at the laggards and think "I gotta get rid of that!" But here's the thing - every dog has its day and what goes up is almost certainly going down …