This week I received word that I am now a member of the Forbes.com Business and Financial Network. I learned about the invitation about a month ago when Sharon Gitelle of Forbes sent me an email.

I feel extremely honoured to receive the invitation especially since my blog, Protect Your Nest Egg in Retirement, only began on 1st April 2008.

“Participation in the network is by invitation only, and all blogs are vetted by Forbes.com editors for appropriate content, and to ensure that they are in keeping with the Forbes editorial brand.

The network will allow advertisers to target a highly engaged, exclusive niche audience of senior business decision makers and affluent investors easily and effectively.”

Forbes.com is using the network as a way to provide targeted audiences for their advertisers.

Read the rest of this entry »

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Have you noticed that whenever you talk with a financial planner they talk in terms of certainties. But when you sign the investment documents they point out that there are no guarantees the things they told us before may apply?

Do you go to a car showroom and hear them tell you all the great things about their cars but as you drive it out of the showroom do they make you sign a waiver and tell you the car may not work as stated. It may stop as soon as you leave the driveway, the doors may fall off, the engine may not reach the speeds they said it would. Read the rest of this entry »

So much for safe, steady as she goes, buy and hold long term investment of your nest egg. Do you know your retirement funds may be contributing to the Oil Price bubble? Your trusted wealth managers may be telling you to have a conservative balance portfolio in retirement whilst they speculate in oil with your money.

“A pension fund is supposed to be investing money in secure, stable investments for the benefit of the people whose money they are investing,” said Dan Lippe, an energy analyst at Houston-based Petral Consulting Inc. Retirement Funds Plowing Cash into Oil

I’m really not sure of the ethics of this. It is supposedly well intentioned and aimed at protecting your nest egg to some degree against inflation and the loss in value of the US dollar. However I am more of the view they were chasing their bonuses on what looks like a sure thing riding the oil trend, just like the housing bubble. They get their bonuses every quarter in real cash. They cannot be trusted.

Read the rest of this entry »

It really doesn’t matter what country you belong to. If you have a retirement nest egg and you are in retirement then it is still subject to the same dangers whether you are in the USA, Australia, Europe or Asia. Protecting your nest egg is universal.

Buy and Hold will cause you the same anxiety right now wherever you are in the world as you watch your nest egg dive just when you need it. GE that once great Buy and Hold company is down 84% from its highs.

Large losses are not the preserve of one nation. The global community makes sure we all get our share. But often that share is unevenly distributed. Avoid them like the plague.

High Fees and charges do the same damage to a nest egg whether it be in Australia, USA, Europe or anywhere good people have to contribute to their own retirement by building a retirement nest egg.

Read the rest of this entry »

The DOW is only 0.8% off 20% losses the technical level for declaring a Bear Market. What does a Baby Boomer do now?

In these volatile times cash is a position for Baby Boomers in retirement. But it may be too late to exit those poor performing buy and hold mutual funds.

It is time to review your retirement nest egg and consider each investment. If there are significant losses in some of the investments then it makes no sense to sell them right now. But if you have some investments down around 10% it might be worth considering putting them into cash.

This will at least provide you with some income to hopefully ride out any further market turmoil without forcing you to sell those investments with large losses against them.

It may be best to look at the Fixed Interest/Income Investments first. Read the rest of this entry »

This post is just a quick one to point out several important topics affecting Baby Boomers approaching retirement. I find MarketWatch has some very interesting articles and audio’s. Some I don’t agree with but the ones listed here I believe are important to us Baby Boomers.

This will be a short post because a family matter has taken most of my attention. It should be back to normal tomorrow.

They just seemed to me to hit all our hot buttons with their topics.

Consumers more at risk from financial scams as stocks slump Read the rest of this entry »

Today I received an email from someone who maintains it is impossible to be in the market when it is rising and out of it when it is falling. I was investing this way for several years. I also entered the market in March 2003 using my indicators.

I requested more information and received a more detailed explanation of why the sender thought this was so.

This is the email I received to support the statement above. The email contents are in italics and I respond to each paragraph. I want to thank the writer for taking the time to give me their justification so I could respond. I’m happy to keep this discussion going so please all join in if you want to add (or subtract) from what has been said. Read the rest of this entry »

The wealth management industry focuses on returns. This is how they sell their funds. But Baby Boomers in retirement should ignore this noise and focus on costs.

When in retirement and not adding to your nest egg any costs if not controlled can seriously deplete it. These costs primarily are Fees and Charges, Taxes, Inflations and Stock Market Losses.

I am included Stock Market losses here because if your nest egg suffers a large loss it will seriously cost your nest egg dearly.

If you look at any business out there they focus on costs. You are in the business of managing your nest egg in retirement. As such you too need to focus on costs.

Saving just one dollar this year means that dollar can be put to work earning income for your nest egg. If you pay it to your financial planner, the tax man or you lose it due to stock market losses it will cost you money in the long term. Read the rest of this entry »