When in retirement you can have your own personal recession. How? Well look at the numbers.

• Inflations of 4%
• Fees of 2%
• Pension of 4%
• Market Drop of only 10%

Total drop in your nest egg value is 20%.

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 »

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 »