taxes

Investing

Investing for Retirement: Estate Planning

You should work with your attorney and tax specialist to craft an estate plan that reflects your personal needs. What is the primary goal of your estate plan? Avoid taxes? Providing for your family? Charitable giving? Have you defined the primary beneficiaries of your estate? What is your plan for giving to your heirs? If you have minor children, have you named both guardians for them and trustees for your estate? Do you have life insurance? Is it enough? Who are the beneficiaries? Do you have long-term care insurance? Continue reading Investing for Retirement: Estate Planning

Mike Connelly
Investing

Investing for Retirement: Passive Investing – Indexed Mutual Funds & ETFs

The only rational path for individual investors is to invest in passively managed index funds. For the reasons described here, active management is a negative-sum game. Index funds track the performance of a particular market benchmark (“index”) as closely as possible. They do this by buying all, or at least a representative sample, of the securities in the benchmark. Indexing now represents approximately 30% of all investment dollars. Index mutual funds have $2 trillion in assets. ETF index funds have a similar amount. Surprisingly, that means that approximately 70% of investment dollars are still in actively managed funds! Continue reading Investing for Retirement: Passive Investing – Indexed Mutual Funds & ETFs

Mike Connelly
Investing

Investing for Retirement: Actively Managed Investing

It is nearly impossible for active managers to beat the market over the long term after taking management expenses, transaction fees, taxes, and risk into account.  Individual investors don’t have the time or resources to compete with institutional investors. The only rational path for individual investors is to invest in passively managed index funds. Continue reading Investing for Retirement: Actively Managed Investing

Mike Connelly