Posts Tagged With ‘ Featured Article ’

Golden Reserve Founder Greg Aler pulls back the curtain on how the trillion-dollar financial services industry is failing retirees in his new book Fire Your Financial Advisor. Read on for an adaptation from the book’s introduction. It’s easy to forget that retirement as we know it today is a fairly recent concept. In fact, just over 80 years ago, nearly half of men over age 65 continued to work until the day they died. Thank goodness we now have a better plan. Or do we? Retirement is a small blip in the broader context of human history, the idea of wealth accumulation even more so. It wasn’t... Continue Reading

Poll your friends and family about annuities and you’re bound to get a lot of adverse reactions. They’ll likely cite at least one of these three things :  They’re expensive and have big fees.  They don’t give you access to your money.  There’s no growth.  While these statements are true of some annuities, they’re not true of all annuities. By painting with such broad strokes, you may be removing yourself from a great investment that provides safe growth in retirement. Here’s why.  Misconception #1: Annuities are expensive and have big fees.  Variable Annuities: TRUE Fixed... Continue Reading

Let’s talk about commissions. For many professions—like real estate agents, sales professionals, brokers and artists—it’s a compensation structure to which we’ve become accustomed. They make money when you make a purchase related to the services they provide. But when it comes to commissions and financial advisors—whoa, hold your horses.  We’ve been conditioned to think that commissions and financial advisors shouldn’t mix. Is that the right approach?    Let’s look at it this way. Imagine you use a realtor to help you purchase a home; not just any home, but the right home... Continue Reading

Call it the new kid on the block. Fixed index annuities (FIA) are a more recent offering in the world of annuities and we think they’re worthy of your attention. Now, before you run off, we know annuities have become something of a dirty word. And frankly, they’ve earned the reputation. Historically, some haven’t been so great, while others have been downright terrible. BUT FIAs are the breakaway exception. And retirees who have been using them are loving them. Why are FIA’s Different? So what exactly is a FIA, and what makes it stand apart from other annuities? The FIA was first introduced... Continue Reading

We recently heard a large, national firm use the slogan, “We do better when you do better,” and we couldn’t help but scratch our heads. On the surface it may seem agreeable; after all, if they’ve helped you build wealth, why not reward them, too? But when you think about what that means, it becomes clear that there are a few things wrong with that slogan: Retirement is about preservation first. “We do better when you do better” implies that the more money the advisor makes for you, the more money they make for themselves—a typical assets under management compensation model where... Continue Reading

We’ve written extensively about the risk of long-term care, but most people don’t want to consider the possibility that they’ll need it. Unfortunately, statistics tell us there’s a 70% chance that you will need long-term care if you’re 65 or older. If that’s surprising to you, it’s because the prevailing strategy for preparing for the cost is to bury one’s head in the sand and do nothing.   Clearly, that’s not a good strategy, especially given the astronomical cost of long-term care (currently over $7,500 per month on average for a private room). According to the U.S. Department... Continue Reading

No one likes extra fees, especially when they are hard to understand or being intentionally hidden. You know the ones: the stealthy “service fee,” the suspicious sounding “surcharge,” or the “handling fee,” which is always a head scratcher. There are two fees we think all retirees should know about: investment fees and advisor fees.    Granted, there’s no avoiding investment and advisor fees. Everyone should be compensated fairly for the service they provide. But how do you determine if a fee is fair? That’s what we developed the Fee Filter for.   Investment and advisor fees... Continue Reading

You probably don’t often think about how much your portfolio could go up or down at any moment—that is, until the market moves so much that it’s front-page news. Upward movement is thrilling, but downward movement is… well, we don’t have to tell you how that feels. The years 2000 and 2008 probably bring back some memories.  Those crashes proved that you can lose most of your life savings in an instant. And there’s no one more vulnerable than retirees who don’t have the luxury of additional working years to win back their losses. You can’t predict when the next crash will be, but... Continue Reading