PFA Ponderings

Your quiz of the week: Are Social Security benefits taxable income? a) Yes b) No c) It depends If you’re at all familiar with federal programs and taxation, I hope you chose c without any hesitation.  Tax issues are never so cut-and-dried that they can be answered with a simple…

By the time this blog posts, many of us will have already broken our resolutions for 2019.  That doesn’t make us bad people… rather, we’re good people who make bad resolutions. Bad resolutions are those that are over-ambitious, or that are too vague, or that really aren’t all that important…

This is the last blog post for 2018, and barring a really nice New Year’s Eve rally, most of the stock market indicators, both domestic and foreign, will likely end up with losses for 2018.  Importantly, absent a really rough New Year’s Eve rout on the markets, the stock losses…

Financial terminology 101: Volatility (n): The tendency of prices to go up and down sharply over time. Given that definition, it’s pretty clear that we, as investors actually like SOME volatility (the “up”-part).  Today’s blog post is directed to the majority who really don’t like the “down” part of the…

Personal finance is complex.  At least I hope it is – I’d hate to think I’ve dedicated my career, many years of schooling and untold hundreds of continuing education hours on something overly simplistic.  Most people who hire a financial advisor are doing so to knock some of that complexity…

Sometimes we in the planning world tend to paint with a broad brush.  Rules of thumb become ingrained and biases develop.  In doing some self-introspection, I recently identified such behavior in myself around the topic of Reverse Mortgages. I was quick to dismiss reverse mortgages as sub-optimal financing schemes for…

Healthcare costs a lot.  Especially in the US.  And it costs more for people over age 65, who tend to be more likely than the younger population to utilize medical care.  To help with covering these costs, President Johnson signed Medicare into law in 1965. Medicare comes in several parts….

Okay, last week’s blog focused on harvesting capital losses, and it being a great way to reduce taxation by offsetting capital gains and, to a limited degree, regular income if done correctly. Despite recent market volatility, though, the truth is that if you have invested over the past 10 years,…

This week’s blog post is being written on the first of November.  October has gone by, and here in Maine, the leaves have been falling almost as quickly as stock prices. While declining stock prices are not a popular thing in and of themselves, the fact is that it is…