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Slick TV ads often make financial planning and wealth management sound simple, but it’s usually not. Managing wealth requires knowing a lot about highly technical topics, like taxes, government regulations, and finance as well as history, psychology and how to communicate with loved ones about sensitive issues. This article highlights some of the knowledge needed to manage wealth and why it’s often so daunting without the help of an independent personal financial advisor who is familiar with your situation.
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Understanding The Federal Reserve Mandate To End Inflation
The Federal Reserve System, the nation’s central bank, has a dual mandate to pursue maximum employment and maintain price stability. These two priorities are currently treated equally, but that was not always the case. In fact, the Fed’s bias toward maximizing employment was a critical driver of the stagflation that plagued the U.S. in the late 1960s and 1970s. Recognizing the need to balance price stability and maximum employment, in 1977, Congress revised the Federal Reserve Act.
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Fed Governor Kugler Details Inflation And Economic Outlook
The 12-month inflation rate, as measured by the personal consumption expenditures (PCE) index, was 2.6% in December, down from its peak of 7.1% in June 2022, and the six-month rate for PCE inflation was even lower, at 2%, which is the target rate set by the Federal Reserve.
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Why Rates May Not Be Cut Until June
The cost of a loan to buy a home, car, college education, and achieve the American Dream is staying the same for now. As expected, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell said the central bank did not lower loan rates following the Fed’s Wednesday, Jan. 31, 2024, policy meeting.
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Practical Suggestions For Achieving Your 2024 Resolutions
New Year’s resolutions usually fail because they‘re often too hard to achieve. After six months, only 10% of people who make resolutions achieve them or remain committed to them, , according to a study by Dr. Mark Griffiths, a Chartered Psychologist and Distinguished Professor of Behavioral Addiction at the Nottingham Trent University. What can you do to make financial, medical, or other personal resolutions more likely to be achieved?
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A Sign Of Progress In Solving U.S. Economic Problems
The Federal Reserve appears to be pulling off a feat most experts did not believe it could: ending its aggressive inflation-fighting campaign of 11 interest rate hikes without tipping the U.S. economy into a recession.
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Fed Keeps Rates Unchanged; Expects Easing In 2024
To promote transparency and free markets, the Federal Reserve System began publishing the opinions of the 19 U.S. central bankers that decide interest rate policy.
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Have You Logged Into Your Social Security Account?
Have you logged in to your Social Security account? Creating an online account at SSA.gov is an important first step in understanding your retirement income situation. However, only about 60 million of the 160 million individuals in the U.S. labor force who have Social Security accounts have created a way to access the Social Security Administration’s website.
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The Great Fake Out Of 2023 Is Poised To Extend Into 2024
All year long, the economy and stock prices have fooled experts and consumers, outperforming expectations month after month.
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Test Your Financial Planning IQ
The five questions below are a challenge meant to allow you to assess your knowledge of investing, tax and financial planning. If you have been following our news stream, this quiz draws on familiar ground. The answers are below.
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Planning Briefs
Three Easy Ways To Increase Your Chance Of Financial Success
Published Wednesday, July 29, 2020, 10:20 p.m. EST
Changing your financial behavior can be an important step in determining your long-term financial success. Here are three simple activities that can help.
Automate. Infrequent interventions, such as budgeting once a year, are less likely to bring success than more automatic actions that occur quarterly or monthly. Enrolling in a salary reduction plan which takes money from each paycheck and goes into your qualified retirement plan illustrates the difference between decisions that require your recurring action versus those that automated. What else might you automate to increase your savings or make sure you pay your bills? Examples include signing up for a newsletter, webinar series, or class about tax and investment planning. The easier you make it to become educated about a topic you might not otherwise research regularly on your own, the more likely you are to seek out the knowledge you need to be more fully engaged in learning and find answers to the important questions.
Write It Up. Whenever you make a major financial decision, write yourself a note about your decision. By jotting down your analysis at the time you make a decision, you’ll create an introspective record that, over the years, will help reveal successes and failures.
Increase self-awareness. Your financial personality can help or hinder your financial success and you may be entirely unaware of it. Increasing self-awareness can help you avoid sabotaging yourself. The burgeoning social science of behavioral finance can help you learn about your financial personality traits. For example, would you rather receive $160 today or $246 in 12 months? How about $160 today or $180 in 12 months? Your answer to a series of questions like this can reveal your predisposition toward deferring rewards now in favor of reaping financial benefits from a long-term plan. Similar questions can guide you in determining how likely you are to tolerate losses in bear markets, whether you are overconfident about your financial decision-making abilities, and offer hints of the types of investments that might work best in a long-term portfolio designed to help you accomplish your financial goals.
If you are interested in increasing your self-awareness about your financial personality by taking a behavioral finance assessment or would like to talk about other steps you can take to ensure healthy financial behavior, please do not hesitate to contact us.
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