By: Laura Walton AFC® The promo intrigued me – a story about a having trouble making ends meet on $100,000 income – so I found it online. Bear in mind that the median household income is $59,000 – we should be able to make it on $100,000, right? NPR’s Lulu Garcia-Navarro reported on four conversations with just…
By: Laura Walton AFC® Ted has conceded to Warren and now Mark is taking a seat at the table. Here’s an update on the famous $1M bet. It all started at an event when a student asked Warren “…if you think [a low-cost S&P 500 index fund] can beat hedge funds, why doesn’t anyone take…
By: Laura Walton AFC® Halloween seems to kick off the holiday season. This year, Halloween spending was big – maybe another sign of consumer confidence trending upwards. Here are the stats from the National Retail Federation: Projected spending: $9.1 billion (a record high) Americans planning to partake in Halloween festivities: 179 million Top adult costume: A witch…
By: Laura Walton AFC® For our 3rd Decade program, it’s all about the bass, in our case, the bottom line. Now that we’ve had a chance to track ‘before’ and ‘after’ net worth statements for our participants, we’re seeing “all the right junk in all the right places” to take a line from Meghan Trainor’s hit song.…
By: Laura Walton AFC® We don’t teach kids about thermodynamics by letting them play with a box of matches so why do we teach them about investing by encouraging them to play stock market games? There’s a new stock market game out. Stockpile is a startup designed to allow investors to buy fractional shares of stocks with…
By: Laura Walton AFC® This was Richard Thaler’s response to how he would spend the $1.1M awarded him for the Nobel Prize in Economics. You see, his focus has been on the irrational decisions we make about money. His point is that people are human. Economists have long thought that people would make rational choices…
By: Laura Walton AFC® He said “I’m not going to freeze my credit.” She said “I think I will.” That was the conversation at our house this week. What are you going to do? Here’s my message from Equifax: Equifax, one of the big three credit reporting bureaus, the very folks who track and report…
By: Laura Walton AFC® I promised a more objective way of choosing a financial planner in my recent blog on how advisors dress. How they charge is a good place to start. Not only will it tell you the cost of the service, but it will give you a good idea who you’re dealing with.…
By: Laura Walton AFC® From psychologist Daniel Kahneman and economist Angus Deaton we learned that higher incomes, over about $75,000 a year, didn’t make us any happier per se, they just allowed us to spend more. A new study says that increased happiness depends on the way we spend that extra money. This study says that if…
By: Laura Walton AFC® As with many favorite recipes, the ingredients are simple but the dish is a crowd pleaser that is served time and again with predictable results and rave reviews. As you know, Warren Buffett’s secret investing ingredient is the low-cost S&P 500 index fund but, he says, the mega-rich can’t believe that…