Financial Choices Matter

The term “fake news” has become synonymous with the political climate of the past few years. But the phenomenon has spread to other parts of our culture as well. What about fake news in the financial space? We’ll look at some recent news headlines to see if they qualify to be labeled as “fake news”.

0:28 - Say "Hi" to new co-host, Marc.

2:05 - Quote of the Week from Pablo Picasso.

4:50 - Financial Fake News #1: Social Security is going broke.

8:18 - Financial Fake News #2: The crash of the dollar is imminent, so buy gold now.

10:52 - Mailbag Question from Jim: Is it OK to start Social Security while still working?

Hopefully your famous last words in life won’t be “Hey y’all, watch this!” And in the financial world, there’s quite a few phrases that you don’t want to be your famous last words either…

Some of retirement planning’s most important questions seem so simple at first. They can be asked in just 4-5 words and give the impression the answers are a simple “yes” or “no”. But it’s tricky because many of these questions can become overwhelming to answer. Let’s cover some of the important retirement questions that are harder to answer than you might think.

Charles tackles the impending debt crisis facing college students and their parents.

Not everything in financial planning is black and white. In fact, most things aren’t black and white — there’s usually a lot of gray area. Let’s identify some of the issues that usually require a nuanced discussion…

It’s easy to get distracted by “shiny objects” of the financial world. Let’s cover some of the distractions for which we should be on the lookout.

Any advisor worth his or her salt is going to have a conversation with you about risk. But what in the world is “risk tolerance”? It’s a buzzword that gets used a lot in meetings with financial advisors, but we’ve found that a lot of people don’t have a great understanding of how their risk tolerance truly impacts their financial and retirement plans. Let’s fix that and give you the 411 on risk tolerance.

A lot of people have questions about their retirement plan, but we find that they’re often asking the wrong questions. We’ll cover some of these common questions and learn about the different questions you should be asking instead.

Most people think that a financial advisor’s primary job is picking investments. That’s only a small part of it. The reality is that the primary job is solving problems. Let’s look at some situations that have happened over the years where the financial planning became less about picking investments and more about solving problems.

Depending on who you ask, you could get very different answers to some of retirement planning’s most important questions. Let’s see where our opinions all stand on issues like insurance, mutual funds & annuities. And we’ll try to answer why there are so many different opinions on these concepts.