Planner’s Perspective
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Nathaniel Ritchison
July 17th, 2009
Now, more than any other time in the last 70 years, people are reevaluating their investment and financial decisions. The concept of down-side risk has become a stark reality rather than just a catch-phrase. The time frame of investing has also become paramount as investors calculate how long it will take their portfolios to recover so they can calculate current and future income adjustments. Our job as financial planners is to help clients work through these issues and analyze each area of their financial life so they can make clear decisions that are compatible with their overall written financial plan. A financial planner specifically trained to address these concepts and ensure that each and every investment and financial planning decision is complementing your goals and helping you build a successful life.
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Investing with the Wind at our Backs
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Bruce Doole
July 16th, 2009
INVEST WITH THE ECONOMY NOT AGAINST IT….With the tremendous volatility in our financial markets these past 12 months, we thought it was appropriate to talk about how to invest in each part of the economic cycle and how we can use it in our investment portfolios. In every economic cycle there is going to be a period of slowing or negative economic growth, followed by recovery, growth, and ultimately inflation before the economy slips into recession again. We know that these cycles will happen, what we don’t know is when and for how long. If we were designing a portfolio to simply match the economic cycles, we would seek to eliminate asset classes that did well in the last economic cycle (which seems counterintuitive). We’d then invest in those assets that are going to do the best in the upcoming economic environment but may not have been performing well recently.
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2009 Stimulus Bill
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Nathaniel Ritchison
February 24th, 2009
In a week shortened by President’s Day, President Obama last Tuesday signed into law his historic first bill, the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. Despite this unprecedented action to revive our economy, the stock markets continued their slide and made new lows in this 16 month old recession. With the passage of the bill, the president managed to deliver on one of his campaign commitments. President Obama’s chief economic advisor Lawrence Summers wrote last year describing an effective government stimulus for the economy as timely, temporary and targeted. Although timely, there has been heated debate in both the Senate and the House as to the scope of spending and the duration of tax cuts in the bill. A portion of the bill, approximately $200 billion, will provide tax relief for American taxpayers, while an additional $300 billion or so is targeted at creating and maintaining an estimated 3.5 million jobs through government spending.
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