Over confident and lacks patience. Over confidence and lack of patience manifests itself in a number of ways. If you think you can beat the market by picking individual stocks, be very careful. If you want to test your skills, set up two portfolios. Use a passive approach with one and build it along the […]
Retirement Planning Mistake #10
Investors do not monitor their portfolio adequately. Rare is the investor who can place their hands on the Internal Rate of Return (IRR) of their portfolio. An even smaller percentage of investors know how well their portfolio is performing with respect to an appropriate benchmark. The third measure, risk of portfolio, reduces the percentage to […]
The High Cost of Fees
High fees are to be avoided, particularly management fees. Readers of ITA Wealth Management are well aware of my propensity to keep fees to a minimum and that is why I place so much emphasis on using commission free ETFs. While most of you are managing your own money, there may be new readers of […]
Retirement Planning Mistake #11
Although alluded to in this “mistake series,” an emphasis, or special attention needs to be given to portfolio volatility or risk management. Even if we are tracking portfolio risk as identified by either the Information Ratio (IR), Sortino Ratio (SR) and/or Retirement Ratio (RR), we need to focus on protecting capital. Imagine you retired in […]
William Bernstein Recommends Saving More and Spending Less
William J. Bernstein, in a recent interview, projects modest market gains (2% net expenses) over next two decades. That does not bode well for the 45 to 55 age generation. Here is a quote from the Bernstein interview. “The way you’re going to get rich is by working hard; not spending a lot of money […]
Retirement Plan: Am I On Track?
Retirement planning is a primary motivator for saving and setting up an investment portfolio. Are there any saving guidelines for the individual investor? Below are a few and I suggest you check out William Bernstein’s words of wisdom. Search “Bernstein” on this blog. To gauge whether or not your retirement savings program is on track, […]
Time To Bang The Retirement Drum – Again
“Most U.S. households are heading for a worse lifestyle in retirement than they had while they were working, because they simply aren’t saving enough…” So writes Stan Choe in an Associated Press article. Check out the Retirement Planning category for past blog posts on this subject. Date from the Federal Reserve indicates that thirty-five (35%) […]
Retirement Requirements: May 2021
What size portfolio is required for a comfortable retirement? There are numerous variables to consider. Here is an example for our fictitious couple. We begin with current data on what the average retirement annual salary is and what the average household is living on in the United States. Looking up this data, I found that […]



You must be logged in to post a comment.