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Intro

If you’ve been investing in stocks or bonds for several years, you may feel like you’re beginning to get a hang of this precarious trade. At this point, you may be making plans to diversify your portfolio or research a more complex investment strategy. But in reality, you should be using this time to get back to the basics.

Intro

It is not often that the topics of life insurance and annuities are brought up in the same discussion, primarily because they serve two very distinct purposes. Although they are both products of life insurance companies, life insurance policies are protection against dying too soon, and annuities are protection against living to long.

This isn’t our parents’ or grandparents’ retirement anymore. Just a few decades ago, many retirees enjoyed the full benefits of the “three-legged stool” of retirement provide by guaranteed pension payments, savings, and Social Security.

If you believe some of the world’s greatest investors, such as Benjamin Graham and Warren Buffet, it’s not investments that cause people to lose money; rather, it’s people who cause people to lose their money. What is meant by that is investing with sound principles and intelligent practices will always have a greater likelihood of success.

For over 200 years, family businesses have been at the core of wealth creation in America. Family business founders take the leap of faith to launch their business venture, often risking everything, and then spend their waking hours to realize their vision.

This is the story of two friends – one, we’ll call Randy, who, at age 25, recognized the importance of starting a retirement savings program. The other is Peter, same age, but he couldn’t seem to see beyond his need for more immediate gratification – wanting to experience the kind of life style enjoyed by his more highly compensated friends.

Today’s retirees are finding that retirement requires at least as much psychological and emotional preparation as it does financial preparation. So, retirement planning needs to include a thorough assessment of human assets and liabilities along with an assessment of financial assets and liabilities.

The decision to go forward with your plans to start a family is a joyous one, but it can also lead to increased stress especially if your financial house has not been child-proofed. Considering that, on average, the cost of raising a child now exceeds $300,000, there’s little margin for error for most young families that have other important financial goals to achieve.

Let’s state up front that you don’t need a credit monitoring service to stay on top of your credit status. For people who are diligent and deliberate in monitoring their own credit, they can do so by accessing a free credit report from each of the credit bureaus once per year.