Integrating your Luther Wealth investments with Mint and other finance apps

When I am working with a new client for Luther Wealth, the first thing I do is make them count all their money. It sounds silly, but if you’ve had a few jobs, there’s a pretty good chance you have an old 401k laying around somewhere that you haven’t looked at in a while. In fact, in New York State alone, there is over $15.5 billion laying around in unclaimed, forgotten investment accounts. But the first step in creating a retirement plan is to figure out what you’re starting with.

Woman using a laptop to set a personal budget and retirement plan. She is integrating Mint with her savings accounts. https://pixabay.com/photos/analytics-charts-business-woman-3265840/
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The Hidden Economic Miracle of Driverless Cars – Way Fewer Dead People

Driverless cars are coming! And along with robot drivers, a lot will change in American culture. One aspect that will change, that I think is underappreciated, is that there will be many more people alive. And it turns out people being alive is enormously beneficial to the overall economy!

Driverless Car - Image by Falco at Pixabay
This little guy drives way safer than you do.
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You Shouldn’t Invest In The Company You Work For

Young investors usually start off investing in stocks through mutual funds, often through retirement vehicles like 401k funds and IRAs. In many cases, single stocks (stock in a single company) don’t enter into an investor’s portfolio until much later. Often, the first time an early-stage investor owns a single stock is when they are granted some stock in their own employer firm as part of an incentive program.

What should this young employee do with their new stock? They believe their company is going places, and they might have heard some office chatter about how much money their coworkers have made by holding stock during a recent period of rapid growth.

I’m going to make an unpopular recommendation. Do not invest in your own company, and if you own shares already, sell them!

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Best Financial Reads This Week – 11 Feb 2020

My favorite article this week shows how in the past 20 years or so, the age cohort of American CEOs hasn’t changed at all (i.e. baby boomers). Stay tuned next week for an explanation of why you shouldn’t own stock in the firm you work for!

Reading List – 5 December 2019

Great example of status quo bias in an article about the flu this week. And EU privacy laws are helping a murderer wipe his history from Google. Fun stuff!

CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=511527

I Ran A Marathon! Also, Here’s How to Read a Prospectus

I ran the Philly Marathon this past Sunday! It was my first, and I definitely didn’t run it fast, but I finished. I wasn’t a fan of the rain and snow at the end though. Anyway, back to business…

Many investors that I speak with have their savings invested in a combination of mutual funds. Usually, owned through tax-advantaged accounts like 401k’s and IRAs. This is a good way to invest, although I often notice investors don’t know what fees they are paying. This is an intentional feature of the mutual fund market, unfortunately. Mutual fund providers must provide certain cost information in a prospectus, but many providers intentionally make this information inaccessible.

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Reading List – 14 November 2019

The most important financial news of the past two weeks is that scientists have discovered that Jackson Pollock’s technique cleverly avoided a characteristic of fluid dynamics that leads to unwanted curly tails on paint pourings. Finance!

Source: Plos One. Pollock avoided hydrodynamic instabilities to paint with his dripping technique.
Bernardo Palacios, Alfonso Rosario, Monica M. Wilhelmus, Sandra Zetina, Roberto Zenit.

You Can’t Beat the Market and You Should Stop Trying

Here are some common questions I get asked as a financial adviser. What’s your system? What’s your investment strategy? Do you focus on market timing or relative value? How do you plan to outperform the market?

These questions are natural. Investors want to understand what advisers are doing with their money. But in a way, these questions demonstrate a lot of the misconceptions about what exactly counts as success in retirement saving.

You shouldn’t try to beat the market. Instead, investors should actually aspire to equaling the market return. Let’s take a look at why.

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Extra Spooky Reading List – 30 October 2019

OK fine, this reading list is not spooky. But it’s still really good. Google posts a 23% decline in profit! And a very interesting piece by Tyler Cowen on the game theory dynamic going on between President Trump and Senator McConnell. Lots of aspects I hadn’t thought about at all.

Colonel Vindman at President Volodymyr Zelensky’s inauguration

Don’t miss any new posts! Sign up below to subscribe. I generally post once per month and I alternate between longer-form articles and short digests of interesting financial content from other sites I’ve found. Thanks for reading!