With the lowest labor market participation rate since 1979 announced on Friday Aril 5, maybe all the laid off, underworked and underemployed entrepreneurs are creating websites.  According to Google, there are now 30 trillion websites throughout the world up from just 1 trillion sites just 10 years ago!  That’s thousands of websites for every citizen [...]

During this past Easter weekend, I was reminded of the old Proverb “Half a loaf is better than none”. That was first said by a federal employee going out to play golf at noon. It is hard to believe that less than a decade ago, we were talking about partial privatization of the Social Security [...]

Will Rogers once said that the income taxes has made more liars out of Americans than golf so as we wrap up the tax season and look at the summary of results from the Variable and Fixed Indexed Annuity arena in 2012,  it looks as if Variable Annuities continue to slide after three straight years [...]

Bill Gross and Mohammed El-Erian, co- managers of the World’s largest Mutual Fund at Pimco said the stock market is running out of gas and to buy 5 year Treasuries today, which are one of the major investment vehicles purchased by life carriers that sell indexed and income annuities that feature income riders.   Both [...]

They say there is a coffee shop on Wall Street  serving a Stock Market Breakfast-scrambled nest eggs. With millions of aging baby boomers continuing to work past normal retirement age, many clients are wondering if there is anything they can do to reduce income taxes on social security benefits. Annuities are one way to access [...]

The more things change the more they remain the same or so it seems. One glaring fact is that for as far as I remember, Mutual Fund Investors, Indexed Annuity Savers and other investors have abysmally underperformed the market or their benchmark regardless of whether the market is up or down. For the last 10 [...]

There has been much discussion about what period in the past our capital markets resemble. Is it 1987, a period of  rising rates in the Spring, currency misstatements, and a giant controversial tax act that led to a crash in October? Is it 1973-74, where the resignation of a President, a tripling of oil prices [...]

As Hollywood stands stunned by the enormous success of the History Channels miniseries ”The Bible” and the Employee Benefit Research Institute(EBRI) reports a record number of people destitute for retirement, it is important to remember a few of the less talked about principals that are being ignored by many savers and investors as we celebrate [...]

Sixty Years ago Sir Edmund Hillary, ascended Mt Everest to become the first person to climb the highest mountain in the world.  Hillary’s ascent not only inspired the name for Hillary Clinton, even though she was born six years earlier,  should be a mounting metaphor for the saver and investor of  the fact that it [...]

Late last year, I predicted in September that 2013 and 2014 would the year of the buyout and to prepare for it by brushing up how to use social media to track job changers .  ERISA provides substantial benefits having been enacted in 1974 to protect against employer abuses of defined benefit pension plans. For [...]