Annuities sound like a great idea – “guaranteed” returns with income for life – but in reality annuities have yet to live up to the hype and are extremely complex products.  1. Unfavorable tax treatment.  Any growth is ordinary income (not capital gain), and you can never take a loss. 2. Annual Expenses.  You can find some [...]

In April, Congress passed and the President signed the Continuing Extension Act of 2010 which extends COBRA subsidy eligibility period for the third time for individuals who are involuntarily terminated on or before May 31, 2010.  The subsidy covers 65% of the cost of COBRA coverage. It also extends eligibility retroactively from the previous deadline of [...]

“What we find is that people don’t really understand what asset allocation means,” says Mark Berg, CFP, national board member of the National Association of Personal Financial Planners and the president of Wheaton, Ill.-based Timothy Financial Counsel Inc. See the full article “Asset Allocation in Hard Times” by Data Dratch in The Fiscal Times that [...]

At 1:40 PM (CST), something unusual occurred:  I watched the stock market ticker.  Most of you know that we have a long term perspective and watching the day to day market fluctuations, much less the intraday movements, has little to no appeal to us.  Nevertheless, I happened to be looking up the current price of [...]