In sum, Wall Street's Bucketing Strategy is a bad joke. Its focus on the market's high average cumulative return or the high chance of doing well, on average, is akin to basing your financial plan on dying precisely at your life expectancy -- at the date at which people like you will, on average, die.

Everyone is scared of dentists, medical tests, and financial planning. I get the first two. But financial planning? Done right, it can uncover a gold mind.

“House poor” is a common expression used to describe people who are wasting too much money on housing, leaving them with too little to spend on everything else. But it can also refer to those who are getting too little housing bang for their buck.

Student loans total a colossal $1.74 trillion with 43 million Americans owing, on average, $38,000. The loans swamp the $1.14 trillion in outstanding credit card debt, whose average balance is a far smaller $6,864.

The above chart, based on an S&P study, reached my inbox by way of Torsten Slok, Apollo’s Chief Economist. Torsten produces The Daily Spark — a terrific financial blog providing important insights into our financial world, all in bite-sized chunks.

When it comes to motivating us to change our financial behavior, Dave Ramsey is simply the best.

Like much of the world, Wall Street is psyched about AI, specifically using its deep learning to help sell “advanced” advice and financial products.

Here’s another stomach-turning story of Social Security incompetence and bureaucratic cruelty.

The best way to hedge this risk used to be to purchase not a nominal, but a real annuity — one whose payment would be adjusted upward each year in light of that year's inflation.

You can go from house poor — spending too much or at least more than you'd like on housing — to becoming house rich and you don't necessarily need to downsize your home to extract more value from it. In our case, we upsized our home while still netting a big sum.

The coronavirus is scary enough, but for far too many of us, it's becoming a financial nightmare.

Optimizing retirement outcomes means funding the highest standard of living, both before and after retirement, with a smooth transition in between. Planning for that economics-based outcome, known as “consumption smoothing,” is computationally intensive. But a recent technological breakthrough, which does that smoothing using uncertain asset returns, gives advisors a tool that improves portfolio choice.

Target date funds can be far off target. They can be far too risky when young and far too safe when old. The proper fiduciary default investment is TIPS (Treasury Inflation Protected Securities), not a target date fund.

As Kitces suggest, many if not most practitioners interpret the replacement rate rule of thumb as an income replacement rate. Interpreted in that light, this couple's replacement rate is not the vaunted 70%, nor the often higher 85% figure bandied about. Instead, it's zero or essentially zero in seven of the eight cases considered.

Over 4,000 people divorce each day in our country. Some do so after many years of marriage and in the context of very unequal spousal incomes. Such divorces often require alimony to achieve a fair settlement. The question is how much alimony should be provided and for how long? Economics and advanced software can help answer these questions.

You can’t rely on Social Security to provide accurate information on your options. In my experience, over half of what Social Security staff tell people is either flat out wrong, incomplete, or misleading. But now I've come to lear that you can't even rely on Social Security's benefit statement to be accurate.

Two years ago today, the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) released their report A-09-18-50559 which estimates that over 11,000 widows have been cheated out of more than $130,000,000 — an average of over $10,000 each .