Category Archives: Personal Finance FAQ

Is Owning a Home a Necessary Part of a Retirement Plan?

Fort Worth, Texas based Certified Financial Planner Jason Hull of Hull Financial Planning firmly believes that owning a home is not a necessary part of a retirement plan.

A study by Walter D’Lima of Old Dominion University and Paul Schultz of Notre Dame showed that real estate investors outperform general market indices, but only when they:

  • Live near the investment property
  • Buy without a mortgage
  • And have experience in real estate investing

Furthermore, those investors earn less when the live in the house.

Typically, the average person will buy a property … Read the article

Prepare Your Money for a Recession

While the coronavirus induced recession is forcing all of us to reevaluate our financial behaviors with a close eye for detail, these are habits that will serve us well whenever life has returned to normalcy, which, hopefully, is sooner rather than later!
  1. Cut living expenses. In times when we are not worried about negative financial outcomes, we tend to spend more extravagantly. Often, the things that we spend money on are things that don’t actually provide us with a lot of psychic value, or that we perceive as too onerous to
… Read the article

Should Millennials Use Roboadvisors?

For whom would a robo-advisor be a good choice?

There are only a couple of situations where I think that robo-investors (I really call them robo-investors, as they’re not robo-advisors, such as myfinancialanswers.com) are appropriate for a millennial:

You are absolutely, positively, never going to rebalance your portfolio, and you want to put money into something and completely forget about it. I still would rather see someone invest in a low-cost target date fund, such as Vanguard’s target date funds, than see someone pay over the top for a robo-investor.

You have … Read the article

How to Spring Clean Your Finances

  1. Why is it important to check in with your finances quarterly or biannually?
I’m a fan of bucketing your check ins with your finances:
  • Monthly: Check your checking and credit card accounts. What you’re looking for are a couple of things. First, you want to make sure that you’re not spending beyond your budget, which I recommend making on a monthly basis. Second, you want to check to make sure that there are no unrecognized charges or transactions in these accounts. While you have limited liability on them, particularly with credit
… Read the article

Why Should You Think About Updating Your Will During the Coronavirus Pandemic?

Generally speaking, people are afraid to face their own mortality. We have a psychological trait called optimism bias that is often very beneficial – it’s what helps us to believe in a brighter future and to wake up in the morning and go to work. If we didn’t have optimism bias, we’d sink into depression and live like Eeyores.
However, optimism bias also causes us to not believe that we could ever get hurt or to die. How many teenagers and young adults do you know who think that they are indestructible?
… Read the article