The College Solutions Blog

November 10, 2007

Do you know how well your mutual funds have been doing lately? This past week, you were probably too depressed to look at your returns thanks to the market’s particularly nasty tantrum that just wouldn’t quit. And that’s okay since frequent checking of your portfolio’s net worth is often counterproductive. Turn on your computer and you can easily find the...

November 3, 2007

Over the years, studies have thoroughly researched and exhaustively footnoted what most of us already know. Americans typically don’t start seriously thinking about saving for retirement until they near their own mid-century mark. After snoozing for decades, our middle-aged Rip Van Winkles suddenly awake with a jolt to see the financial equivalent of a fully loaded pallet of cinder blocks...

November 1, 2007

I read an interesting story on Yahoo today that delved into the habits of so-called middle-class millionaires. The conclusions of the private wealth experts reminded me of the take-home messages from a book entitled, The Millionaire Next Door. Middle-class millionaires are nearly three times as likely as the average middle-class American to select a career based on potential earnings and...

October 13, 2007

I got an email this week from one of my favorite financial whizzes. When I still had my newspaper column, I occasionally wrote about Henry (Bud) Hebeler, who was formerly a top executive at Boeing and the holder of three MIT degrees. (As a complete failure in math, those degrees will always impress me.) After Hebeler retired, he created a...

September 15, 2007

Someone at The Wall Street Journal got a jump on the competition when it found a copy of Alan Greenspan’s new book in a New York area bookstore. The newspaper was so delighted by its find that its article about the book, The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New Word, was the lead story in Saturday’s edition. The self-described...

September 1, 2007

When I read what’s been happening in the financial markets lately, I’m embarrassed to be a financial journalist. Actually, it’s not Wall Street’s behavior that embarrasses me, it’s the way it’s being covered. Why do journalists insist on covering the market as if it’s a horse race? It’s not. People who are invested in stocks should be committed to keeping...

August 24, 2007

You might assume that there is nothing good to say about the subprime mortgage meltdown that has triggered heartbreaking personal tragedies across the country. I assumed the same thing, which was why I was surprised to learn from The Wall Street Journal yesterday that there is one pleasant side to the financial heartbreak. Some of the nation’s mortgage lenders are...

August 18, 2007

I have never seen any statistics about the percentage of Americans, who catastrophize. These are the people who tend to tear themselves apart about setbacks, or even imaginary setbacks, which makes them seem far worse than they are. I am one of those people. When my daughter started driving, I worried a lot about her getting in a terrible car...

August 7, 2007

If you ever fiddled around with an online retirement calculator, you may have felt uneasy with the results. That’s because these calculators, as imperfect as they are, will generate meaningless results if the calculations are based on faulty assumptions. Of course, we are the weak links since we’re stuck providing those assumptions. T. Rowe Price, the mutual fund company, hopes...

August 3, 2007

For a couple of days last week, the stock markets seemed to be behaving as if it was suffering from some horrible chronic illness. But then Wall Street bounced back and behaved as if the problem had just been a hang nail. Today, the market has crawled back in bed. For all of us invested in stocks, volatility is something...