Author - Mark Hume

When you are early in your professional career you typically have not accumulated a significant amount of investable assets.  At least not to most investment professionals.

High-emotion, low-probability topics dominate news headlines and your emotions.  And this means it is top of mind and difficult to dismiss.

In the world of private wealth management and financial planning, these are recent, common issues that I would classify as high-emotion, low-probability:

Remember the game show, “Press Your Luck”?  A contestant would earn spins and the number one goal of the spin was to not get a whammy.  A whammy meant that your earnings from the game went to zero.  Getting a whammy was based purely on luck.

Scams and fraud have been pervasive throughout time.  The internet created a new avenue to scam unsuspecting people.  My first memory of an internet scam was the prince from a distant land who wanted to wire you money.  That never works out like you hope.

STOP

Have you already filed your 2020 taxes?

Is your Adjusted Gross Income (AGI) in the neighborhood or $150k - $200k?  What?.....you don’t know this number off the top of your head???   j/k

If you have not filed your 2020 taxes and you think your AGI is in this vicinity you need to….

• Nick Saban
• Dabo Sweeney

These are the only active football coaches who have won multiple national championships.  When Alabama hired Nick Saban, there were only two active college football coaches with multiple national championships:  Bobby Bowden and Pete Carroll.  Bowden was two years away from retirement and Carroll was becoming mired in sca

Our final installment of Know What You Own is a perfect illustration that you cannot make assumptions based on the title of a fund.

You can’t find a less expense or more simplistic equity fund than an S&P 500 index fund.  The two tickers above, SPY & VOO do just that:  Mimic the S&P 500 index.

That same newsletter from Part 1 just published another article.  This one was on the real estate market. 

And while it was not as misleading as the Nasdaq vs tech fund issue, it did completely gloss over the largest sectors of this asset class.

We recently received a free trial for a Substack newsletter on finance.  I was browsing a recent post and a headline caught my eye: “How do I find a lower cost alternative to Nasdaq ETF QQQ?”

The proposal:  Deposit a dollar into your 16yo child’s Roth IRA for every dollar they earn at their first job up to $6,000.  Do this through the year they graduate college.

A question: How much tax-free money does this provide them at age 70 assuming 8% annualized returns?

The answer:  $2.3M