Recent Articles from James Osborne
Five great financial tips for 30-somethings
Call it your emergency fund, your sleep-well-at-night money or your safety net, but you need it. At a bare minimum it should be over $10,000, and realistically it should be four to six months’ salary. (If you are self-employed, a contractor or otherwise have irregular income, you may consider bum...
Four keys to early retirement
Early retirees are among those who stand to benefit most from the rollout of the Affordable Care Act. Unless one was offered retiree health care (which is quickly going the way of the dodo) or had a working spouse with health benefits, an early retiree could easily be turned down for a private in...
A financial year-end to-do list
Any minute, it will be Halloween, then Thanksgiving, and then the rest of the holiday season will come and go. Suddenly, it’s 2014. Before the year runs out, investors would be wise to consider planning opportunities available to them in areas of charitable giving, deduction planning and tax loss...
Do inflation-hedged investments deliver?
Inflation-hedged investments are all the rage. Since the commodities boom of the mid 2000′s and politically-driven town criers screaming of Fed-induced hyperinflation, investors and their advisors have scrambled to build portfolios with an eye on “inflation hedged” investments. This has meant a scramble for commodity investments and Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities, among others, i[...]
The ins and out of index investing
Index investing is relatively simple – certainly much simpler than pouring over meaningless track records, performance statistics and manager biographies of actively managed mutual funds in an attempt to beat the market. That said, more thought should go into a passive portfolio than buying the nearest S&P 500 fund and considering your work done. First […]
Rating the money stars
That five-star fund manager? There's no telling where he'll be next year. Morningstar's star rating system is entirely based on past performance. A manager who had a good run over a few years will see his star rating jump. Ultimately, we're awarding star ratings to the manager who was the luckiest.
Have more, pay more
The business of investment advice is a strange one. The leading model of advisor fees results in high net worth investors paying high fees simply based on their ability to pay and not related to the services they receive. An investor with $5 million who meets with his advisor once a year will pay...
The Supremes, DOMA and money
There are several possible outcomes from the Supreme Court's decisions, but for the purposes of this discussion, let's assume that the court decides the provision of DOMA in question is, in fact, unconstitutional under the 14th Amendment's Equal Protection clause. If the court reached this conclus...