What Can Happen When You Have a Life Insurance Salesman as Financial Advisor
Posted on: January 19, 2012
Financial Salesman
In an online forum, a doctor’s wife shared with me her story that should serve as a cautionary tale for all doctors.
Her husband had a solo medical practice. They had a “financial advisor” who advised them to put their saving into a $5mm cash value life insurance policy. They believed the product not only provided protection in the event of the doctor’s death but also was a great savings vehicle.
Last July, her husband was struck by an uninsured drunk driver. He suffered brain damage. Though he recovered from the coma, he was unable to practice medicine any more.
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Government Retirees Beware: Your Financial Advisor May Not Be Your Friend
Posted on: January 14, 2012
I have a client (Let’s call him John) who retired 12 years ago from the government. He had a pension, and he had the option of taking out a lump sum of about $800k or drawing a monthly check of more than $4,400 per month until death.
Lost Retirement Money?
John took his options to his financial advisor from Smith Barney (now absorbed into Morgan Stanley Smith Barney.) Guess what the advisor recommended? He recommended that John take out the lump sum and let him manage it instead.
By the time John came to me for a second opinion financial review four years ago, his retirement account had only $265k left. John decided to become my client, and I have been able to restore some of his money, but not all.
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If you are new parents, you are busy nursing, changing diapers, and dealing with the emotional roller coaster of having a new life in your household. If you put your finances in backburner, I don’t blame you.
As a new parent and a financial advisor, I can offer you a few absolutely necessary to-do items to safeguard the financial well-being of your family and your new baby.
1. Have a will.
Now that you have a baby, you don’t just live for yourself any more. You have the responsibility of seeing your baby grow up. What happens if both you and your spouse die in an accident? If you don’t have a will, the court will determine the baby’s guardianship. Do you want to leave that decision to the court without your input? If you don’t, get a will.
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A 2011 Investment Recap
Posted on: January 8, 2012
My investment approach can be summed up by three principles:
- Globally diversified
- Small cap value tilt
- Short duration tilt
This approach endured extraordinary challenges in 2011.
1. Globally diversified
Even though the US equity market largely ended up where it started, the global equity markets did a lot worse: the MSCI EAFA Index (world developed markets) dropped 15% and the MSCI Emerging Market Index dropped 20%. To the extent that your portfolio is globally diversified, it will suffer along with the rest of the world. Despite that, global diversification is still a sound principle. We should not regret just because the US market did better. In fact, the market that did the best last year was Venezuela; it went up 110%! Should we regret not concentrating on the Venezuela market? (The answer is no.)
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Saving for College
My son is 6 weeks old. Today, he received his social security card. The first thing I did for him after receiving the card was to open two Maryland 529 plan accounts for him: one with myself as the account holder, and the other with my wife.
In Maryland, the 529 plan deduction limit per parent per child is $2,500. So I put $2,500 into each of the accounts, for a total of $5,000. I invested the money for a target date 2030 fund since that’s the time my child will be of college age. I further set up an automatic contribution going forward: $2,500 will be deposited into each account every year.
Why I am doing this?
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How Can I Help You in 2012
Posted on: January 3, 2012
A few days ago I got a call from someone who needs financial help. He is a typical middle class person, making a middle class wage, and has not saved a lot of money.
How Can I Help?
In the past, I would have gently turned him away: “Sir, my practice has a limited capacity of serving only 50 clients. To make the most of it, I only work with doctors and small business owners who have at least $500k in investable assets or a combined household income of $400k and above.”
Maybe it’s because of my newborn son’s sickness, but I did not say no this time. I took him through the discovery process to find out where he was financially, what he wanted to achieve, and how he planed to get there.
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10. How to Tell If Your Financial Advisor is a Crook
9. Why asset class diversification is superior?
8. The 2011 estate tax changes
7. Recession and stock market performance
6. Bill Gates: 11 Things You Don’t Learn in School
5. Variable annuity fees you don’t know you are paying
4. 2011 year end tax-planning tips for individuals
2. Profit from Harry Dent’s prediction? think again!
1. Bonus depreciation: Congress wants businesses to invest in 2011
Also see Top 10 last month.
Get informed about wealth building, sign up for The Investment Scientist newsletter
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Today is the last trading day of 2011. The S&P 500 closed at 1257, exactly the same close as in 2010! So, if your goal is wealth preservation, the market just did it for you.
Or did it?
From January to April, the market staged a four-month rally of 8.5% to peak at 1364 on April 29. For the next six months, it collapsed nearly 20% to bottom at 1098 on Oct. 3. Then, it staged a late rally to close the year at 1257.
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- In: Life
- Leave a Comment
Last Monday, we took our newborn son to hospital for an MRI. He was found to have a lipoma corpus callosum, a very rare congenital tumor in the middle of his left and right brains.
Our pastor Lon Solomon has a daughter with brain damage. If it comes to that, we have an example to follow. Here is what he shared in Esquire magazine:
Jill was born perfectly normal. At three months she started having seizures, and they got worse. Eventually she lost the ability to speak. She’s probably had five thousand grand mals or more, and has serious brain injury. She’s sixteen now, and nonverbal. It took nine years, but finally the doctors figured out that she had mitochondrial disease. The mitochondria are the parts of your cells that produce energy, and hers don’t work right. Her brain doesn’t get enough energy. She used to have six or eight seizures a day. Once, she had nineteen. We never slept through the night.
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Credit: behaviorgap.com
In my previous article, “The perils of chasing hot fund managers,” I showed that the average investor in a mutual fund run by “star” manager Bill Miller would be better off buying and holding an S&P 500 index fund.
There is only one problem. Most index fund investors are not immune to the buy high and sell low tendency, as illustrated by the table below. Between 1991 and 2005, the Vanguard S&P 500 Index Fund (VFINX) returned an annualized 11.51%, but the average VFINX investor only earned a return of 7.96% during the same period.
| 1991 to 2005 annualized | |
| VFINX fund return | 11.51% |
|
VFINX investor return |
7.96% |
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This week, a business woman came to my office for a second opinion financial review.
She explained why she came to see me: she bought a permanent life insurance policy because her financial advisor told her it is a great investment. She has been paying $3000 a month for that, and so far she has put in roughly $80k. Recently, she needed some cash and called to redeem the policy. Much to her surprise, the surrender value is only $1,300. She became suspicious of everything in her portfolio and wanted me to examine it for her.
It took me only five minutes to figure out that her financial advisor is screwing her, no punt intended.
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Bill Miller’s Legg Mason Value Trust
On November 17, Bill Miller announced that he would step down as manager of Legg Mason Capital Management Value Trust (LMVTX).
From 1991 to 2005, under Miller’s stewardship the fund outperformed the S&P 500 index for an astounding 15 straight years. Since then, the fund has underperformed the index in all but one year, and by a significant margin.
So what’s the problem? The problem is many investors bought the fund only after Miller had become a mutual fund rock star, just in time for his hot streak to end. They missed much of his upward ride, but were fully onboard when the fund went down the toilet. See the table below. Read the rest of this entry »
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10. America’s top financial advisors: how they are made?
8. The 2011 estate tax changes
7. Why asset class diversification is superior?
6. Recession and stock market performance
5. Variable annuity fees you don’t know you are paying
3. 2011 year end tax-planning tips for individuals
2. Bonus depreciation: Congress wants businesses to invest in 2011
1. Profit from Harry Dent’s prediction? think again!
Also see Top 10 last month.
Get informed about wealth building, sign up for The Investment Scientist newsletter
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Why I Am Most Thankful
Posted on: November 30, 2011
- In: Charitable | Life
- Leave a Comment
At 2:24pm on 11/5/2011, my second son Caden arrived in the world. Upon seeing his face, my heart sank since there appeared to be a tiny piece of flesh dangling from his nose.
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Buying My Primary Residence
Posted on: November 29, 2011
- In: Real Estate
- 1 Comment
Less than a week after we were done with settlement on a rental home purchase, we bought a house for our primary residence. The decision process for our primary residence purchase was vastly different from that of the rental property. For one, I didn’t use cap rate to evaluate the primary residence. Instead, we followed these five decision steps.
1. School district
My two sons will grow up in this house, so the right school district was of the utmost importance. My wife did thorough research, and she declared Whitman to be the best school district in the whole state of Maryland, followed closely by Churchill. The first is in Bethesda, the second is in Potomac. These two areas happen to be the most expensive areas in Maryland.
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What It Takes to Be a Landlord
Posted on: November 28, 2011
Owning a rental property as investment may sound attractive to a lot of people who are sick and tired of the volatile stock market. However, owning a rental property is like owning a business. Do you know what it takes to be a landlord? Listen to Paula Pant talks about it.
Podcast: Becoming a landlord
Table of contents
[00:00] Introduction from Tom Dziubek
[00:36] Interview with Paula Pant
– [00:54] Owning rental properties
– [01:51] Analyzing a property’s profitability
– [03:04] Expenses involved
– [04:08] Things to look for in a property
– [05:19] Renting to professionals
Read the rest of this entry »
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