Archive for July, 2013

Hospice: A Few Surprises for Those First Learning About It

Hospice care is the sort of care that we get when we are on our last legs. Most of us know that. But what hospice care truly is, once you dig into it, is quite surprising to a lot of folks. This piece aims to fix that. It talks about […]

Investing Is Simpler than You Think, Part 1: The Rise of Self-Directed Investing

I came of financial-career age at E*TRADE in the late 90s. The commercialization of the Internet was in its infancy back then, and so too was the world of online stockbrokers like E*TRADE and Schwab and Ameritrade and Datek (long ago hobbled and then subsumed into Ameritrade). At the juncture […]

Embracing Change: Will You Jump, or Do You Need to Be Pushed?

Richard Thompson, guitar hero to many (me not so much) and all around very-much-a-Brit sort of fella, along with his lovely-voiced then-wife Linda, on their seminal getting-divorced album called Shoot Out the Lights, did a song called Did She Jump or was She Pushed? Far more of a music guy […]

Replacing “Assets Under Management Fees” with “Net Worth Under Management Fees”

The other day I asked a money manager I was getting to know whether his firm charged a lower fee for managing bond portfolios than it charged for managing stock portfolios. He said no — that his firm charged the same for both. I asked him about this because some […]