Tag: Schwab

If You’re Self-Employed and Have Zero Employees, You Should Set Up an Individual 401k Plan Before the End of the Year

Financial planners and tax advisors tend to shy away from simple blanket statements. They’re far more comfortable using highly-detailed, multi-faceted statements that, while accurate, nonetheless lose something in the telling due to, ironically enough, their completeness. It’s understandable. After all, the arena in which financial planning and taxation come together […]

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 […]

Not All Total-Bond-Fund Bond Index Funds are Alike

I read Morningstar’s annual report the other day, and saw something interesting in there: Morningstar’s business is being hurt by the rise of passive investment approaches and the mirror-image fall of active investment approaches. That makes sense, right? After all, Morningstar helps folks be better informed about, primarily, mutual funds, […]

The Indefatigable March of the Asset Gatherers — The Gallop Home of the Bad Horses

There’s been much talk lately of banks doing away with “free checking.” The banks, the thinking goes, as a direct result of some of the new banking federal regulations stemming from The Great Recession, no longer have the un-checked ability to charge $35 and up as “insufficient funds” penalties (also […]