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ICW Journal

Measuring What Matters Most

Have you been measuring what matters most to your future financial success, or have you been focusing on the market’s day-to-day gyrations over the past several months? If you’ve been focusing on the market, you’re not alone. Like the crowd at a tennis match, investors have been looking back and forth, one moment at a

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Investment Behavioral Mistakes

Much has been written about investment behavioral mistakes and whether financial advisors can help clients generate market-beating investment outperformance. Amid all of the activity that investors and their advisors pursue in hopeful expectations of outperforming the market, it’s easy to overlook the risk that those activities might create below-market returns. Underperformance can easily come from

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The Value of Long Term Investing

When building wealth for the long term, your goal should be long term investing ‒ time in the market versus timing the market. This view represents the difference between being a long-term owner and a short-term renter (of stocks). If you can only take one investing axiom to heart, this might be the one. Moving

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Quantifying a Financial Advisor’s Value

Quantifying a financial advisor’s value has become easier in recent years as financial services firms have undertaken and completed studies on the matter.  Firms such as Vanguard, Morningstar, Dalbar and most recently Russell Investments, have added to the body of knowledge on this topic. The significant global changes of the past 24 months have prompted

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The Greatest Risk to Retirement Success?

Shortfall Risk is the Greatest Risk to Retirement Success The greatest risk to retirement success? For most of us, it’s shortfall risk ‒ the chance that our savings will expire before we do. Shortfall risk typically arises from one or both of these shortcomings: (1) not taking the time and doing the work to study

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Retirement Distribution Planning

Retirement Distribution Planning May Help Minimize Your Overall Tax Expenses If you’ve diligently saved and invested throughout your working years, congratulations! You’re on your way to funding a more comfortable retirement. But when you finally do stop working, you’ll face a new challenge: Making sure that your assets last as long as possible. One way

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Asset Location Strategy

Better Asset Location Strategy Helps Lower Your Tax Exposures Asset location strategy helps punctuate the old adage, “It’s not what you earn, but what you keep.” Part of investing more successfully is structuring your investments to help minimize your overall tax exposures. That’s no easy feat, given exposures to federal and state income taxes, the

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Investing Lessons from the Pension World

Investing lessons from the pension world help us to focus on the critical importance of matching our long-term retirement liabilities with proper long-term investment assets. Investing Lessons from the Pension World Help Us Generate Better Retirement Expense Estimates Asset/liability matching originated in the pension world.  Pension managers are responsible for meeting specific objectives, namely, paying

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The Shocking Truth About Index Investing

You May Not Believe It Until You Read It, But It’s True. The shocking truth about index investing is that reality can be very different from theory. Index investing funds are wildly popular with Americans: As of year-end 2021, “passive” equity and fixed income index funds managed total net assets of $5.7 trillion, according to

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The Multi-Million Dollar Retirement Planning Question

With the days of company pensions faded into memory, it’s up to most of us to build and manage our own pension plans ‒ and manage the multi-million dollar retirement planning question ourselves. How much do we need? And what are the possibilities that we suffer shortfall risk – the possibility that our savings will

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