In the world of financial advice, most people hire advisors with conflicts of interest. And the cost to you isn’t a few bucks for new golf balls. There’s a lot of money that can be made off your money. That’s why probably the most important question you can ask a financial advisor is “How are you paid?”

At its most basic, retirement planning is a mathematical exercise. Inputs include annual savings during your working years, expected return on investments, expected retirement date, expected household expenses during retirement, and life expectancy. Did ya notice that one word popped up an awful lot there? A fairly large amount of the financial planning process is based on expectations..

Past performance is not a predictor of future returns. Ever heard that one before? We all have. But most investors invest like they haven’t. Or perhaps more accurately, most investors invest like they don’t believe it.

Talk to an active stock trader for a while, and they’ll tell you—well, I’m not positive what they’ll tell you. I avoid talking to active stock traders for a while, or any other length of time. 

Yes, I found these on the internet, so probably about 40% of them are true.

The market is going to go down! You heard it here first. Well, actually if you pay even slight attention to the financial news, you heard it here one millionth. We are in our eleventh year of a strong bull market and prognostication on the coming bear market has been rampant for approximately all eleven of those years.

You’re 25 years old. You just got your first decent paying gig and you’ve decided to start saving for retirement, which you’ve already got marked on the calendar for mid-2054, thirty-five years from now.

To the surprise of nobody, fraud did not let up in 2018. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) received about 1.4 million fraud reports over the year.

The more wealth you amass, the more likely you are to be taken to court as the defendant in a civil action. That lawsuit could be for real wrongs, imagined ones, or downright nuisance cases.

I remember back about a decade ago when health savings accounts were a thing. Then they weren’t a thing. Now they are a thing again.

It is impossible to separate investing and risk. Whether you choose stocks, bonds, mutual funds, annuities, alternatives like gold and oil, or just a money market account, you run the risk of loss.

The 2018 market year is in the books, and it wasn’t pretty. It wasn’t anywhere near as bad as 2008, which was worse than going to prom with your mother. 2018 was more like going to prom with a second cousin.

Market risk isn’t the only risk you face in your financial journey. You could avoid market risk entirely very easily: Stay out of the market. But can you grow your nest egg fast enough to retire when you want to and have enough money to last your lifetime?