March 2019 Best of the Web
It’s time for our monthly collection of the best articles from around the internet to help you save more, invest better and retire sooner.
We start with a few articles about the advantages of investing for the long term and end with articles that focus on the intersection of family and finance.
In between we examine the potential benefits of having a widely diversified portfolio and explore the impacts inflation can have on your retirement plan.
Articles also explain what it takes to produce $50,000 of income in retirement and why you need to ask better questions if you want to get better answers to optimize your social security benefits.
Investing for the Long-Term
There are millions of factors that affect your investment outcomes, but precious few that you can actually control. This is why we frequently return to these common themes (controlling investment fees, taxes, and behavior) in our blog posts and in these roundups.
This month we found three excellent articles to reinforce what it takes to be a successful investor over the long term.
Morgan Housel writes Not Caring: A Unique and Powerful Skill.
Ben Carlson explains that understanding markets is hard, but being a successful investor doesn’t have to be with Edges That Won’t Go Away.
JL Collins adds to his Stock Series, giving new perspective to investing for the long term with Part XXXV: Investing for Seven Generations.
A Diversified Portfolio
Paul Merriman makes a strong argument for building a widely diversified portfolio to improve risk adjusted returns with the annual installment of his “ultimate buy and hold portfolio.” He writes The Ultimate Buy and Hold Strategy: 2019 Update.
The Impact of Inflation
We have little control over inflation. Still in these times when inflation is below historic norms, it’s important not to overlook it and to understand its potential impact. Fritz Gilbert writes Inflation: The Silent Killer of Retirement.
Popular Topics
Retiring sooner and creating retirement income are always popular topics around here. ESI Money covers both with How to Get to a $50k Retirement.
Social Security Questions?
Mike Piper asks Can You Trust Information from the SSA? He thinks you can, but you need to know what questions to ask and where to ask them.
Family and Finance
As we get serious about personal finance, it’s easy to get too focused on the finance and forget the personal. This is especially true if you are making decisions that affect spouses, children, and possibly extended families and friends.
Jim has been blogging about his plans and ambitions to retire early at Route to Retire for several years. His wife recently wrote her first blog post to share her perspective. She hit a home run on her first ever swing, writing Is Retiring Early Really the Best Thing for Our Family?
J Money is the self described “#1 fanboy” of renting. He writes My wife is itching to own a home again (!!!) It looks like Mr. Money is going house shopping.
I had a chance to have a great conversation with the the ladies of the FIRE Drill Podcast. We dug into details of how my wife and I saved and planned for early retirement as a team, how we timed my retirement and our cross country move around life circumstances more than finances, finding the right location for early retirement, challenges that come with major life changes (even when things go better than planned), and what “early retired” life actually looks like now that we’re settling in to new routines.
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Valuable Resources
- The Best Retirement Calculators can help you perform detailed retirement simulations including modeling withdrawal strategies, federal and state income taxes, healthcare expenses, and more. Can I Retire Yet? partners with two of the best.
- New Retirement: Web Based High Fidelity Modeling Tool
- Pralana Gold: Microsoft Excel Based High Fidelity Modeling Tool
- Free Travel or Cash Back with credit card rewards and sign up bonuses.
- Monitor Your Investment Portfolio
- Sign up for a free Empower account to gain access to track your asset allocation, investment performance, individual account balances, net worth, cash flow, and investment expenses.
- Our Books
- Choose FI: Your Blueprint to Financial Independence
- Can I Retire Yet: How To Make the Biggest Financial Decision of the Rest of Your Life
- Retiring Sooner: How to Accelerate Your Financial Independence
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