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The main reason that people plan for anything in life is to mitigate risk. We plan on how much gas we will need to reach our destination or else we may run out. We plan for how much money we will need to buy our weekly groceries or else we may go hungry. We plan for how much time we need to perform...

After a sharp decline Friday afternoon, the S&P 500 and the NASDAQ suffered their worst weekly losses in over two years. For the week, the technology heavy NASDAQ was down 2.3%, the S&P was down 3.1%, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average was down 2.7%;this decline pushed the Dow into negative territ...

Many people have placed the majority of their savings into their 401k plans. So when you need cash, and the bank account funds are simply not sufficient or your investments are not providing the cash flow you need, it is extremely tempting to consider taking money from your hard earned 401k. Before...

Last Friday, markets were anxiously awaiting the release of the most recent jobs report. The Labor Department reported that, outside of the farm sector, the U.S. added 248,000 jobs in September well ahead of market expectations of 215,000 jobs added. Unemployment fell from 6.1% down to 5.9%; this de...

It's football season again and September and October are the most dangerous months for the stock markets. The crashes of 1929, 1987, and 2008 all began in those months. Does that have anything to do with football? No; but it does give me an opportunity to prove that correlations don't prove causatio...

After 20 seasons in the major leagues, Derek Jeter, the New York Yankees shortstop and longtime captain will retire. He played his final game at Yankee Stadium last Thursday in what was surely a storybook ending. After the Yankees blew the lead, Jeter played the hero, again; he knocked in the game-...

Many of us have a picture of what we think our life will be like, where we'll go, and exactly how it will progress. Yet, as a financial advisor, I have the opportunity to appreciate the many pivotal moments where each of us realizes that life is never quite what we expect, and does not happen in the...

If you're currently retired or considering retirement in the near future, you may want to take a long, hard look at your mortgage. I'll admit that, it may make sense to continue making mortgage payments into retirement; one benefit, for instance, would be that you may be able to deduct mortgage inte...

On Friday, China's e-commerce giant Alibaba became the largest U.S.-listed initial public offering (IPO) in history; the company began trading on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol "BABA". Alibaba is an online marketplace, similar to eBay and Amazon, only much larger. Transactions o...

Rochester is no newbie to the spin-off game. Many of us remember when Kodak spun off Eastman Chemical in 1994; a company which has since become a highly successful Fortune 500 firm. Even more, Kodak spun off Carestream Health and ITT Exelis, and both are now highly successful corporations, originall...