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Our T.V. spots featuring advisors and their clients was selected for a Bronze Telly Award in the "Local Television Commercial" category! The Telly honors "outstanding local, regional, and cable TV commercials and programs, the finest film and video productions, and groundbreaking web commercials, vi...

When you terminate employment you have a choice to make. Do you leave your employer-sponsored retirement plan (401K, 403B, 457, etc.) with your previous employer or do you move it? It might be tempting to take the money and run. However, if you "cash out" your plan you will probably lose a large...

Today's topic is disaster, Armageddon, apocalypse. Parts One, Two, and Three dealt with much more workaday risks like default. What would happen financially in the event of worldwide panic? How would you feed your family if national currencies were devalued? There is a school of thought that says...

UIT stands for Unit Investment Trust. A UIT is a packaged investment offering that purchases stocks, bonds or other securities in order to achieve a specific investment objective. The objective might be to achieve tax-free investment income (i.e.-municipal bonds), to invest in companies in a cer...

We have covered different types of bonds in Parts One and Two of this series. Today let's talk about bond mutual funds. Most people know the general description of a mutual fund: a diversified pool of investments, typically professionally managed, in which you can buy shares. When you own a fund tha...

In Part One of this series the focus was on bonds, and the bank insurance or government backing behind them that offers safety to investors. Left out of that post were state and local bonds, commonly called municipal (or muni) bonds. Like the bank CDs and federal government debt we discussed yesterd...

I am skipping a post in my "What is a Safe Investment?" series to revisit a topic I touched on in early May in a post entitled "Of Boots and Oil." I was disappointed in the comment made by Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar. In a comment left on our blog, one person wrote: "Your point on tone is...

In my first post on this topic, I mentioned that safety is a subjective term and will mean different things to different people. A common definition of "safe" is: will I get my original investment back? If you invest a dollar, you expect a dollar back by a certain date, plus interest. All such fi...

Different types of employer-sponsored retirement plans are well known commodities. If you work for a privately owned company, there is a good chance you have a 401k. If you work for a hospital or school district, you are probably aware of the 403b available to you. State employees often have 'deferr...

Among the most frequent questions we get are those about safety. It seems at first like an easy question to answer: something is safe or it isn't. But stop and think: the very word "safe" is subjective. That is, what makes one person feel safe might not make someone else feel the same. Put another...