investing

Five alternatives to 0% yield U.S. treasuries

This week the 4 week T-bill rate was driven down to 0% and the demand for these treasuries was astounding. It seems that investors are so pessimistic that they are willing to acce

Book review: Spend 'til The End

My wife spotted this book at the library and brought it home, suggesting (based on the title) that it might be a sort of anti-Wise Bread that I could read and mock. When I started

The Highest Yielding "Safe" Investment Now - Tax Exempt Money Market Funds

Last year I wrote an article about how I used my Vanguard Tax Exempt Money Market Fund as a high yield checkings account, and this week I suddenly got quite a few hits for that art

The "Pa-Doink" Principle of Personal Savings

"Pa-doink" is the sound you hear when something small and heavy hits water. Think about a child throwing a coin into the fountain at a shopping mall: a toss and a pa-doink later, t

Book Review: Full of Bull - Do What Wall Street Does, Not What it Says by Stephen McClellan

Stephen T. McClellan is a seasoned securities analyst who has more than 32 years experience with several different well known investment firms. In his book Full of Bull- Do What W

Not free to be poor

Nobody wants to be poor. It's a dangerous and constrained position to be in. But there are people out there (me, for instance) who are relatively happy to live at a fairly low st

Book review: Cash-Rich Retirement

Do you need a kick in the pants to get you saving for retirement?  Do you need someone to wave their arms and run around screaming that your whole future is at risk, in order to mo

Laddering for higher, more stable returns

When investing in things that pay an interest rate--things like CDs and bonds--it's tempting to try to get the maximum interest rate, and then to try to lock up that rate for a

Non-financial investments

Talk about investments and most people think stocks, bonds, and mutual funds, plus maybe real estate and commodities like precious metals. Let's call those "financial inve

Are you an "Adult" Investor?

With the use of provocative phrases such as "hard sell," "sharp-rise," "capital injection," inflation," "surge" and "double-digit

The Pros and Cons of Dollar-Cost Averaging

Having balanced your budget and analyzed your risk, you're now ready to start tackling that "investing" entry on your list of new year's resolutions. But where do

How Do You Take Advantage of the Federal Interest Rate Cut?

The Federal Reserve just cut the interest rate by 0.75% between two official meetings! This is the largest cut since 1982 and it was like an adrenaline shot to the sagging stock ma

Join the rentier class

You don't hear much about the rentier class any more. Perhaps that's because we all expect to be members by retirement age. Perhaps it's because even the very wealthy

Best asset allocation for your portfolio

This is the first Wise Bread post that I've been afraid to write. I've thought about it many times, but haven't even gotten as far as making notes until today, when I

The Retirement Latte

My introduction to David Bach was when I saw him speak at a financial conference a few years ago. He told an interesting story about a couple who came in for a consultation with hi

Book review: The Only Investment Guide You'll Ever Need

Andrew Tobias' The Only Investment Guide You'll Ever Need is the perfect book for every Wise Bread reader.

Clues to detecting the astute investor

You may have encountered some financial talk at cocktail parties or neighborhood cookouts. The discussions may have centered on low mortgage rates, debt consolidation deals, and sk

Book review: The Little Book of Common Sense Investing

John C. Bogle's The Little Book of Common Sense Investing will help you earn a maximum long-term investment return with the least effort possible.

How To Choose A Financial Planner - Yes You!

I don't care who you are. (Well, actually I do, otherwise I wouldn't be writing this). What I mean, is I don't care about your background, education, financial prowess, or absolu

The false goal of maximizing investment returns

Along about the middle of the dot-com boom--when the market had already had two years of 20% annual gains--I read an article that suggested that individual investors had no need of a cash res [more]