Being smart with $$ -- Early November 2014 posts

November 14, 2014
Are you paying your investment advisor 1% of your assets every year? Or even more? Is this costing you thousands of dollars per year? Ask me about a sensible alternative. I offer a free consultation to discuss a different approach. Each month you delay can be costing you hundreds of dollars that you could be saving for retirement.
- Larry Pike, CFA, Client Priority Financial Advisors LLC
- www.clientpriority.com

November 12, 2014
Hedge funds? Wish you could invest? Warren Buffett made a bet that over 10 years a low-cost S&P 500 stock fund would beat a portfolio of hedge funds. A little more than halfway into the bet, Buffet's choice is ahead by a huge amount. Hedge funds usually collect fees of 2% of assets plus 20% of the upside! That structure can make the hedge fund manager quite rich if things go well but it also explains a lot about why Warren Buffett is winning his bet so far.
- Larry Pike, CFA, Client Priority Financial Advisors LLC
- www.clientpriority.com

November 11, 2014
An article today on BloombergView,com by Barry Ritholtz is titled "My Prediction: Your Forecast is Wrong". He gives many examples of how even the best-respected Wall Street analysts are so often wrong. Even well-known predictors of previous market crashes have gone on to crash and burn on their next big prediction. So remember that the next time you hear a forecast on TV of a big market crash, there's a very high chance he/she is wrong and there will certainly be someone else making a similar claim every year. Just by chance, eventually somebody will be right but I'm not letting one doomsayer scare me into selling all my stocks.
- Larry Pike, CFA, Client Priority Financial Advisors LLC
- www.clientpriority.com

November 10, 2014
Is your retirement plan based on working until you die? That's what Mrs. Fletcher thought. Remember her? "She's fallen and she can't get up!" Apparently if you're over 65 you have a 1 in 3 chance of falling each year with about a quarter of those having some lasting disability (says U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.) Maybe time to implement Plan B now and save aggressively. We won't know if Plan A works until it's too late.
- Larry Pike, CFA, Client Priority Financial Advisors LLC
- www.clientpriority.com

November 3, 2014

If we prioritize the most important uses for our money, what comes after groceries, housing costs, basic clothing and medical care/insurance? 1) Education costs and college savings for our kids; 2) Retirement savings; 3) Cable TV; 4) iPhones for our families; 5) Car expenses; 6) Entertainment and the dining out; 7) Charity; 8) Vacations; 9) Discretionary shopping. Put these in order of most important to least. Now we must ask ourselves why we are spending money out of order.

- Larry Pike, CFA, Client Priority Financial Advisors LLC
- www.clientpriority.com