[Written by Carla Seely]
Organizing and planning for your family’s financial well-being can be challenging at the best of times. However, there are many challenges involved in managing and maintaining a household as a single parent. Being a single parent means you have less money to spare, and there is a pressing need to have a solid long-term financial plan because in most cases there are no alternative sources of income. (more…)
General financial education, in addition to education specific to 401(k) plans, can encourage employees to save more for retirement. Topics like budgeting, debt management and reduction, and finding ways to save on household purchases may allow employees to feel more confidence in contributing more of their income to the plan. In turn, that can lead to improved retirement readiness. (more…)
The upside of using auto-enrollment (and auto-escalation) features in a 401(k) plan are considerable. Participants in plans that use auto-enrollment seldom opt out, even when they are enrolled at 6% to 10% of pay. This has resulted in many new participants saving for their futures. Recently, though, a study was done that suggests people who are automatically enrolled in their plan may take on more debt than they would have otherwise.
As featured Bernews.com.
In our home, July marks our ‘check-in’ chats: discussions on any travel plans for the remainder of the year, whether we should upgrade any furniture or get a newer car, and so on. But our biggest and sometimes most ‘heated’ chat is regarding the semi-annual review of our finances and update of our ‘net worth statement’.
Without setting your life goals, saving and investing can seem like a bunch of disconnected facts and figures
For many investors, the process of monitoring progress to retirement can seem to swirl around a bunch of numbers: portfolio performance, market index returns and portfolio rebalancing percentages, to name a few.
These are important figures to keep in mind, but they miss a key critical element: how you go about defining and prioritizing your unique life goals, and then tracking your progress toward them. Here are five ways to make sure that the numbers don’t sidetrack you from what’s really important — living the personally enriching life you have imagined for yourself.
Start with the big picture. The way you view your long-term financial picture generally can be segmented into three goal “buckets:” your needs (think housing, health care), wants (hobbies, travel) and wishes (fishing boat, new outdoor kitchen). (more…)
One thing I have learned during the course of my eighteen years in the financial industry is that a person’s view on money is like a fingerprint; no two views are exactly the same. They may have 
similar values, they may invest using similar methods but everyone treats money slightly differently from the next person. The question to ask is “What is your Behavioral Finance?”
Here are some of the typical behavioral traits people exhibit when it comes to finances:
a] Mental Accounting
The majority of people prepare a monthly budget and allocate certain parts of their pay cheque to certain bills. This “preparation” is slightly different with mental accounting. Mental accounting is the tendency for people to designate particular money for a specific purpose, without consideration for the big picture in terms of practicality. For example, a person can split their money and treat each portion differently, depending on which “account” it’s in. So, money in a savings account is treated differently than money meant for debt repayment. That is, even if a savings account is paying 1% pa in interest and their car loan is costing 7.5% pa in interest, the money they allocate to each “pot” they deem as equal because each “pot” of money has been designated for a purpose.
