Financial Advisor Blog

How to lend money to a deadbeat friend Let’s say you have a couple of friends and they each want to borrow money from you. One of them has a great job, and the other always seems to have some kind of issue – he’s always broke, getting fired, and sleeping on friends’ couches because…

So You Wanna Be a Real Estate Tycoon? “Buy land, they’re not making anymore!” That little morsel was from one of my favorite authors, Mark Twain. It’s also the rallying cry of every real estate agent and would-be real estate investor. But before you jump in and start buying real estate, let’s get you money…

Can I borrow $10,000? What do you need to know to make a good decision? Let’s say we’re friends, so you don’t want to charge me any interest, but is there anything more you’d want to know? Well, I guess you’d need to know how long I want to borrow it for. Is it for…

Bonds don’t have to be boring. Just like you can split up stocks into different categories, we can do the same thing with bonds. And by doing this, it can tell us a great deal about our investments and how we are invested. Here are the main sub-asset classes when it comes to bonds: Good…

Can you pass this pop quiz? Knowing what you know right now, what would be the most volatile and potentially risky asset class of these: large U.S. or small U.S.? Yes, small U.S. because the smaller the company is, the more risky it usually is. Okay, a little harder now. Large developed or large emerging…

In the last lesson, you learned that geography is an important distinction. Are there are any categories that might be important? Let’s look at U.S. stocks. We know these are different and may perform differently from developed international stocks and emerging market stocks. But do you think there is much of a difference between a…

We’ve spent a lot of time on stocks because, as an investor, it will be one of the main types of investments in your portfolio. And I’ve said that stocks are a main asset class, which means stocks generally share many characteristics and tend to behave similarly. Not All Stocks Are Created Equally All of…

As an investor, you’re bound to hear a lot about asset classes. This is one of those key areas in which you’ll want some level of understanding. In other words, you would definitely not be money smart if you didn’t know about asset classes. So let’s jump in. An asset class is just a fancy…

Why does the stock market go up and down? Well, the stock market has been likened to a teenage girl because of its erratic moods and volatility. But that’s not really a fair thing to say about teenage girls. Their mood swings are not as bad as the stock market. So what causes this up…