Photo of house in Norway, 1977 by Bill Hunter.
The Curious Cat Investing and Economics Carnival has been published infrequently over the last few years. My plan is to start publishing it much more frequently starting now.
- Personal Finance Basics: Long Term Disability Insurance by John Hunter – “people are much less aware of the importance of long term disability insurance. The census bureau estimates that you have a 20% chance you will be disabled in your lifetime.”
- Fed’s Low Interest Rates Crack Retirees’ Nest Eggs by Mark Whitehouse – “A long spell of low interest rates has created a windfall worth billions to banks, mortgage borrowers and others it was designed to benefit. But for many people who were counting on their nest eggs, those same low rates can spell trouble.”
- How to profit from the coming Greek default by Matthew Lynn – “Sell the U.S. banks but buy the dollar. If everyone knows Greece will have to default, what’s keeping them from pulling the plug? That’s easy. The Germans and the French won’t want to ‘re-profile’ all that Greek debt until they know their banks have largely sold both the debt and the credit-default swaps associated with it to someone else.”
- Buy Cheap Bonds with Safe Spread by Bill Gross – “Investors shouldn’t give their money away, and at the moment, the duration component of a bond portfolio comes close to doing just that – not because a bear market is just around the corner come July 1, but because it doesn’t yield enough relative to inflation.”
- How to retire with no savings – “Once you hit age 50, your chances of being jobless start to rise rapidly. You don’t get to choose when you retire. The job market or your ailing body will decide for you. Most retired Americans are getting by on incomes that you’d probably consider appropriate for the Third World. And even if they wanted to work until they died, they can’t.”
- Words of wisdom from Warren Buffett’s legendary sidekick – “You have to be a lifelong learner to appreciate this stuff. We think of it as a moral duty. Increasing rationality and improving as much as you can no matter your age or experience is a moral duty. Too many people graduate from Wharton today and think they know how to do everything. It’s a considerable mistake.
- Executives Again Treating Corporate Treasuries as Their Money by John Hunter – “When times are good senior executives are lauded as visionary, brilliant, decisive and responsible. When times are bad senior executives are lauded and performance is excused as beyond their control and certainly their rewards should not be limited due to bad results.”
- Why Dividend Growth is More Important than Dividend Yield – “Let’s take a look at a company that has a current yield of 2.5% that has a growth rate of 10%… in year 11 (10 years after the first increase), your original investment would be returning almost 6.5% in dividends. Compare those numbers with a stock that has a really high current yield and you won’t see the same returns.”
- Revealing Excessive 401(k) Fees by Ron Lieber – “Let’s say you have 35 years until retirement and a balance of $25,000. You put no more money in and earn a 7 percent return annually. If fees and plan expenses reduce those returns by 0.5 percent a year, your balance will grow to $227,000 in those 35 years. If those fees total 1.5 percent, however, you’ll end up with just $163,000, 28 percent less.”