If your portfolio isn’t built with broad market index funds, you’ve got to ask yourself one question, “Do I feel lucky?” Well, do ya, punk?
NO. 34: FIGURING out what we ought to do with our money is relatively easy. Getting ourselves to do it is hard. Victory goes not to the smartest, but to the most disciplined.
HOME BIAS. We’re most comfortable owning familiar investments. That’s why we often invest heavily in shares of our employer, local companies and corporations whose products we use, as well as in rental properties. Meanwhile, we shy away from foreign stocks. While the result may be a portfolio we’re happy to own, it’s often a badly diversified one.
NO. 45: WE LOVE yield—the higher, the better. Many investors refuse to sell investments, but happily spend the income that their investments generate. The danger: These folks assume that a high yield means a high return and that all this income can be safely spent, because there’s no risk the yield will come at the expense of shrinking investment values.
DON’T LISTEN to market forecasts. Wall Street strategists often spin convincing tales about the stock market’s direction. The danger: Even though we know such forecasts are wrong half the time, these narratives can still subtly influence our thinking, prompting us to make portfolio changes that trigger trading costs and cause us to miss out on market gains.
NO. 34: FIGURING out what we ought to do with our money is relatively easy. Getting ourselves to do it is hard. Victory goes not to the smartest, but to the most disciplined.
ERIC SCHMIDT SAID this when he was Google’s chief executive: “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”
In his Congressional testimony last week, Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg didn’t say anything nearly as condescending or abrasive. But his testimony was a good reminder that we’re in a very different world privacy-wise than we were even 10 years ago,
SOME YEARS AGO, an elderly neighbor came to our door, asking for a favor. She was looking for packing tape because she’d sold her television and needed to ship it. She went on to say that the buyer, who she’d found on eBay, was in Nigeria. It was, of course, an obvious scam. But for whatever reason, she couldn’t see it.
Today, scams like this are better known and easier to recognize. But what makes online fraud such a problem is that the crooks are always developing new tricks.
WE’VE ALL HEARD of the three credit bureaus, Equifax, Experian and TransUnion, which compile our all-important credit reports. But have you heard of ChexSystems?
ChexSystems generates reports on bank customers, typically using banking history from the past five years to assess the risk that customers pose to their banks. Those risks are reflected in blemishes on a consumer’s banking history, such as overdrafts and unpaid fees. In some instances, ChexSystems warns banks about potential fraud.
THE EQUIFAX DATA breach seems to be a tipping point, unleashing a barrage of articles—and a boatload of angst—about the security of personal information. What are the potential problems and what’s the best way to defend yourself? I got some great ideas from followers of my Facebook page, where I posted a draft of this article and asked for feedback.
It seems there are five key scenarios where hackers could potentially wreak havoc with your financial life.
“YOUR CHECKING ACCOUNT balance is low.” It’s an alert none of us wants to receive, especially if we’ve just been paid. But that was the message that a friend—let’s call him Ron—got recently. A hacker had gained control of his account and started bleeding it dry.
Ron, it turns out, was lucky to have received that alert. Another friend—let’s call him Arthur—received no such alert when his account was also taken over by hackers this summer.
Being my father’s son and of Scottish heritage, I consider myself to be extremely wary when it comes to falling prey to the grifters and scammers of the world. But this morning, I almost got taken.
I was scrolling through my Facebook feed to see what was going on when I came across a post from an acquaintance who I went to high school with announcing that her family was clearing out items from her father’s house.
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