Would it surprise you to learn that a majority of American households own mutual funds? It’s true, according to the Investment Company Institute’s 2023 Fact Book. An estimated 68.6 million U.S. households, 52% of all households, were mutual fund investors in 2022. If we add exchange-traded funds, closed-end funds, and unit investment trusts to the…
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Older Adults Are Playing Video Games (Maybe You Should Too)
When approaching retirement, one of the looming questions is always: “What am I going to do with all that time?” It’s a lot of unstructured time, and after the first few years of bucket list items, there’s usually a lot of time left. That’s why we recommend things that would help create hobbies as retirement…
Bank Failures Are Scary, But Trust Funds Are Always Secure
In modern times, most bank depositors are not concerned about a bank run when a large number of customers withdraw their deposits at the same time causing a bank failure, because for the majority of people their deposits are fully insured by the FDIC. The FDIC was formed in 1933 in the wake of the…
Pricing Locally and Around the World
The cost of living varies greatly from state to state. Even though a dollar is a dollar everywhere, you can’t exchange it for the same amount of gas in California as you do in New Jersey. The costs of selling that gas varies with local tax structures and distance from the source. Local competition could…
Quantifying Risk
Ronald Howard, A Stanford professor, introduced the “micromort” in 1980 to measure the impact that particular behaviors have on the risk of death. He assessed individual actions and decisions at a very small scale to see how it all adds up, by utilizing a microprobability (a one-in-a million chance of some event) to quantify how…
SECURE Act 2.0
When a software creator such as Apple or Microsoft makes changes to their main platform or operating system, they either adjust the number before the decimal of the system or afterward. One might expect, when going from Windows 10.1 to 10.2, to have minor incremental changes, but going from 10 to 11 to have more…
Opportunity Costs in Retirement
A recent working paper “HOW MUCH LIFETIME SOCIAL SECURITY BENEFITS ARE AMERICANS LEAVING ON THE TABLE?” from the National Bureau of Economic Research takes lots of data, including the spending and taxation of families, and suggests: “More than 90 percent should wait till age 70. Only 10.2 percent appear to do so. The median loss…