Author: gstc

Interest on student loans has started accruing again, with the first repayment due next month in most cases.  Given the long hiatus, it’s possible that the service providers handling many of these loans have changed. By some estimates, over 17 million of the student loans—about 1/3 of the loans—are now being handled by someone else.…

Save. Save more. Save even more. Eventually, those words will change. It’s time to retire, and start spending instead of saving, but some retirees still feel uncomfortable with the transition from accumulation to distribution of financial resources. Some are not confident that they’ve saved enough. In fact, in some studies failing to save enough is…

Children love dogs, going so far as bringing home a stray and asking to keep it. There are the pros and cons to consider.  For example, can the child take responsibility for the pet, and can the household afford another mouth to feed? A perhaps less familiar scene is pet adoption by adults for themselves,…

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…

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…

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…

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…