How To Cut Costs And Understand Your Spending
If you feel that you are spending too much, you’ll want to determine when you do your spending and what items you spend the most money on. One way to get started is to track your spending for a period of time and try to determine if you have a spending pattern.
Estate Planning: Protecting Your Assets
You’re beginning to accumulate substantial wealth, but you worry about protecting it from future potential creditors. To insulate your property from such claims, you’ll have to evaluate each tool in terms of your own situation.
3 Lessons To Teach Your College-Age Child About Money
Perhaps your child already understands the basics of budgeting from having to handle an allowance or wages from a part-time job during high school. But now that your child is in college, he or she may need to draft a “real world” budget, especially if he or she lives off-campus and is responsible for paying for rent and utilities. Here are some ways you can help your child plan and stick to a realistic budget.
How to Protect Your Small Business from Cyber Threats
Risk management is a key component in any successful business plan. In today’s world — where data breaches are common occurrences — it’s especially important for business owners to understand the digital risks they face. Are you doing all you can to mitigate the risk of a cyberattack?
401(k) Plans for Small Businesses
Small business owners looking to adopt 401(k) plans are sometimes discouraged by the typically high costs and complicated testing requirements associated with plan administration (see italicized note below). Fortunately, over the past few decades, legislators have introduced a number of simplified alternatives to the traditional 401(k) to help encourage more business owners to adopt these potentially valuable retirement benefit programs.
Estimating Your Retirement Income Needs
Your annual income during retirement should be enough (or more than enough) to meet your retirement expenses. That’s why estimating those expenses is a big piece of the retirement planning puzzle. But you may have a hard time identifying all of your expenses and projecting how much you’ll be spending in each area, especially if retirement is still far off. To help you get started, here are some common retirement expenses:
Tax Planning Tips: Life Insurance
Life insurance contracts must meet IRS requirements For federal income tax purposes, an insurance contract cannot be considered a life insurance contract–and qualify for favorable tax treatment–unless it meets state law requirements and satisfies the IRS’s statutory definitions of what is or is not a life insurance policy. The IRS considers the type of policy, […]
Insuring Your Home Business
At-home business owners often make the mistake of assuming that their homeowners policy covers their business equipment. In fact, your homeowners policy may include little or no coverage for your business property and business liability exposure.
Balancing Your Investment Choices with Asset Allocation
The most popular approach is to look at what you’re investing for and how long you have to reach each goal. Those goals get balanced against your need for money to live on. The more secure your immediate income and the longer you have to pursue your investing goals, the more aggressively you might be able to invest for them.
Investing in Stocks
Although past performance is no guarantee of future results, stocks have historically provided a higher average annual rate of return over long periods of time than other investments, including bonds and cash alternatives.