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.
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.
Investment Planning Throughout Retirement

While you’re working, your retirement objective generally is to grow retirement savings as much as possible, and investments that offer higher potential reward in exchange for greater potential for volatility and/or loss are often the focus for those retirement savings.
Do You Need Travel Insurance?

Soon you’ll be on your way, taking that trip you’ve looked forward to for ages–but suppose something happens. If you get sick, lose your suitcase, or have to cut your trip short, will any of your existing insurance policies cover your expenses or reimburse you for your losses?
7 Tips For Handling Market Volatility

Diversifying your investment portfolio is one of the key ways you can handle market volatility.
