Author Archives: David John Marotta

David Marotta discusses the politics of congressional earmarks.

Future earnings and the potential for Roth IRA conversions should be part of your plan.

Healthy spouses with little earnings should encourage their partners to delay filing.

Filing early and then repaying is the least dangerous for those who are single or for a husband and wife whose benefits are roughly equal.

Dying young never jeopardizes a retirement plan financially.

Filing early exacts a steep price.

Your filing option choices may be worth $250,000 of income or more.

The various congressional bailouts have been touted as essential to the nation’s economic security. So long as the notion of economic security remains vague and abstract, it has wide support. But anyone who examines the details should realize this so-called security threatens our freedom and stability.

To safeguard your money, you must be able to extricate yourself from any bad investment quickly. Of course, the companies that sell mistakes don’t want you to be able to do that, so they use financial hooks to hold your money captive.

You have a critical part to play in financial planning. Certain responsibilities cannot be delegated to others.

Crazy volatile markets push people toward irrational investment schemes. Know how to avoid them in order to safeguard your money.

An overwhelming number of failed marriages cite financial troubles as a major factor in their breakup. This is no surprise because the way we use our time and money reflects our values. Without a strong set of shared values, marriages drift apart. But, dealing with finances together can bring a couple closer. Here are seven principles of how you can build wealth and your marriage.

One important safeguard is to insist on investing only in liquid assets. Investors undervalue liquidity 99.9% of the time. You need to be in the other 0.1%.

There are several investment safeguards you should insist on. One is to avoid any investment opportunity that sounds too good to be true.

I was recently asked if investors should trust their financial advisors. And my short answer, you may be surprised to hear, was no. Your financial advisor should not also have custody of your investments.

Every year many of us make New Year’s resolutions and then can’t follow through because we claim we’re too busy.

Christians celebrate the birth of Jesus on Christmas Day. But for too many of us, it’s the season that unravels the careful financial planning of the previous 11 months. So this year, instead of trading your financial goals for a mountain of gifts and debt, take a moment to contemplate how a spiritual perspective can help you put your wealth in perspective.

Philip Zimbardo’s latest book, “The Time Paradox” suggests that understanding your own time perspective may help you unlock the secrets of financial freedom. In other words, how we think determines who we are and what we do.

David Marotta discusses how our time perspective influences our lives.

A shortage of people are buying real estate and we’ve passed a one-per-customer tax incentive law.

There is always a day of reckoning when people use debt to leverage their investments.

How you “title” the property you own is a lot more important than you might think. Failure to title your assets properly could undo the best will and trust planning that money can buy.

Fee-Only financial advisors will be in cities across the country to conduct free advice events.

This year, give your family the gift of financial peace of mind. Celebrate the season simply.

David Marotta discusses celebrating Christmas.

For charity to be a virtue, it must be freely given from your own resources.

Free markets are under assault in America. We have seen much hyperbole and slander in these past two years of political polarization. But the idea of capitalism and free markets has received more negative campaigning and vicious attack than both candidates combined.

But if you were invested in a balanced portfolio, you did not lose this past decade.

Privatization eliminates benefits for those who can do better with 5% of their payroll taxes than the government does with the entire 12.4%.

All this toil to maintain an average benefit of about $12,000 a year!

David Marotta discusses how Social Security could offer more benefit for less cost.

When a hurricane threatens, making a plan and gearing up for emergencies is imperative. Economic emergencies happen too, but it may be less obvious how to prepare. Here are seven steps you should take to weather any financial storm.

Regulation and centralized planning have caused financial instability and failing institutions. If this is the root cause, then many of the proposed solutions will only make matters worse.

Eastern European countries have been struggling out of the darkness of communist rule into the light of free markets.

Free markets thrive when a country guarantees property rights and the rule of law. China possesses neither of these.

David Marotta discusses how politics affect us.

“The fence itself grazed through the field.”

Russia never really tried free markets. Rated at just below 50% free, Russia is considered repressed.

One area where Brazil has excelled is making headway toward energy independence.

David Marotta discusses financial planning for a college education.

To process financial information, our minds often attempt unwise shortcuts. By understanding behavioral finance, we can limit the information we use and keep our decisions balanced and on track.

The benefits of investing in the countries with the most economic freedom.

One of the early studies on herd mentality was the Solomon Asch experiments in the 1950s. The setup was a mock vision test. In reality, all but one of the participants were actors, who after a few correct answers started agreeing unanimously on a wrong choice.

Think of confidence as a continuum: Lack of confidence is paralyzing, self-confidence is good, but overconfidence is deadly. Successful investors seek to find a balance between rashness and timidity. Understanding the psychology that causes us to act overconfidently will help you avoid it.

The essence of successful financial planning is using your money to meet your life’s goals. Curiously our minds tend to fall prey to the fallacy that behavioral finance calls “mental accounting”.

Our first reaction to a complicated situation, usually instinctive, often does not serve our best interests. One heuristic that the brain uses to solve complex evaluations is to make an initial guess and then adjust from that point. This mental process is called “anchoring.”

You can both diversify for safety and boost your returns by adding international investments to your portfolio.

A year ago when the markets were all setting new highs, people were asking what they should do with their retirement portfolio. I answered, “Rebalance.” Now that the market is setting new lows, I get the same question, and my response hasn’t changed.

You can hedge your assets against underreported inflation and protect your retirement goals.

Inflation at this rate causes serious harm to our nation’s economy and its citizens.