The Mission Critical Blog
How Saving for Retirement Creates Resilience—Financial and Otherwise
It’s the wish of every parent that their children will experience a better standard of living than they did. And yet, people who grew up poor and are now raising their kids in affluent surroundings talk about a downside. Never having experienced want, their children simply take their comfortable lifestyle for granted. New York Post columnist Karol Markowicz writes about what it’s like to raise rich kids after growing up poor. As a child of new immigrants she recalls [...]
Why Worrying About the Things You Can’t Control Holds You Back From Reaching Your Goals
We have a friend who’s a devoted fan of his university’s football team. When he watches them play, he wears a team hat and hopes they win. When they lose, he puts the outcome in perspective. There’s always next week. It’s only a game. But he didn’t used to be this philosophical. Several years back he was truly a fanatical fan. He was deeply invested in the outcome of each game. He disliked the opposing schools and their [...]
The 7 Money Personality Types
Everyone can agree that financial literacy is a good thing. When people understand the basics of personal money management, saving, and long-term investing, they’re better equipped to make informed decisions about their finances. But financial literacy alone can only take you so far. Simply having knowledge on a subject is often not enough to overcome a strong emotional desire to ignore certain aspects of the available information. A good example of this is food labeling. Every package of [...]
The Kind of Inflation You Can Control
A friend who sold cars for a living once pointed out a prestigious imported brand and stated that, in general, anybody you saw driving one really couldn’t afford it. His evidence was, of course, anecdotal. But maybe not too far off. People like paying more than they ought to for nice cars. Edmunds reported that in 2020 70% of car loans were for a period of longer than 5 years, a jump of 29% within the past decade. [...]
Millennials Expect to Work During Retirement
Younger generations are often unfairly characterized by their elders. In the late 1960s the Greatest Generation, who grew up during the Depression, accused baby boomers of being anti authority. Some were. When their turn came, the baby boomers said that the millennials (those born between 1980-2000) were lazy and entitled. Some have been. But this “young” generation (the oldest of whom are now in their early 40s) has proved to be anything but lazy and entitled when it’s [...]
When it Comes to Investing Biases, Some are Harder to Overcome than Others
It’s not controversial to say that investing biases can hurt the performance of your portfolio. Most investors would agree. And yet by its very nature a bias—an unreasoned opinion—will often be invisible to the person holding it. You can find evidence of this in a recent DALBAR, Inc. study of investor behavior. Researchers found that over the 20-year period ending December 31, 2020, individual stock fund investors consistently underperformed a market benchmark index. During the studied period the [...]
