My new partner, Adam Hartrum, and his wife, Bianca, join the firm The next time you come in the doors of Asset Strategies, you’ll have more smiling faces to greet you — and a greater depth of experience to care for your wealth management needs. That’s because Adam Hartrum has joined our firm. Please join […]
Another year is coming to a close. So much has happened of late — England voted to “Brexit” the European Union, the Chicago Cubs ended their 108-year World Series draught and Donald Trump was elected President of the United States. With all that’s going on it might be easy to forget about your year-end financial […]
If there was a Hall of Fame for rock ’n’ roll fans, Jane Comitz and her husband, Chet, would be charter members. Jane and Chet enjoy traveling, as a lot of folks do. But they don’t stop there. They travel the world not just to see the sights, but to catch musical acts. ‘We wanted […]
If you make orange juice from frozen concentrate you can mix it too strongly. Add only a little water, and it tastes too sugary, too tangy. Something similar is happening with the S&P 500 Index.* Lately, the index tastes funny. It’s too concentrated. “The S&P 500 has a big performance issue that should be a […]
I’ve written about municipal bonds in the past. Now is a good time to update my thoughts on this asset class. Municipal bonds and muni bond funds have historically been an effective way of generating tax-free income. In high school, you may have learned about the 1819 U.S. Supreme Court case, McCulloch v. Maryland. That […]
My wife Roxane, my son Craig and I visited Washington, DC over Memorial Day weekend. We enjoyed seeing the sites and experiencing the ambiance of the city, though we missed the cherry blossoms by a month. What a pleasure to take in the National Memorial Day Parade — an awesome display of patriotism held annually […]
It was the topic this spring that everyone talked about — except for some lawyers and bankers who generated the talk. The Panama Papers, an April 2016 leak of 11.5 million documents from a Panama-based law firm, revealed the murky world of tax havens and offshore companies and identified by name some very wealthy people […]
What was the proper investment move to make during the past year, when the stock market fell, rose, fell again and rose a second time? With that question in mind, the headline of a recent Wall Street Journal article caught my eye: “How to Stop Killing Your Returns.” The same article was titled “The Big […]
If you’re like me, you’ve probably received abusive phone calls from people purporting to be from the IRS, or a bank or credit card company. Abusive phone scammers call my home frequently. A very common scam, one that is going on a lot right now, is the Angry IRS Caller. They speak with a stern […]
I wrote an article in 2013 entitled, “History’s investment lesson.” The article showed that in most years the stock market experiences at least one 10% drop during the year, but ends the year with an overall positive return. What’s unusual about the bull market since March 2009 is that we have not experienced these big, […]