Recently in Investing and Retirement Category

While I consider that my retirement is fairly diversified, one of the things I haven't really dabbled in at all is futures. One of my regular customers is a futures broker. He's been slowly educating me about the business over the last couple of weeks and of course trying to talk me into investing with him. I may very well do that but it will most likely be more toward the end of the year before I make any kind of changes.

I don't really want to stop or drop anything I am currently investing in so I will have to budget for the additional outlay of monthly funds before I can make the plunge. He's a pretty sharp guy though and if I do decide to invest in futures it will be through him.

Financial Expert Ray Martin offers advice on how concerned investors should be in the current economy.

Condor Options is the type of investing website that I enjoy. I have my investments in several different places including mutual funds, stock indexes and IRAs as well as a direct stock purchase plan through work. The difficult part for me has always been in deciding exactly where I should put my money. I am far from being an investment expert on investing. Condor Options is a newsletter service strictly for options trading that is put together to let you earn 10% monthly returns with only ten minutes a week. It is focused on the same thing that the pros focus on daily, Iron Condors.

One trade per month is all it takes. Condor Options trades the iron condor one a month and earns profits from it. There is no need to worry about strategies and getting confused by trades and having to learn difficult lingo. I have a friend that is a day trader, and all day long he sits in front of the computer worried about his stock trades. The same thing goes for Forex trading and futures. You are stuck having to watch it and move when the time is right. Iron condor positions don't change drastically and Condor Options watches the market FOR YOU so that you can actually enjoy life somewhere else.

Condor Options sends the trade alerts to you via email as well as posting them on the weblog, which is for subscribers only. That way you never have to worry about losing out when there is an update that you need to take care of. The thing I really like about iron condors is that it's a lot like the mutual funds and indexes that I am invested in. I chose to go that route so that I could spread it out a bit and eventually make a steady income. I am not interested in blowing the doors off the bank one week and becoming a pauper the next. I want to know my investment is safe and earning a profitable return. 10% is pretty profitable in my eyes. Over time 10% adds up very quickly particularly once you have been trading for awhile.

If you are wanting to reduce the risk you run of losing your investments in other long term strategies such as stocks and mutual funds, then options trading just may be right. By putting in a small amount of capital at a time into the options spreads like iron condors, it can smooth out your returns and help make investing a bit less of a gamble.

One of the things that attracted me to going into management with my company so long ago and has kept me there is that it's a cash based company. We have NO debt. That's pretty darned unusual in this day and age and it's something other large corporations should take a look at, particularly really big top-heavy companies where no business for a week would just shut down. Look at what happened to the airlines after 9/11 for instance.

We could close the doors to all of our businesses today and still continue to pay people for the next year before we start to worry. That's because we own most of our land and buildings, only occasionally leasing, we own both jets, we own the land and buildings where our corporate offices are and as a matter of fact we lease buildings to several other companies in the vicinity, we are privately held which means that the stock market has no effect on us. As a matter of fact when things are going sour in the rest of the economy we always seem to do better. Everyone has to eat and if you are broke it's more likely that you will take your family out for a $20 meal rather than a $50 meal.

Over the last 20 years that I have been there our stock has earned something like 15% earnings. I beat myself whenever I think about it. Although I probably have around $90k in stock options right now I don't have what I consider to be very much in solid stock. I have taken money out of the plan several different times over the years for various reasons, emergencies, college, etc...and that has hurt my total. It's coming back though. I have somewhere around 5% of my gross going into our stock and I will increase that to around 10% by January I think.

Right on the heels of the report that the dollar is doing lousy against the euro comes this report that the DOW touched an all-time of 14,111.53 early this afternoon. The previous high was 14,021.95 back on July 19th of this year. The S&P and Nasdaq both gained 1.3% and the Russell 2000 small-cap index jumped more than 2%.

The market is rallying which is a good thing and with all of the unfavorable news that has been going on investors are afraid of falling behind.

Today is the first day of the fourth quarter and hopefully things will continue looking up.

Learning about how to 'properly' invest your income can be a pretty daunting task. There are so many twists and turns on the road to retirement that if you aren't careful you can lose more than just your shirt. One of the benefits to having friends that are already familiar with making financial decisions, particularly in areas in which to invest, is a great thing. Its the same at work. I have people that I consider mentors that have been in the business even longer than I have (21 years right now) and they are always available to answer my questions because no matter how much I think I might know there is always something more to learn. That applies in investing as well. If I have people that are familiar with tracking and picking the right stocks those are the folks that I am going to turn to when I have questions.


Back when I first started investing for my retirement I did quite a bit of research. I read books and magazines, but the problem with those is that they are outdated and often times just plain wrong for todays market. The learning curve with investing is pretty steep and you have to take it in very small steps or you can get lost very quickly.

There is a web site online where you can also find friends that will be more than happy to help out at MyWallSt.net. What's cool about MyWallSt.net is that it's a social networking sight that is specifically directed toward investing in the stock market. The latest Wall Street news is always available and there are amateurs and professionals alike that visit the site and want to help. Get over to the site and check it out. You can create a profile and start browsing the profiles and the blog. Getting to know these folks might just avoid a costly future mistake due to lac of knowledge.

One thing I find interesting that people don't do quite as much now is to invest in jewelry. I guess because it's not so portable as other stuff. My grandmother owns quite a bit of jewelry and that is exactly how she looks at it. Jewelry certainly doesn't go down in value at least not most of the time, so although it may not be earning returns like the stock market or real estate, it's still a solid investment vehicle. The big problem is where to keep it. I suppose you can keep it locked up in a safe or a safety deposit box, but then it wouldn't get worn as the creator intended.

With the serious drop we have had in Real Estate pricing recently it's a volatile time to be involved in real estate investment. No one is really sure whether this is a good time to be buying new property or not. It is entirely possible that prices will continue to drop or it may be that things will stabilize and start heading 'north' again.

Either way anyone interested in investing in real estate needs to take a good long look at the current data and long term forecasts in order to make an informed decision before purchasing any property. One thing that can help you when running the numbers is Real Estate Genius, a web based software that makes it easy to run the numbers and make informed profit forecasts. Obviously before investing you want to know if you are going to make any money or not otherwise you wouldn't be looking at it in the first place.

Since Real Estate Genius is web-based you don't have to worry about downloading or installing another piece of software on your computer and membership is only $4.95 a month with no contracts or long term commitments. It's an easy way to get a real cash flow analysis and can save quite a bit of time with this real estate investment software.

NuWire Investor (www.nuwireinvestor.com) is a site where you can get the latest news on investing in several different areas including loans, real  estate and small businesses. There is a wealth of information at the site including interviews with CEOs and Real Estate Brokers, articles on investing in real estate, business investing and more.

Online during the Labor Day weekend I found several interesting articles to look over including The Top 15 Franchise Investments of 2007, Top 5 Places to Buy Caribbean Real Estate and Affordable Real Estate in Arlington. I found the last two articles interesting for a couple of reasons. I have several friends that live in the Arlington area, and the area is also one of my companies biggest areas as well.

With all of the writing that I have done recently on the Caribbean and the fact that I am interested in going early next year, getting a bit of investing information on the area this early is nice.

I found the article on Franchise Investments intriguing. The top three franchise investments are all hair cutting franchises and if I recall they were also some of the fastest growing and profitable franchise opportunities back in the eighties as well. It's interesting to see that they are still doing well. The service industry is always a good bet on investment because there are always things that we need no matter how the economy is doing.

You can also sign up for the free newsletter at www.nuwireinvestor.com and keep abreast on changes in investing news both in the U.S. as well as the international community.

I was reading a short article over at the Tax Foundation about them being asked which tax reform plan that they support and their answer was pretty much as I would have suspected. Both of the plans actually cite work done by the Tax Foundation in their plans. Here is a bit form the article...

From an economic perspective, there are many similarities between the FairTax and a Flat Tax. For example:

• Both the FairTax and the Flat Tax are "consumption taxes." In other words, only spent money is taxed, not savings.
• Both would eliminate the estate and capital gains taxes.
• The Flat Tax would be collected on an annual basis like our current federal income tax. The FairTax would be collected at the point of sale, like our current state-level sales taxes.
• Both plans are single tax rate systems that eliminate double taxation. 
• Both plans would dramatically reduce compliance costs and the tax system's dead-weight loss to the economy.

Any tax reform plan will have transition issues and these will have to be thought through carefully. That said, the long-term benefits of fundamental tax reform should far outweigh the short-term transition costs.

For more information on tax reform and what you can do to help, head on over to the site.