Tag: Fortune
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10 Rules: Defer Taxes
This final tip in Forbes’ ten rules for building wealth starts dabbling in tax implications and how income and capital gains taxes will affect you investment decisions. The two tips they gives: Be aware of whether your sale will be a short term or long term capital gain. A short term capital gain will be…
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10 Rules: Reduce Credit Card Debt
This tip in Forbes’ ten rules for building wealth starts moving away from retirement planning in the strictest sense and starts dabbling in good personal finance advice: reduce and avoid credit card debt (and all other debt too, but start with credit cards). Forbes recommends ranking them by interest rate and paying off the highest…
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10 Rules: Watch the Watcher’s Prices
A mutual fund usually has an expense ratio, that is, a percentage of its assets that it collects for administrative fees and “expertise.” The actively managed funds generally have higher fees because you’re paying the manager to be good at his job. Passively managed funds generally have lower fees because you’re basically paying for the…
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10 Rules: Stocks, Stocks, Stocks
The seventh tip of Forbes ten rules for building wealth deals with “proper” asset allocation and that you should be investing more in stocks and less in anything else. Their rule of thumb? 120 minus your age should equal allocation percentage in stocks and the rest should be put in bonds. Stocks are usually more…
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10 Rules: Save It Automatically
The only way to guarantee that something happens regularly is if you make it automatic (duh!) and that’s the focus of this sixth tip of Forbes ten rules for building wealth: make saving automatic. This is the premise of David Bach’s The Automatic Millionaire and it’s definitely a tip that, twenty years from now, you…
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10 Rules: Don’t Chase Trends
One of things that a lot of people do, without even thinking about it, is the topic of this particular tip. Human beings have a natural herd mentality and so when there are trends, people want to be a part of it whether it’s bell-bottom pants or its investments. During the dot-com bubble that burst…
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10 Rules: Don’t Try To Beat The Market
I wholeheartedly believe in this fourth tip of Forbes ten rules for building wealth of not trying to beat the market. Honestly, you have better things to do with your time than research investments and you should be doing those, instead of checking PE ratios, growth rates, and the like. Strangely, Forbes focuses a lot…
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10 Rules: KISS – Keep It Simple Stupid
The third tip of Forbes ten rules for building wealth is one that, I think, applies to almost everything in life: keep things simple. Forbes recommends that you choose three or four index funds that will give you some good exposure – that is, a nice mix of risk and reward instead of all in…
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10 Rules: Use Your 401K
This is the second tip of the ten in Forbes ten rules to building wealth and it works nicely with rule 1: start early, because contributing to your 401K should be an automatic decision when you start a new job. I don’t want to beat this discussion to death, because every personal finance blogger has…