Blog - Page 28 of 70 - NorthStar Capital Advisors

4 Weeks Until an Important Deadline

Here’s an important reminder if you have an individual retirement account (IRA) or are considering opening an IRA. 2015 contributions to IRAs can still be made up through April 15, 2016.

Make it a double? If you really want to make the most of the growth potential that retirement accounts offer, you should consider making a double contribution this year: a last-minute one for the 2015 tax year and an additional one for 2016, which you’ll claim on the tax return you file next year. That strategy can add much more to your retirement nest egg than you’d think.

2015/2016 Annual IRA Contribution Limits*

Traditional/IRA Rollover: $5,500 ($6,500 if you are 50 years old or older)
Roth IRA: $5,500 ($6,500 if you are 50 years old or older)
SIMPLE IRA: $12,500 ($15,500 if you are 50 years old or older)
SEP IRA: $53,000

*Note: The maximum contribution limit is affected by your taxable compensation for the year. Refer to IRS Publication 590 for full details.

The savings, tax deferral, and earnings opportunities of an IRA make good financial sense. The sooner you make your contributions, the more your money can grow.

If you have any questions or would like to make an IRA contribution give us a call at (704) 350-5028 or email info@nstarcaptical.com.

Retiring in a Bear Market

AARP recently reached out to our firm to get advice on what people should do if they are going to end up retiring in a bear market. Here are our leading thoughts that we shared:

First, let’s address the premise that you’re retiring into a bear market because you may in fact be jumping the gun! There are always talking heads in the financial media warning of an imminent bear attack. Pessimism sells and being a pessimist makes you look smart. Just look to the recent past. Every single year for the past five plus years “pundits” have threatened that a bear market is just around the corner. Meanwhile, the market has pushed onward, just like it does a majority of the time, and delivered a fantastic run up in value.
Don’t start planning for a bear market after it occurs. Since timing the market is essentially impossible, you want to structure your investments to be a stable ride whether it’s an up or down market. In fact, if you have a properly diversified portfolio with a robust mixture of stocks and bonds, you’ve got the all-weather portfolio that you need. Technical note — high quality intermediate-term bonds are your best option for preserving capital during an economic disaster.
What about your attitude and, more importantly, your behavior? Prepare yourself psychologically to keep calm and carry on regardless of the investment environment. Getting your attitude and expectations in check will decrease the chances of making an unforced error and blowing up your portfolio. Have a plan and stick with it. If you need help, don’t hesitate for a moment to hire a financial coach because this is the most important game of your life.
When you’re actually in a bear market, you’ll know it. By convention, market values will be off more than 20% and everyone’s attitude will be gloomy. While the market is down there are concrete steps that you can take to avoid straining your retirement nest egg and denting its future potential.
What you want to do is avoid withdrawing from your investments as much as possible.
- delay major expenditures
- temporarily cut back on your travel and other discretionary spending
- draw down on your cash reserves to provide temporary retirement income
- if you have to draw from you portfolio, preferentially sell your bonds so stocks don’t get sold after a crash
- even consider a part-time job or consulting gig to supplement income
The less you draw from your portfolio during the bear, the greater the spring back will be in its value when the market recovers. Historically, bears hit fast and then the market recovers quickly so you shouldn’t have to take these emergency countermeasures for too long.
Another technical note — don’t forget to continue to annually rebalance your portfolio even in a bear market. Those intermediate-term bonds should be up in value which will provide you dry powder to buy stocks when stocks are on sale at temporarily diminished prices.

Misconduct! 10 Worst & 10 Best Behaving Advisory Firms

New research shows the level of financial advisor misconduct is alarmingly high. “It’s everywhere, not just small firms. It is pervasive,” said Dr. Amit Seru, a finance professor at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business and a co-author of “The Market for Financial Adviser Misconduct” (Egan, Matvos, and Seru 2016).

These researchers data mined the FINRA database to aggregate and measure the misconduct data for all U.S. firms with at least 1,000 advisors. The industry-wide average was 7% of all advisors have records of misconduct.

Oppenheimer ranked #1 in the “bad behavior” list. Nearly 20% of the advisors at Oppenheimer & Co. have been disciplined for misconduct that varies from placing clients in unsuitable investments to trading client accounts without permission. This rate is ~25 times higher than the “best behaving” firm, Morgan Stanley.

The following excerpt from Table 6 of this landmark study lists the 10 firms with the highest rate of “bad behavior”:

On the flip side, here is the list of the “best behaving” firms from the study:

Here are some other key findings from this research:

Roughly 7% of advisors have misconduct records
Prior offenders are 5 times as likely to engage in new misconduct as the average financial adivsor
Approximately 50% of financial advisors lose their job after misconduct
44% of those advisors are re-employed in finance within a year (!)
Misconduct is concentrated in firms with retail customers and in counties with low education, elderly populations, and high incomes
Some firms “specialize” in misconduct and cater to unsophisticated consumers

Run, don’t walk, to the FINRA search page to immediately review your advisor’s regulatory disclosures!

Sources:
The Market for Financial Adviser Misconduct (Egan, Matvos & Seru, 2016)
Bloomberg

What Buffett Wouldn’t Do and You Shouldn’t Either

People often look to Warren Buffett, one of the greatest investors of all time, for guidance what to do. But what about the opposite? The Oracle of Omaha has a great list of “no-goes” enumerated in a recent Bloomberg article:

Investing:

Don’t be too fixated on daily moves in the stock market (from Berkshire letter published in 2014)

Don’t get excited about your investment gains when the market is climbing (1996)

Don’t be distracted by macroeconomic forecasts (2004)

Don’t limit yourself to just one industry (2008)

Don’t get taken by formulas (2009)

Don’t be short on cash when you need it most (2010)

Don’t wager against the U.S. and its economic potential (2015)

Management:

Don’t beat yourself up over wrong decisions; take responsibility for them (2001)

Don’t have mandatory retirement ages (1992)

“Don’t ask the barber whether you need a haircut” because the answer will be what’s best for the man with the scissors (1983)

Don’t dawdle (2006)

Don’t interfere with great managers (1994)

Don’t succumb to the attitudes that undermine businesses (2015)

Don’t be greedy about compensation, if you’re my successor (2015)

Source: Bloomberg

Re-sizing U.S. Counties Based on Local Economies

When you look across the globe, 54% of the world population is city dwellers and 80% of economic activity occurs in cities. Cities are engines of growth that leverage networks and economies of scale to create “economies of agglomeration”.

Max Galka has created a great visualization of the metro economic impact across the United States. In these cartograms, the size of each county is distorted to reflect its relative economic contribution to GDP. (It’s great to see our home-town favorite, the Charlotte Metro Region, holding it own between Greater Atlanta and Greater D.C. !)

U.S. Map Re-sized Based on Local GDP Contributions

Here’s a static frame that shows the heft of the 10 largest U.S. metro regions by GDP. Greater New York City at $1.5 trillion GDP is as big as Boston, Philadelphia, Atlanta, and Washington, D.C. combined!

Source: Visual Capitalist

Don’t Mix Your Politics and Your Investments

Salespeople and product-sales organizations are very astute at selling during political stress. They usually find a hook to sell their products…products that in most cases are not really in your best interest.

As Mike Piper points out in the Oblivious Investor, fear is a powerful sales tool. Salespeople exploit a person’s political views to instill fear and ultimately sell undesirable financial products. Those products are not only intrinsically bad, they come with a huge cost.

The pitch goes something like this,

[Political event X] just happened or is likely to happen.
As a result, the economy will take a nosedive.
You should buy my product to protect yourself.

This strategy is popular because it appeals to people of vastly different political views. To lure in investors with left-leaning views, the pitch evokes a narrative that the markets are rigged by the financial elite. To draw in the right end of the spectrum, the pitch emphasizes over taxation, over regulation, or excess government spending.

The technique is also popular because it can be used to sell just about anything…

The economy is going to hell, and that’s why you should buy gold.
The economy is going to hell, and that’s why you should buy my market-timing newsletter.
The economy is going to hell, and that’s why you should buy this annuity.
The economy is going to hell, and that’s why you should invest in my hedge fund.

If the fact that someone is trying to play you with a sales pitch designed to sell any product to two contradictory sets of beliefs isn’t enough to drive you away, consider this. For the recommended product to be right for YOU the following conditions have to be met:

The salesperson’s political prediction must be right
The salesperson’s economic prediction must be right
The salesperson’s product must indeed be a good solution to the proposed scenario

Good luck getting all that to be true!

Source: OI

Retiring from the NFL

This Sunday’s Super Bowl 50 match-up between our hometown Carolina Panthers and the Denver Broncos is the talk of the town. But what happens after the Super Bowl? Potentially way after the game when a professional football player retires?

It turns out the National Football League has a rather generous pension plan. The NFL is one of the rare 7% of American companies that offers traditional pensions to new hires. That figure is way down from the 62% level seen in 1979.

Only a few years ago the NFL had the worst funded plan of the four major sport leagues, reaching a low 49% of assets on hand to fund future benefits. Their funding ratio has made a dramatic recovery since then to 72% and NFL owners have committed to 100% funding by 2021.

The NFL pension plan has $1.8 billion in assets with 4,200 retirees and 2,100 active players. Players qualify after 3 seasons and are eligible to draw benefits starting at age 55. An 18-year veteran like Peyton Manning would receive an estimated annual pension $107,040 compared to a 3-year, short-timer’s check of $21,360.

Although most corporations have done away with pensions and shifted the risk and responsibility of saving for retirement to their employees, the NFL’s program is strongly in place thanks to the community of active and retired sportsmen. NFL retirees do a great job of communicating the great benefit of the pension to the younger, active players which carries through to the players’ collective bargaining.

Source: WSJ

Index Card of Personal Finance Essentials

Simplicity is a great foundation and powerful foil to unnecessary complexity. University of Chicago professor Harold Pollack champions this approach to personal finance and dashed out this index card to make his point.

We work with our clients to go above and beyond the common sense, but it’s built upon a strong foundation of essentials similar to Dr. Pollack’s.

Happens All The Time

The New Year selloff in stocks has captured a lot of attention because,

We’re not used to this since the market has been unusually quiescent the past few years

The decline is global

The speed of descent is significant

But despite perception, double-digit declines from prior highs are the norm, not an anomaly. It happens two out of every three years.

Here are great points of reference to put this market event into context:

The average intra-year decline is 16.4%. This current decline might feels worse due to the speed at which it’s happening, and because it’s occurring right out of the gate.
Double digit declines are to be expected, 64% of all years experienced them.
It’s not unusual for those double digit declines to be of little importance. 57% of the years with 10% drawdowns finished positive.
Stated differently, 36% of all years saw a double digit decline and still finished positive.
Drawdowns of 20% or more have happened 23 times, or 26% of all years. On five of those 23 occasions, stocks still ended up positive on the year.

The following chart provides a great visual on how intra-year drawdowns are normal.

Source: TII

Stock Market’s Down — SO WHAT?

This great little piece in the New York Times provides 6 points to consider when the stock market is down:

You Are Not the Stock Market
Chances are, your portfolio is a diverse mix of investments. While stocks may be falling, you probably also have some bonds and cash. Perhaps there are some real estate mutual funds, too. Then there’s your home equity if you own a home, not to mention the value of your future earnings. These things probably won’t all fall simultaneously.

You May Have Done Quite Well in Stocks
If you were in stocks from 2009 to 2015, or in the 1990s or consistently since the early 1980s, you are most likely a big winner. It’s generally a bad idea to look at your investment statements too often, but take a quick peek at your long-term performance. That outsize gain you see is one reason you were in stocks in the first place.

Your Goals Probably Have Not Changed
At some time in the past, when you were not scared, you made a decision to construct your portfolio a certain way. You knew that stocks involved risk and that the returns they have traditionally delivered, above and beyond what cash and bonds do, was the reward for your persistence.

Most Investors Have Plenty of Time to Recover
Too many 70-year-olds sold all of their stocks in 2009 and are healthy enough to live to 100. They would be going on a lot more vacations now and be worrying less about long-term care if they had held firm.

Some People Cannot Handle the Stress of Stock Investing
Maybe you are one of them. But try to give this more time, and consider the alternatives. There are few investments that can deliver the kinds of returns that stocks can without their own accompanying anxiety. An alternative is to save a lot more in safer investments like cash or certain bonds. Most people don’t have enough income to do that easily, so settling for lower returns will mean a combination of working longer and living modestly. For some people, that is a fine trade-off.

Dear New Investors: This Is Just What Markets Do
There is absolutely nothing abnormal about what is going on here. Most of us have to save somewhere, and history suggests that stocks are the most accessible route to getting the returns you will need to retire someday. It would take decades of systemic economic erosion to prove otherwise, and a few days of market declines do not suggest that anything like that is upon us.