The 5 Steps to Buying Your Happiness in Recessionary Times

President Harry S. Truman once said; “Recession is when a neighbor loses his job. Depression is when you lose yours.” While you may not have lost your job, more than likely, there’s a good chance you have lost a lot of money in your portfolio and are probably wondering what to do. It doesn’t matter [...]

When Buy and Hold Fails: From Scrambled Nest Eggs to Starting Over Easy

Perhaps buying and holding as an investment strategy isn’t feeling so good lately. Perhaps you’ve heard, eggs do have lots of cholesterol and eating too many of them can be bad for your heart. If you are one of those who have been relying solely on the conventional wisdom that buying and holding will turn [...]

Nonprofit Recession Survival Guide to Getting Donations

First the markets, then Madoff, now the Obama administration is proposing reductions in the charitable tax deduction for your biggest donors. What else could possibly go wrong? Oh yeah, I forgot to mention the snow day and nobody came to work. One thing is for certain; raising funds in the current environment is much more [...]

Tune In To Hear Me Interviewed On The “E-Factor”- Tuesday, March 18th, Noon Eastern Time

I’m about to be interviewed on the E-Factor. I invite you to listen in and be part of it! The date will be next Tuesday, March 18th, at noon, Eastern Time (11:00 AM Central, 10:00 AM Mountain, 9:00 AM Pacific). Read below to find out more.
E-Factor is the popular bi-weekly, 60-minute conference call show, which explores the [...]

The Secret of “The Secet”- Connecting the Dots

By now, it’s no secret that “The Secret” has struck a nerve with both fans and critics alike.  The Secret’s message of “The Law of Attraction” is that everything you attract into your life is the result of what you put out into the world.  If you subscribe to Rhonda Byrne’s “purist” view, you believe [...]

The New Law of Attraction in Financial Planning

Have you ever had an “Ah Ha” moment when things seemed to become crystal clear to you and everything just made sense? This happened to me recently after an acquaintance recommended a book called “Think and Grow Rich”, written by Napoleon Hill in 1937. As a Certified Financial Planner™ practitioner, I have read many books [...]

Want the Secrets About Money They Don’t Teach In School? « Richie Richer’s Guide To Everything Money (and more…)

Financial Planning, Meet Philosophy
Several years ago, I took an interesting philosophy course. The instructor suggested that in order to become “wise”, we needed to embrace some critical concepts. I’ll call this concepts “The Circles of Knowledge”. The main points go something like this:

There are things you know you know- I know I know that the earth [...]

What is the Best Way to Reduce Your Federal Income Tax?

As a CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER™ , this is a subject that I get asked frequently. There is no one best answer to this question, however there are a number of places you can look to take advantage of tax breaks the government makes available. My first suggestion is “don’t let the tax dog wag the lifestyle tail”.
Before You [...]

Account Aggrigation- Quicken, Yodlee, or other?

Technology canbe a wonderful thing. There are more and more ways of aggregating your consumer online billing accounts together, but which one?
I tried Yodlee through Yahoo Finance a while back. I found the program to be quite quirky and not robust enough for my needs. I recall that many of the businesses that I was [...]

Learning From Warren Buffett-Good For the Heart, Good For The Tax Return

 The Associated Press recently reported that Warren Buffett Wants Charities to Use His Fortune Within 10 Years After His Estate Is Closed.
Warren Buffett is arguably one of the greatest investors of all time. We should all be so fortunate to be in his position. Warren Buffett is not only a smart investor and generous philanthropist, he [...]