Good morning, Apexians, and welcome back. I’m not much in the mood for pithy chit-chat. There’s just too much heavy stuff going on in our country right now.
I’m 51 years old. In those 51+ years, 2020 is probably the “weightiest” year I’ve experienced…and we’re only five months in! On a personal level, this year has been awesome. But it feels like that as a society, things are falling apart…
Anyhow, let’s look at some money links, shall we?
“I don’t feel like buying stuff anymore.” [Buzzfeed News] — “In many ways, the pandemic has functioned as a great clarifier, making it impossible to ignore the dilapidated state of so many American systems. It’s highlighted whose work is actually essential, which leaders actually care about people who aren’t like them, and whose lives are considered expendable…And a whole lot of things we thought of as needs have revealed themselves to be pretty deeply unnecessary.”
Why is the stock market doing well lately? [Oblivious Investor] — “The value of the stock market at any given time is essentially the market’s consensus as to the present value of the expected future earnings of publicly traded companies. That is, the stock market is concerned with the profitability of publicly traded companies. Nothing more or less than that.”
The pros and cons of rebalancing your portfolio. [Morningstar] — “Rebalancing is not an unmitigated good. On the bright side, under normal conditions (meaning that the portfolio holdings are imperfectly correlated), the practice does improve returns, albeit by not dramatically. Less happily, rebalancing means the ongoing habit of trading the portfolio’s best-returning asset for its worst.”
What happens to unpaid debt when a person dies? [CNBC] — “It’s not unusual for a person to pass away and leave behind some unpaid debt. For the heirs — typically the surviving spouse or children — the question often is what, exactly, happens to those obligations. The answer: It depends on both the type of debt and the laws of the state.”
Last of all, here’s a fifteen-minute video from Ben Felix in which he explores retirement income and the four-percent rule for “safe” withdrawal rates. I’m new to Felix’s stuff, but I like it. A lot.
Okay, that’s it to start the week. I’ll be back again tomorrow…and maybe I won’t feel so dark and gloomy.