The New York Times has a fairly decent article on saving for retirement over at CNBC:

What would you do if your financial planner prescribed the following advice? Save and invest diligently for 30 years, then cross your fingers and pray your investments will double over the last decade before you retire.

You might as well go to Las Vegas....

Reaching your goal is highly dependent on the power of compounding — or the snowball effect, where your pile of money grows at a faster clip as more interest (or investment growth) grows on top of more interest....

“What the wise person does is save a large amount of money when they are young,” said William Bernstein, author of "The Investor's Manifesto: Preparing for Prosperity, Armageddon, and Everything in Between" and other investing books. “And if they can do that, when they are older, they can cut back on their equity allocation. When you’ve won the game, you stop playing the game.”

I have noticed that financial experts such as Dave Ramsey, author of The Total Money Makeover: A Proven Plan for Financial Fitness, or Suze Orman have cut out some of the talk about sky high returns but not enough. If I hear Orman say one more time that the $1500.00 that a viewer wants to spend on a trip would turn into hundreds of thousands years down the line, I think I'll scream. Seriously, that $1500.00 may not do all that well, given inflation,while the trip may bring lasting pleasure. Saving is a good thing to do, but falsely letting people think that just by saving a few thousand a year, they will be a millionaire someday is often like telling them to head to Vegas.

"Ugh. Stop trying to justify the sexist notion that it's better for women to marry up. "

Jessica Wakeman over at the Frisky has a column about men marrying for money (via Instapundit and Vox Day). She writes it in response to a Newsweek article about the book, Smart Girls Marry Money: How Women Have Been Duped Into the Romantic Dream--And How They're Paying For It:

Forget for a moment that they annoyingly refer to grown women as “girls” in their title and check out their thesis: because, for a variety of reasons, men earn more money than women, it’s a wise move to marry someone who can provide for you and your family....

Take me, for instance. I’m afraid I’m going to get tarred and feathered as a “bad feminist” for admitting this, but yeah, I do want to marry someone who can financially support both me and our kids.

I’m not ashamed to want to “marry for money,” if that’s what would you can even call it, because I don’t fundamentally believe it is the “man’s role” to provide for women. My actual motivations, as I see them, are pure enough. I know of great guys out there—journalists, teachers, non-profit dudes—who will probably make great dads. But I personally wouldn’t pair up with them because, realistically, our two salaries together just wouldn’t be enough to cut it for what I want out of life. But, but, but, “Bank accounts shouldn’t matter at all!” And while I agree with that in theory, sorry, a man who can provide for me and our children is just much more attractive to me.

Maybe this isn’t “feminist,” but logically, I need to marry a guy who makes more money than I do—preferably a lot more money than I do—for us to be able to afford what I want and I hope he will want, too.

I have to admire some of the comments made by women such as this one:

Ugh. Stop trying to justify the sexist notion that it's better for women to marry up. Feminism gave us the opportunity to make our own money so we could control our own destinies and marry the people we love instead of being indentured servants to men we depend on for survival. If you want to put yourself in that prison, have at it, but don't act like it's a great idea for women in general.

What happens if your husband loses all his money in a lawsuit or market crash or gets injured and can no longer work? Gonna dump him for the next meal ticket? Being able to take care of yourself and family is feminist. Putting yourself in a position where you couldn't do it is what hurts women and children.

At least the above commenter isn't a hypocrite. I can't say the same for Ms. Wakeman who appears to want to be a "feminist" with a meal ticket. I've noticed that the more a woman talks about feminism, the more likely she is to screw a guy out of his money. Why is that?

"The so-called value of tax-free Roth income is just goofy...."

I was reading up on the Roth conversion for 2010 and found this article from MercuryNews.com:

With all this talk about Roth IRA conversions available to everyone in 2010, I don't see the attraction. It seems so simple to me to understand that if I don't write a big check to pay the taxes a conversion requires, I will have a lot more money, along with compound earnings, to pay whatever taxes I might owe on future distributions.

Plus, I control all the money and I have hedged my bets against what might be changes in tax policy or another market crash over the next 40 years.

I agree. I just don't understand all the people who think that converting to a Roth IRA in 2010 is a a good idea. Do you?

Is the market really better under a Democratic administration?

I was checking the stock market at CNBC a few minutes ago and clicked on an article entitled, "Build an Investment Strategy for an Obama Presidency." Here is what I learned:

To shift your long-term investment strategy so that you take advantage of the next four years - and then some - stay with a diversified portfolio but consider making adjustments in your holdings to capitalize on an Obama presidency. Zachary Karabell, economist and president of River Twice Research, reminded that despite popular belief, the stock market tends to do better under a Democratic administration than a Republican administration.

I remember reading about some study on Democrats being better for the market than Republicans a while back in the blogosphere and decided to find out if this was true. Not according to The Wall Street Journal that says divided government is best for the market:

Then there are the various party mixes between the president and Congress. If John McCain wins and we have a Republican president and a Democratic Congress, history leads us to expect an average 10.3% total return from stocks and 3.3% real GDP growth. If Barack Obama wins, and we have a Democratic Congress too, then according to history stocks will average 13.8%, and real GDP growth 3.3%.

But that's no argument for voting for Mr. Obama. Vote for Mr. McCain -- but vote for Republican senators and representatives too. When Republicans have controlled the whole government, it blows away anything Democrats can do. Stocks have averaged 17.5%and real GDP growth 3.3%.

By the way, as fond as Democrats are of saying how poorly stocks have performed under George W. Bush, here's a sobering fact: Stocks averaged 14.1% return in those Bush years when Republicans controlled Congress -- and when Democrats got in there and mucked things up, the average has been a loss of 8.9%. That's not even including 2008 year-to-date, which doesn't look so pretty.

If the electorate were really smart, it would elect a Democratic president and a Republican Congress. Under that deal, stocks have averaged a 20.2% total return, and real GDP averaged 4%. That tells us that economic and stock market success isn't really about partisan politics at all. Sadly, nobody has a political incentive to conduct a study about that.

No, I guess not.