Charles Schwab has a new high yield checking account according for Fortune.

Econbrowser provides a quick peek at how underfunded local governments are with respect to their promised pensions and health benefits.  The scary part is this is during a bull market.  During the next recession these numbers are going to get much worse.  It wouldn’t surpise me if we see a number of small municipalities declare [...]

With the private equity hype machine ratcheting up these days, here is a timely paper analyzing private equity performance. The punchline is that on average private equity has been under performing the S&P 500 by more than an annualized 3%. Abstract: This literature review covers the issues faced by private equity fund investors. It shows [...]

In the same way that Zillow and Trulia help you see real estate prices in an area, Rentometer helps you see rental prices in an area.  Lauren Kim of the Wall Street Journal talks about the pros and cons of Rentometers approach.

Scott Burns writes about a study on equity indexed annuities (warning PDF). Here is his summary “…the study estimates that “between 15 percent and 20 percent of the premium paid by investors in equity-indexed annuities is a transfer of wealth from unsophisticated investors to insurance companies and their sales forces.” Benchmarking against a simple $100,000 [...]

William Bernstein writes about how the most successful investors are ones which are not focused on financial success. Two nuggets from the piece. Three things provide long-lasting satisfaction, as quantitatively measured by academic psychologists: autonomy meaningful contact with others the development and exercise of competence. If you want to earn high investment returns [meaning above [...]

Lawrence Starr has been hitting the press with his viewpoint that Roth 401Ks are a bad idea for most people. I’m not as big a pessimist as he is because I believe in tax regime diversification. Since most people have much more money in their tax deferred savings than in their tax free savings, I [...]

Erin Burt walks through a typical budget for someone graduating from college and starting there first job.  First she shows the taxes that come out of your paycheck.  Here is an example for a $35K/yr job. Monthly gross pay $2,917 ($35,000 divided by 12 months) Federal taxes $331 Social security $181 Medicare $42 State taxes [...]

While Vanguard is generally my preferred vendor for people to use when managing investments on their own, Schwab‘s latest offering is a real plus for those who want to be on the Schwab platform. Fundamental indexes use a combination of company attributes (e.g., sales, cash flow, dividends, book value) to determine their weight in the [...]