It has been a few years since I talked about online backup and a break from economic news is probably not a bad thing.
An online backup service should have the following features.

Require minimal care and feeding. If you have to pay attention to it, it wont happen.
Keep previous versions of files that have changed [...]

Whenever fear levels are high, I find it comforting to go over the fundamentals of investing.  Today I am revisiting how you should set your exptations for long term returns from equities.
Equity returns come from the following sources

Dividends
Earnings growth
Price/Earnings ratio expansion or contraction
Inflation

I’m going to focus on expected real return and therefore leave inflation out [...]

First, to put it on the table, I have a strong bias against EIAs because I think there are more effective ways to achieve the same result.  They often have many moving parts that can make them less valuable than they originally appear and which help hide the expenses built into the product – commissions (often around 8%) and [...]