Tag: vig

When a Vig Equals Ownership: The Forever-Cost of a 401k Plan

Wall Street — by which I mean the overall business behemoth that makes its money by holding investments of other people’s money and by trafficking in investments and money generally — is vigging all of us to death. I mean this pretty much literally, i.e., I mean that, from the […]

The Fee-Only vs. Fee-Based Financial Planner Dustup: Much Todo About Something?

Quick: what’s the difference between a “fee-only” financial planner and a “fee-based” financial planner? You haven’t a clue, right? Well, that means that the financial planning community hasn’t done a great job educating the public at large about what these labels mean, which is too bad because helping the public […]

A Scale-Tale: How Big is a Business with 400 Employees?

I am a student of scale — a collector of scale-tales. It all began decades ago with the wonderful book The Seven Mysteries of Life, by Guy Murchie, a life’s-work sort of undertaking for him, full of interesting notions interspersed with the author’s cute drawings and beginning with a chapter […]

Replacing “Assets Under Management Fees” with “Net Worth Under Management Fees”

The other day I asked a money manager I was getting to know whether his firm charged a lower fee for managing bond portfolios than it charged for managing stock portfolios. He said no — that his firm charged the same for both. I asked him about this because some […]

Hearing the Two Words in “Social Security”

Sometimes we use a combination of two words together frequently enough throughout our everyday language that the two essentially become one; we cease to hear the two words as words on their own, and instead hear the two words as a single amalgamated word. It’s a case of near portmanteau-hood. When […]