Dennis Carpenter, CFP

03/06/2014

Don't make the same mistakes as these Celebrities!

Celebrities' estate planning mistakes, all easily avoidable, have cost their heirs millions of dollars.

02/18/2014

http://www.lifehealthpro.com/2014/02/14/companies-from-facebook-to-jpmorgan-squeeze-401k-c?eNL=530295a6160ba04a49000019&utm_source=AnnuitiesInsider&utm_medium=eNL&utm_campaign=LifeHealthPro_eNLs&_LID=133995069 #.UwO_klEPbjk.email

Measures taken by some large employers are making it difficult to save for old age.

02/18/2014

Baby boomers should consider annuity purchase as retirement date approaches

MarketWatch
For baby boomers preparing to retire, the purchase of an income annuity may be a better option for guaranteeing a steady income than periodic withdrawals from savings, writes Melody Juge, managing director of Life Income Management. "If you currently don't have an annuity and you find that you will be dependent on pulling money out of your investment portfolio each month for basic living expenses, this may be a good time to research and consider the offerings of a simple life income annuity," she notes. MarketWatch (1/24



http://www.marketwatch.com/story/when-to-retire-3-steps-3-contingencies-2014-01-24?pagenumber=1

Approaching retirement but confused on when to start? Here’s a three-step plan to apply to three key retirement dates to decide which is right for you.

02/18/2014

Avoid the high fees of a 401K and enjoy Tax-Free Income instead!

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/business-economy-financial-crisis/retirement-gamble/how-retirement-fees-cost-you/

Most Americans are unaware of the fees they are paying for their 401(k)'s, but over a lifetime, such charges can cost an ordinary American more than $109,000. Here's how.

11/01/2013

Thanksgiving soon will be upon us, so now seems an appropriate moment to remember just how dramatically life can change.

I’m sure some of you have heard the story of the Thanksgiving turkey … happily content, going about his life on the family farm, waking up every morning to as much food as he could possibly consume. But, then again, turkeys are stupid creatures. And because every day is filled with food and the carefree life of meandering around the pen, the turkey always assumes that tomorrow will be exactly the same as today.

Only one day, amid the chill of late-November, all that the turkey knows as normal changes radically and in an instant.

In this story, we are all the turkey. Our monetary system is broken and we are no longer tied to the Gold Standard.

As such, one morning we will find our daily food is not in the hopper and we will wonder why the farmer carries a hatchet...

10/24/2013

No one in America should be breathing a sigh of relief that we avoided a default and that the government shutdown is over. This is just the calm before the storm. Relief only masks the bigger concern: the crisis of confidence in America. All the fundamental problems we have as a nation remain unchanged, unaddressed and worsening with each passing day. We should be more worried today than before the debt-ceiling crisis began. The fight between Harry Reid’s Democrats and John Boehner’s Republicans did nothing to repair, even marginally, to avert the coming train wreck.

10/23/2013

One Chase Plaza – was sold yesterday in New York for $750 million.

Not surprisingly, the building was bought by a Chinese asset-management firm, Fosun.

Today's Friday Digest is about this deal… and the massive economic forces that lie behind it. The story of One Chase Plaza is the story of how America was sold to its bankers. It's the story of how inflation plundered our wages. It's the story of how credit, rather than savings, came to dominate our economy and transform our way of life. It's the story of how America was packaged and sold to our foreign creditors – mostly the Chinese.

The U.S. continues to consume far more than it produces. We finance this consumption with debt that's owned in large measure by foreign creditors. Take the U.S. Treasury debt, for example. At nearly $17 trillion, this is the world's largest pile of obligations. If you exclude Treasury obligations held by the U.S. government and the Federal Reserve, 54% of the remaining obligations are held by foreign creditors. And these foreign debts continue to grow rapidly – at about $500 billion annually.

Debt service on these obligations allows our foreign creditors to continually buy America's best assets. Today, foreign creditors directly own and control U.S. assets worth more than $25 trillion. That's roughly a third of all the wealth in America. And that's far more than what Americans own overseas, which equals nearly $5 trillion.

10/22/2013

US Post Office Defaults~
While no one was noticing, earlier this month the Post Office failed to make a $5.6 Billion payment for healthcare of its retirees. This system is broken, its business model is out dated and inflexible.

The Unions claim it is a temporary problem due to the downturn in the economy. That is wishful thinking. Number of pieces being mailed has dropped dramatically and continues to drop. We need to fix it or pay the estimated $50Billion bailout in 2017!~

10/16/2013

The expansion of Medicaid, with increased cost burden for taxpayers.

Medicaid is a combined state-federal program initially designed to help the neediest among us. But it has burgeoned to cover medical costs for about one in every five people. Today, Medicaid pays for two of every five babies born in the United States, and three of every five people in long-term care facilities in the US.

Obamacare will add another 20 million new Medicaid dependents. According to the Kasier Family Foundation, that Medicaid expansion will add an average of 13% to state budgets in costs for 2014 alone.

Even though Medicaid was designed to help the poor, studies have consistently shown that Medicaid recipients receive worse medical care than people without any health insurance at all! Medicaid patients have longer waits to see a doctor, fewer specialists to choose from, and poorer medical outcomes overall. A particularly morbid piece of evidence is that on average, Medicaid patients die sooner after surgery than people who have no medical insurance.

Essentially, Obamacare is forcing 20 million more Americans into second-class medical care with Medicaid.

10/11/2013

Should you pay off your house?

● AARP reports that 53.6% of households age 55-64 carried a mortgage in 2010, compared with 37% in 1989; among households age 65-74, the figure jumped to 40.5% from 21.7 percent. Meanwhile, the median value of mortgage debt among the 55-64 crowd soared to $97,000 in 2010, up from $33,800 in 1989. For households age 65-74, median loan values soared to $70,000 from $15,400. ● The media loan-to-value ratio among homeowners age 50-59 jumped from 10% to 38% between 1989 and 2010, according to the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University.

10/07/2013

HIGH AND LOW – 47.8% of tax returns filed in 2011 reported adjusted gross income (AGI) of less than $30,000. 3.2% of tax returns reported AGI of at least $200,000 (source: Internal Revenue Service).

09/20/2013

Jeremy Siegel is a professor of finance at the Wharton School of the prestigious University of Pennsylvania. He studied the returns of different types of asset classes like stocks, bonds, Treasury bills, and gold over a 200-year time frame.

The results were astonishing.

From 1802 to 2006, $1 invested in:
• Gold grew to $32.84
• Treasury bills grew to $5,061
• Bonds grew to $18,235
• Stocks grew to $12.7 million

Those are the actual numbers: Gold grew to $32.82. Treasury bills grew to $5,061. Bonds grew to $18,235. And stocks grew to an astonishing $12.7 million!

Gold and bonds have an important place in your wealth-building strategy, but when it comes to Legacy Investing—i.e., building long-term wealth—stocks are the only way to go.

You may be thinking, "Two hundred years is a long time. After all, the average life expectancy of a U.S. male is 83 years."

So how would stocks do over a shorter period of time—say, 54 years?

In The Future for Investors, Siegel answered that question. Between 1950 and 2003, a $3,000 investment in the S&P 500 would have given you a return of $1,323,936. That's very impressive.

But had you invested that same $3,000 into three companies that have enduring, competitive advantages, your total return would have been $5,080,054 using the same time frame!

Here are the stock-by-stock results. One thousand dollars invested turned into a:

• Balance of $2,042,605 in Kraft Foods
• Balance of $1,774,384 in R.J. Reynolds To***co
• Balance of $1,263,065 in ExxonMobil

Wow!