Dollar Mentor

Three-legged Stool

Sanjib Saha 14 June 2023 We’ve heard this a million times already: Getting rich quickly is hard, but building wealth slowly isn’t. To be sure, becoming wealthy is neither automatic nor overnight. But with three foundational pieces in place, and some patience, we can achieve it sooner or later. What are the three ingredients of the wealth building recipe? I like the metaphor of a three-legged stool, where each leg represents a mandatory element on which our financial future rests. Each element is necessary, but not sufficient by itself. We need all three legs for the stool to be safe…

Retirement Income Estimator

Sanjib Saha 19 March 2023 Are you thinking of dialing down at work, but worried about not having enough in retirement if you stop saving? Depending on how much you've saved already and how long your investments can grow untapped, you might get there sooner than you think. Instead of guessing, why don't you get a clearer picture by doing the math with our simple calculator? Let's say that you've saved some money for retirement and plan to add to it regularly in future years. Let's also say that you don't plan to retire before you're 65 years old. "Retire…

New Year Resolution, Anyone?

Sanjib Saha 31 December 2022 Any New Year resolutions for 2023 yet? A few of our favorites: 1. If you are the CFO of your household, prepare the annual financial statements – the balance sheet, income/expense summary and cash-flow – and share with family. 2. If someone else manages your household finances, help the person to prepare and walk you through the annual household financial statements– the balance sheet, income/expense summary and cash-flow. 3. If you are new to investing, learn the basics of different asset classes – Stocks, Bonds, Cash, Hard/Real Assets and Alternatives – to ponder which ones might be appropriate for you (or…

Dollar Goes Further

Sanjib Saha 27 November 2022 I wrote about the true damage caused by misspending. Let’s look at the other side of the same coin. Each dollar that you managed to cut back from your expenses goes a lot further than you think. How? Because retirement dollars can be cheap to buy when you’re many years away from it. You get a large discount –the time value of money. But if are able to stop a recurring expense – be it the annual gym payments because you chose to pick up health activities that you can do yourself, or the monthly…

Raiding the Bank

Sanjib Saha 24 November 2022 Each dollar we misspend in our working years is a raid on our retirement bank. Sounds dramatic? I guess so. But it’s true, nonetheless. We just don’t think of it that way. Why? Because we aren’t that good in thinking long-term and picturing ourselves in our inevitable life-stage called retirement. “It’s many years from now, and we’ll cross the bridge when we get there.” This shortsightedness, alas, can be costly if we aren’t saving a good chunk of our income towards retirement. Realistically, most of us are going to earn only a limited amount of…

Portfolio Benchmarking

Ask-Learn-Share Discussion August 21, 2022 Sid Roy This month’s Ask-Learn-Share meeting was a change in some ways. We have been focused on talking about the foundations of a sound investment strategy for a while. We have been stressing about the importance of starting with goals in mind and a well-diversified portfolio to reach those goals. In this episode, we will talk about getting a sense of how well the portfolio is doing. First, let us talk about portfolio benchmarking. What is it? An example from our school life might be a good way to get an intuitive understanding to start…

Investing Discipline in Market Volatility – Part II

Ask-Learn-Share Discussion July 10, 2022 Sid Roy This is a follow-up to last month’s article on investing discipline in market volatility. This was a very relevant topic considering the current market and what is happening to bonds and stocks. We covered a lot of ground in last month’s session. We talked about the two things that trip up even a model investor – risk capacity and risk tolerance. If you have not read that article, it is here. In today’s article, we go a bit deeper into the root of the problem. Many of us have started with a thoughtful…

Investment Discipline in Market Volatility

Ask-Learn-Share Discussion June 10, 2022 Sid Roy We had a fantastic session talking about Investment Discipline in Market Volatility. The session could not have been more appropriate given everything that is going on in the world, the economy, and the investment market. We started noting this irony. We are doing a session focused on managing and responding in a disciplined way to market volatility. Yet, if we really followed sound investment principles, we would be taking a long-term outlook and instead we should be ignoring everything going on in the market. So, if you are not in the camp of…

Life Insurance Investments

Ask-Learn-Share Discussion May 11, 2022 Sid Roy We had another very informative session on a topic that interests me a lot – life insurance investments. This is partly because I was exposed to life insurance pretty early on in my life, but the topic of life insurance investments was new. I am guessing the same is true for most of you. We started the discussion with something almost all of us understand – simple term life insurance. It is meant to provide a financial cushion to family members if an earning member expires unexpectedly and thus the family loses its…

Investing for College presentations are now live

We are pleased to publish a two-part presentation on Investing for College. If you haven't thought about saving for college for your kids, or don't know how to think about it, these presentations would be a good place to start. Please visit the Presentations page for viewing them.Dollar Mentor team