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Thursday, 13 August 2020
Recently trending After 30 years of investing, I prefer to skip this partyAustralian house prices: Part 2, the bigger picture How to handle the riskiest company results in historyAustralian house prices: Part 1, how worried should we be?Welcome to Firstlinks Edition 369
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1997 Nobel Laureate Robert Merton wants greater focus on the income that will sustain a retirement, and even Jane Austen understood this. And he has a surprising proposal to help with longevity risk.
With more people living longer, retirement expectations are being reshaped and redefined. Now is the time to consider the financial and cultural solutions for making the most out of the gift of a longer life.
Important retirement planning lessons benefit from actual experience, given that life does not follow a predictable pattern and many people can’t work forever. Planning is vital but so is making adjustments.
Adequate retirement incomes rely on accumulating superannuation balances throughout a working life, and many factors are detrimental to women keeping pace with men. Urgent reform is needed.
There's a gap between the age when many people are considered too old to start a new job, and qualifying for the age pension. It leaves those who do not own their home especially vulnerable.
Retirement isn't what it used to be, especially for those whose job gave them purpose, pride and self-esteem. After full-time work, strategies are required to stay engaged and energised.
The last major stage of life is a chance to do something we are passionate about. In ‘elderhood’ (post-adulthood) we have the time and relative freedom to make more choices, for as long as our health allows.
Relevancy, as long as we maintain it, is rewarding on almost every level. But what happens when we lose it? As we get older, we need to master irrelevancy, the exact opposite of what we’ve spent a lifetime pursuing.
Nobel laureate Robert Merton wants us to focus on the income that will sustain us in retirement, even Jane Austen understood this. And he has a surprising proposal to help with longevity risk.
With years in retirement increasing and the tendency of modern retirees to be fitter and healthier, we find there's more to life than sitting back and watching the world go by. In fact, it's almost impossible.
Depending on your own situation, 60 might be the new 50 or the new 70. When it comes to making decisions about retirement, aged-based rules might not be as useful as once thought.
It's the most common question asked by potential retirees. Working an extra couple of years, having a zest for life or retiring early might affect both savings balances and lifespans.
Eventually, prices become so extreme they bear no relationship to reality, and a bubble forms. I believe we are there today, not for all stocks but for many in the technology space.
There is good reason to believe the negatives will continue to outweigh the positives over the next 12 to 18 months. There is more concern about house prices than the short-term indicators suggest.
It is better to miss a results bounce and buy after the company has delivered than it is to step on a landmine. With such uncertainty, avoid FOMO by following these result season investing tips.
Three key indicators are useful for predicting the short-term outlook for house prices, although tighter lockdowns make the outlook gloomier. There is enough doubt to create cause for concern.
Imagine you had perfect foresight about COVID-19 at the start of the year. You correctly foresaw that the global pandemic would kill over 700,000 among 20 million infections by August. In Australia, borders would close, cities would be locked down, most mortgagors would be on income support and companies would be allowed to trade while insolvent. You then had to guess how much the stock market would fall. Would you say about 10%?
Sometimes the simplest ideas are the best. The founders of Afterpay stumbled on the attraction for consumers of paying by instalments, and now retailers must offer the facility or lose business.