Cheerfulness, sir, is the principle ingredient in the composition of health. —Arthur Murphy

Fire Prevention Week, Oct. 9-15. From 2005 to 2009, U.S. fire departments responded to an average of 373,900 reported home fires per year. These fires caused an estimated average of 2,650 civilian deaths, 12,890 civilian injuries, and $7.1 billion in direct property damage per year. Check your smoke alarms, and make sure you have an emergency evacuation plan. Preparation is survival.

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We are looking to fill a position of Strategic Assistant within the firm. If you know of anyone who you feel may be a good candidate, please ask them to review this job description and if they are qualified to forward their resume to me for review.

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To Your Wealth,

Financial Missteps Made By Married Women

By Bill Losey, Retirement Solutions

A recent survey found that over 60% of women feel they are better at handling money than men are. However, married women sometimes find themselves in perplexing financial situations – conditions that might be avoided with a little planning and/or foresight. With vigilance, you can plan to steer clear of these mistakes.

Not saving enough for retirement after marriage. If your spouse earns a huge salary and has invested avidly, you may have less impetus to save for retirement yourself. Your IRA, 401(k) or 403(b) may start to seem more supplemental than primary. Yet what happens if the relationship ends someday and you personally end up with a retirement savings shortfall? Keep contributing to your own retirement accounts.

Dipping into retirement savings once married. If your spouse is really wealthy or has much greater net worth than you do, your retirement nest egg may seem minor in comparison. Your spouse may tell you that with all the investments and savings that you collectively possess, you taking a loan out of your 401(k) won’t be that bad. Well, drawing down your own retirement savings could look like a very bad move 20 or 30 years from now. Who knows what changes life could have in store? Resist the temptation to siphon off your retirement savings.

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Have You Ever Known Everybody To Be Right?

"I buy when blood is running in the streets of Paris" —an early Rothschild

On the day of my birth—Monday, October 11th, 1943—General Eisenhower and Field Marshall Montgomery, meeting in Carthage, made a bet. Ike offered to bet Monty five pounds sterling that the war in Europe would be over by Christmas 1944; the skeptical Englishman took the wager. (Ike loathed Monty to such a degree that, even though it had long been clear that he had lost, he didn’t pay Monty the five pounds until that Christmas Eve. But I digress).

Also on that day, the broad equity market in the United States, as denominated in the Standard & Poor’s stock index, closed at 11.7. As I write, less than a month before my 68th birthday, it’s around 1170.

There’s a certain lovely symmetry in that juxtaposition—stock values, in the aggregate, up a hundred times in my lifetime (while consumer prices are only up about fifteen times)—and I impart this information to you not so much as ancient history as a confession of my bias: all my life experience instructs me to be bullish on the earnings, cash flows, dividends and market values of the great companies in America (and, increasingly, the world) in the long run.

This rise of equity values by a factor of a hundred in my lifetime has been punctuated by thirteen "bear markets"—declines in stock prices averaging about 30%. (Ask your financial advisor for a table of them. I think you’ll find it highly instructive.) For what it may be worth, I’ve been an investment professional through nine of those thirteen episodes, and I can testify from vivid memory that they were all presented to the public by apocalyptic headlines in the financial media as the incipient end of the world. I note as a matter of historical record that the world did not end on any of those thirteen occasions, and that after each of them the long-term uptrend resumed.

This experience—which I hasten to add is not predictive in any scientific or mathematical way—may bring some perspective to the current situation, in which the media are once again trumpeting the end of economic life on the planet as we have known it, due to the stagnation of the U.S. economy and the financial unraveling of the eurozone. And it’s clear that many if not most investors have taken this doomsday scenario to heart, as the flight out of equities and into havens like Treasury bills and gold attests.

Again, though, there is implicit in the paragraph above a fact which always sets off an alarm in my grizzled head. More accurately, it’s a juxtaposition of two facts, one of which is just a statement of my experience. (1) Most people seem to be quite terrified by current events, and are fleeing equities in droves. (2) I have never—not once, not ever in my 45 years as an investment professional—known most people to be right for very long. To the contrary, all my experience indicates that huge and very emotional public consensus—bullish and bearish—turns out relatively soon to be wrong.

But my experience, I hasten to repeat, is not predictive. It does, however, tend to bear out the wisdom of something that the late Sir John Templeton, the father of international investing, was fond of saying: "Among the four most dangerous words in investing are ‘It’s different this time’. "

In closing, even I can respect that my own experiences, based on nearly seven decades on the planet, may be just a bit more information than my reader finds practical or useful. Perhaps, then, we might just look back thirty years, if for no other reason than that that’s probably going to be the average length of a two-person baby-boomer retirement.

In October 1981, we were right in the middle of one of those bear markets. The country was still in the grip of stagflation: unemployment was about eight percent, and inflation was still ten percent, if you can even believe that. And I daresay the bearishness of the mainstream media was every bit as hysterical then as it is now.

That bear market ended, as they all have. But in the intervening thirty years there would be five more, including the deepest (2007–2009) of the postwar era. Now, my birthday in 1981 was a Sunday, so we have to look at the next day to see where we were then, and how far we’ve come.

On Monday, October 12, 1981—thirty years and six bear markets ago—the S&P 500 closed at 121.21. That’s right: it’s about ten times higher today. No, that doesn’t prove anything about the future. (For the record, nothing proves anything about the future.) But it may very well suggest a useful perspective. And you may want to give this some thought before your next conversation with your financial advisor.

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A Woman's Guide To Long-Term Care Insurance Protection

Long-term care is an issue of particular importance to women. Women are often impacted as providers of care and, unfortunately, as recipients of long-term care.

Our FREE Special Report, prepared for you by the American Association for Long-Term Care Insurance, is chock-full of valuable, timely information to help you answer your burning questions about long-term care insurance protection, so you can rest easy.

This FREE Special Report, "A Woman's Guide To Long-Term Care Insurance Protection," Gives You The Information You Need Right Now

This new, informative FREE planning guide for women who are married or living alone includes everything you need to know about:

• A woman's real chances of needing long-term care
• The best age to start planning for the future
• Costly mistakes you can avoid when planning your insurance protection
• Discounts that are available to you, right now
• The tax-deductibility rules you otherwise would have to dig for - laid out for you in easy-to-follow format
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Learn The 16 Questions You Must Ask A Financial Advisor
- BEFORE You Hire One

The world of personal finance is extremely complex. Just one look at the sheer number of investment options, retirement planning vehicles, types of life insurance, estate planning options, and the tax implications of each of these elements, and it’s hard not to feel overwhelmed.

It should be equally clear to anyone who follows the stock market - even if only casually - that there seems to be a lot of volatility in the financial markets these days.

So what’s a person to do?

You could try to learn everything there is to know about each individual aspect of your personal financial situation, and constantly work to keep up to date on those things, or you could seek help from a financial advisor.

http://www.chooseyourfinancialadvisor.com/

On October 20th I’ll be in Chicago for my quarterly business coaching program and will be leaving directly to attend games 3 & 4 of the World Series in either Texas or Detroit. It is obviously very disappointing that the Phils did not advance past St. Louis. I was there to witness the futility first hand and believe me, it wasn’t pretty. Finally, the National League wins an All Star game and the Phillies blow the opportunity for me to finally see them play away as we always go to games 3 & 4.
Oh wee, It will still be a blast. I’ll return late Monday the 24th.

Giving Up a Grudge

If you have ever caught yourself dwelling on someone else’s words or actions and even plotting your revenge, then you certainly won’t be the first or the last to hold onto a grudge.  Holding onto anger, however, only ever hurts one person: the one who can’t let it go. 

Spending endless hours re-enacting an altercation and stewing over what you should have said or done at the time or how you can get even eats away at precious time, energy and peace of mind.  It robs you of the ability to get on with your life and to interact in a positive way with those whom you care about and it also steals your creativity.  Worse still, it fuels feelings of anger, raises blood pressure and causes anxiety.  And while all this is going on, chances are that the other party has already let it go and is getting on with his or her life as though nothing ever happened.

In the greater scheme of things, the people who hold onto a grudge are always the ones who lose.  Never mind the other party – be kind to yourself and learn to let go!

Martin V. Higgins is founder of Family Wealth Management LLC, a fee-based financial planning and wealth management firm. He specializes in providing tax-efficient strategies for preserving and growing family wealth.

Marty is a Certified Financial Planner (CFP)TM practitioner and the past President of both the South Jersey chapter of the Society of Financial Service Professionals (SFSP) and the Estate and Financial Planning Council of Southern New Jersey (EFPCSJ). He is also a Chartered Life Underwriter (CLU), Accredited Estate Planner (AEP), Registered Health Underwriter (RHU), and a Life Underwriters Training Council Fellow (LUTCF). He is a member of the South Jersey chapter of the National Association of Insurance and Financial Advisors (NAIFA).

He is also a 25 year member of the Million Dollar Round Table with multiple Court of the Table and Top of the Table qualifications. He has qualified for his Company’s Chairman’s Council 30 consecutive years. He is a mentor to many of his company’s top producers and is considered an innovator in marketing financial services.

Two Greentree Centre Suite 300 Marlton, NJ 08053 Phone: 1-856-988-7722 marty@familywealthadvisory.com

Martin Higgins is a registered representative and investment adviser representative of Mutual of Omaha Investor Services, a securities broker/dealer and registered investment adviser. Home Office: Mutual of Omaha Plaza, Omaha, NE 68175-1020 Member FINRA/SIPC. There is no contractual relationship between Family Wealth Management and Mutual of Omaha Investor Services, Inc. Martin Higgins can only do business in states in which he is registered. The information presented in this newsletter is intended for educational purposes only, and is not intended to replace the advice of an attorney or qualified tax professional.