Green Wealth Management

The economic data is coming in better than expected, with strong signs of recovery. Even so, there is a long way to go, and especially for jobs it could be several years before we see a full recovery. Click through to read LPLresearch.com's full blog post.

Why is the stock market so strong right now, when things are still so bad? With a number of charts, LPL Research looks at the ways a bad situation is getting less bad, which is good for the stock market.

Every Thursday the number of people filling for unemployment for the first time that week gets reported. For the ninth strait week, that number has been staggeringly huge compared to what was the norm before we shut down the economy. As this article and chart show, however, that number of new unemployed has also consistently gone down since it peaked at the end of March. This isn't good news, 2.4 million new unemployed Americans is not good news, but it is better bad news than it has been.

It is the start of a new year, which among many other things, means new legislation. The big one for investors with 401(k) or IRA accounts was called the SECURE Act, which goes into effect last year. It has made a number of changes that will impact your retirement accounts. The Biggest two are that you can now contribute as long as you work, whatever your age, and your beneficiaries might only have 10 years, and if a trust might only have one year ten years later, to fully distribute a retirement account they inherit from you. Click through to read the big changes, or reach out to our office for a more direct assessment of the impact for you. https://www.kiplinger.com//T064-C032-S014-pros-cons-and-po

As the decade ticks to a close tonight, the impetus to review takes hold. That holds true in life, as well as in the stock market. The article (below) from Yahoo Finance has a chart with the biggest concern of each month of the last decade. Some were pretty massive concerns, yet over that same time frame US equities have largely done well. Unfortunately the Yahoo writer doesn't label his axis very well, The colors are clearly what the concern was, and the vertical is months, but I can only assume the horizontal is some percentage of the survey's respondents. Even ignoring the horizontal axis, the constant flood of concerns is worth recognizing--there is always some reason not to invest. https://finance.yahoo.com//2010s-stock-market-chart-of-the?