Ellen Rinaldi has held a variety of leadership positions since joining Vanguard in 1997. At present, she serves in our Planning and Development division, where she is responsible for protecting client information, among other key responsibilities.
This time of year we are flooded with reminders, checklists, and predictions. Many are useful, but some are merely entertaining.
While there are many items related to your financial health that deserve attention at the beginning of the year, this might be a good time to order your annual free credit report.
If you’ve heard of Pat Venditte—a minor league pitcher in the Yankees organization—you may know he has an extra tool in his arsenal. It’s not another pitch, but another arm.
He’s ambidextrous and changes his pitching arm depending on the batter he’s facing. He still has to deliver on the pitch, but he has a choice—and never has to plan his strategy from a single approach. The ability to change from right to left can be a competitive edge.
How does this relate to investing? Decisions around investing are often posed in all-or-nothing frameworks: all index or all active, or somewhere in between?
Coming back from lunch in our cafeteria (in keeping with Vanguard’s nautical theme, we call it the Galley), I ran into a co-worker (crew member) I’ve known since I joined Vanguard 14 years ago.
After exchanging quick updates on work and our children, he mentioned that while his kids were at one end of the “care spectrum,” his aging parents were at the other—and were occupying a lot of both his and his wife’s time and financial resources. Heading back to my office, I wondered why more isn’t said about this in the financial planning media. It’s not an unknown challenge—there are books, websites, news articles, and even a “Sandwich Generation Month.”
Beloit College has once again issued its annual “Mindset List,” this time for the class of 2014.
While much of the press uses this list as a way to emphasize new college students’ youth and inexperience, Beloit describes it as a look at the “touchstones” that may color collegians’ thinking now and in the future.
For those of you who watch or have heard of the hit series “Mad Men,” you’ll know that the show provides an interesting story line, some fascinating characters, and great commentary on the social mores and gender differences of the late ’50s and early ’60s.
I’ve been watching lately with an eye toward the financial side of life in that era. There are no credit cards to speak of—Don Draper, the main character, peels off cold cash when he asks his secretary to buy Christmas presents for his children. This is pre-401(k)s and IRAs, and Don and his band of not-so-merry marketers left behind whatever pensions they had coming to them when they broke with their old advertising agency to go out on their own. There is little if any dialogue concerning personal investing at all.
