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 Life Insurance Scenarios

By the time you reach the age of 65, you will have spent nearly a quarter of your life on earth—perhaps working for over 40 years. You might have purchased a home and even seen it appreciate in value. Mortgages might have been made and paid off. It’s also possible that you've paid off most or all of your student loans or childcare costs (or even if not, at least they are significantly reduced).

The single biggest expense that you will face in retirement has already occurred. … Read the rest of this article...

By: Mark J. Perry, Professor of Economics and Director of the Program on Economic Policy Reform, University of Michigan and Stephen Moore, Fox News contributor (and former Wall Street Journal editorial board member)

One of the most important economic issues in the 2016 presidential campaign is whether we enter a long period of sluggish growth, as ended in Japan after 1990 or Germany after 2007. To win this debate requires understanding all the forces that broke Japan or Germany, but neglecting all those that led to a much worse outcome for those countries' citizens. Economists call these forces structural economic change. They include population aging, the world economy, and government policies.

In Japan, the aging of the population lowered consumption; Japan no longer needed to pay down its debt. In Germany, a weak euro and global cheapening of labor contributed to massive loss of export markets for German goods.

Those changes are real and worth debating in a presidential election. But they are not structural economic change—they are not force-driven events that could only happen to Japan or Germany at a specific moment in history. They are part of the normal evolution of all developed nations with aging populations and shrinking workforces—and they affect all developed nations equally.

Japan... [is] ...a cautionary tale, but it is precisely because I believe we are now in the middle of a structural economic change that I argue that there is no reason why it should end badly for the United States.

By: Stephen Moore, Fox News contributor (and former Wall Street Journal editorial board member)

We're all in this together. No family—no individual—and certainly no small business has anything close to a margin of safety when mismanaged. The sooner you can understand this and successfully manage your money, the better off you'll be. You should always have at least double what you need to retire in an income stream or other financial assets (savings, stocks and bonds).

It's critical that you have a significant amount of income coming in each month to make it through hard times. This is especially true for retirees who need life insurance coverage. You should also have enough money to meet your basic expenses such as food, shelter, transportation and medications.

No matter how much money you have in the bank, expect to use all of your income throughout retirement. What will keep you from falling into poverty is not the size of your portfolio but your ability to use it wisely during periods of high investment returns and low returns.

By: Cliff Asness

Evaluating an investment opportunity from the standpoint of stock value alone leads inevitably to the conclusion that "it's worth whatever someone will pay for it.” If the price of a stock increases substantially above the value dictated by intrinsic value or cash flows, then it is likely that the stock price will continue to rise and you should buy more of it.

The problem is that this evaluation neglects all the costs, both financial and nonfinancial, that may be associated with ownership of a company's stock. It ignores risks to future earnings and even future profits. And it ignores other considerations such as management performance, corporate governance structures, legal issues, environmental hazards such as pollution or reliance on an area for raw materials—or even a country's risk ratings.

If we accept the premise that the coming year will be no worse than the previous, then a company's stock price will be, on average, fairly valued. This is particularly true if intrinsic value did not increase in the past year, in which case an equal amount of investment risk is rewarded by stock prices that have stayed flat.

Finally, it is important to understand that even when prices go down—and they most assuredly will again—they are not going away. As I said before, stocks beat everything else over time and so their price returns are bound to come back up at some point. The idea of waiting for near-term gains before buying at lower prices is exactly backwards. If you wait for stocks to go down before you buy, they will always be going down.

By: Thomas L. Friedman

The great unknown—and the most dangerous unknown—is how new technologies and globalization will evolve. The more you read about the world today, the more you realize that this is a time of extraordinary change.

Today, as I think about America's future in the global economy, I come back to my original point: We are not going to have an “American Century”—that phrase is no longer appropriate; we are going to have a "Century of the Americas," if we play our cards right. And Mexico and Canada will be at our side every step of the way. If they ever get tired of us, their borders are right there—go across! We're stuck with each other.

For all three nations, our best days lie ahead if we play it right. Our biggest fear is that the fate of NAFTA will be used to demagogue the trade issue, and that's exactly what we fear in Europe today. We are in a different world. The economy is fundamentally changing at a rapid pace. Some changes are good—dramatic improvements in quality of life—and some are terrible—the rise of poverty, inequality, crime and extremist violence. Like it or not, we need to adjust to these changes now if we are to achieve real prosperity in the future.

We have two choices: We can resist these forces and try to make them go away; or we can embrace them and try to shape them for the better.

Conclusion

We are in a new world, and the old rules no longer apply. The future is open—yet it is also unknowable. It's unpredictable—yet it has to be planned for. There are no guarantees—yet we have to make sure that we don't surrender the future to people who want us to turn into a country of serfs.

We need leaders who can see the world clearly and act boldly, even when others are paralyzed by fear. Leaders who can lift their eyes above our borders and imagine what the next century will look like for all three countries together.