Over the past 150 years, the U.S. stock market (including dividends) has ended the year positively roughly 75% of the years, according to many studies, including one by ​Visual Capitalist​. So if you max out your IRA during the first week of January in the tax year of the contribution, there’s a 3-in-4 chance your… The post The Best Time to Invest Your IRA (It’s Not April) appeared first on Retire Before Dad.

For a long time, I thought I was doing everything right. I was making good money. I was saving aggressively. My retirement accounts were growing, my net worth was climbing year after year, and from the outside, things looked exactly the way they were supposed to. And yet, there was this constant, low-level anxiety that never really went away. Not panic. Not burnout-level crisis. Just a quiet hum in the background. It showed up when […]

🎙️Episode #476 – Is 5% down enough to start investing in real estate? Learn the legit strategies, loan options, and risks you need to understand… The post 5% Down Rental Loans: When They Work (And When They Don’t) appeared first on Coach Carson.

Back in December, I shared the five stocks that we were considering to purchase for our 2026 TFSA contributions. Now that the contributions & purchases are done, I thought it would be worthwhile to look … Read more

The stock market outlook remains in a downtrend.

The post Alexandria Real Estate: Analyzing the Dividend Cut appeared first on Dividend Power. Alexandria Real Estate Corporation (ARE) cut its dividend due to the impact of a weakening life science real estate market, federal policy and budget changes, high interest expense, and other factors. Weak financial results in 2025 and a weak outlook for 2026 are also a concern. The firm was a Dividend Contender with a 14-year streak of annual increases before the […]

Let’s clear something about passive income up right away. If you don’t have passive income yet, it’s probably not because you don’t have enough money. That’s the story we tell ourselves because it’s convenient. Money is an easy villain. It lets us delay action without confronting the harder stuff. “I’ll start once I have more cash.”“I just need a little runway.”“I’d do this if money wasn’t so tight.” I believed that too. And it kept […]

Don’t miss an episode of our podcast, Personal Finance for Long-Term Investors. Tune in on: Apple Podcasts Spotify YouTube Now, here’s today’s article: I’ve struggled with this concept. I’ve seen many others struggle with it, too. Step 1: We discover a new shiny idea (…Roth conversions! …Small-cap value investing! …Qualified charitable distributions!) Step 2: This idea’s shiny appeal catapults it to the top of our priority list. Step 3: Blinded by the light, we mistakenly overemphasize this new idea to the detriment of the big picture. In various fields, this is called a “novelty effect” or “novelty bias.” It affects long-term investors and DIY financial planners, too, as they contemplate retirement and other long-term goals. What if, instead, we had a simple, prioritized list of ideas that long-term investors ought to consider? Something that wipes away bias and cuts straight to the facts. We need an “order of operations” that ensures you focus on the most important things first, before getting to the shiny new idea. Math has “PEMDAS.” Personal finance has “FOO” – the “financial order of operations.” And what we’re about to do here is “FOO-adjacent,” but much more specific to long-term investors, retirement planning and portfolio construction. The Long-Term Investor’s Order of Operations I believe that if you follow this list in order, you’ll be a better long-term investor. Don’t commit too much energy to a lower topic until all the upper topics are fully addressed. Step 1: Invest I know, I know… we start with a stunning revelation: the most important step in investing is “invest.” But the truth is, many people get caught up in small details before they’ve invested enough to make those details matter. Your stock/bond allocation doesn’t matter if you only have $100 sitting in an account. The single biggest dial you can turn is how much you choose to invest. Consider making consistent investment deposits over time (aka “dollar cost averaging.”). Focus on your savings rate, lifestyle inflation, and career capital. Step 2: Control Your Temperament Warren Buffett said, “Once you have ordinary intelligence, what you need is the temperament to control the urges that get other people into trouble in investing.” Despite what many people think about investing, behavior dominates math. Simple steps, like automated investing and rules-based rebalancing, can be vital. We all possess biases (loss aversion, recency bias, anchoring) that can derail us. Long-term returns are achieved by staying invested during crashes, avoiding panic selling, avoiding speculative manias, thinking long-term, and choosing process over prediction. The math is straightforward. Controlling the broad spectrum of human emotion is far more challenging. Step 3: Risk Assessment & Asset Allocation Asset allocation describes splitting your portfolio across broad asset types like stocks, bonds, real estate, cash, etc. Determining a proper asset allocation is related to your personal time horizon and “need,