Judy Loy
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Retirement Plans for Small Businesses
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In my last article, I talked about individual retirement accounts. Most investors use their company’s retirement plan to save for retirement. (If you don’t have a plan through your employer, please set up a Roth or individual IRA to make contributions). Saving through your paycheck is easy and many plans now offer auto-enrollment and default…
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IRA 101: What to Know About Individual Retirement Accounts
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Individual retirement accounts come in two flavors: Roth and traditional. They are mirror images of one another when it comes to taxes. Both a traditional IRA and a Roth allow money to grow tax-free. While inside the accounts, there is no taxation on dividends, interest or gains on the holdings. The contribution limits in 2023…
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The World of Book Sales Has Changed, but a Love for Reading Never Does
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Early in my life, I learned to love reading. I would search flea markets for Nancy Drew books and Walden Books at the mall was awesome. (Yes, back in the day, I would have used that word.) My parents were very keen on education and my mom enjoyed reading, so books were something they would…
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Stock and Bond Correlation
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During the pandemic, liquidity flooded the economy. Monetary policy, which is the Federal Reserve’s purview, left interest rates at zero. This permitted businesses and consumers to lend or borrow at low rates. It was incredibly inexpensive to buy a car, buy a house or issue corporate bonds with low interest rate loans. Fiscal policy, which…
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Tougher Insider Trading Law Needed for Congress, Federal Officials
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Insider trading is the trading of a public company’s stock or other securities based on material, non-public information about the company. This form of insider trading is illegal in the United States. Martha Stewart is a businesswoman, author, and television personality. She was also convicted of insider trading in 2004 and spent five months in…
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Stay the Course Amid Market Volatility
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The Standard & Poor’s 500 is an index that best gauges large capitalization U.S. equities that are publicly traded. The S&P 500 Index is capitalization weighted. This means companies are represented more heavily in the index where components with higher market caps carry a greater percentage weight in the index (more shares on the market…
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The Recession Debate
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The official verdict is the U.S. is not in a recession. The traditional, standard definition of a recession has been met. Textbooks define a recession as two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth. GDP is Gross Domestic Product and is the total monetary or market value of finished goods and services produced within a country’s…
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Roth vs. Traditional Retirement Accounts
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Roth accounts are a fairly new phenomenon and were introduced in the Taxpayer Relief Act of 1997. I like to think of them as the mirror image of the traditional retirement accounts. To start, a Roth IRA and a Traditional IRA have similarities. They both allow money to grow tax deferred inside the accounts so…
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Supply Chain Woes and the Return of Inflation
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Inflation is the rise in prices over time and lessens the buying power of currencies. For decades, economic textbooks had predicted that when the money supply grows more rapidly than the economic output of a country, inflation is the result. Inflation defied expectations and was benign due to globalization and advancing technologies. The ability for…
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The Cost and Benefits of Capitalism
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At the beginning of 2022, a Pew Research survey found that 78% of the U.S. population is dissatisfied with the way things are going in our country. In a March 2022 Gallup Poll, only 24% of Americans said they were satisfied with the way things are currently going in the U.S. The positive high for…