The Personal Financier – A Personal Finance Blog Personal Finance Blog

Is financial modeling to blame for the recent crisis? As always the fault does not lie with the tool but rather with the user. When was the last time you took a look at the validity of Net Present Value or Option Pricing? The recent, or ongoing, financial crisis has been attributed, amongst other things, [...]

Welcome to the May 16, 2009 edition of the Carnival of Financial Planning. Today I’m having the pleasure of hosting the Carnival of Financial Planning on The Personal Financier. The Carnival of Financial Planning takes a long-term view of personal financial planning for individuals and families. We focus on efficient and sustainable ...

I’ve promised to update you, my readers, on my investment decisions. I’ve decided. After months of deliberation I’ve finally decided on getting my feet wet again and bought some stocks on Monday. As readers of The Personal Financier know I am a big fan of investment vehicles that track certain indices such as index funds [...]

What can we learn from the 1990′s Japanese banking crisis and the long slump in the Japanese stock market? Are we facing a similar scenario? Price levels in stock markets worldwide are increasingly becoming attractive with each day brining yet another slump. The time of the long term investors has come. Still, a relentless doubt [...]

Is lottery a tax on stupidity or are our flawed psychologies playing another trick on us? My wife and I usually enjoy strolls around our neighborhood on weekends, especially on sunny winter days. We live in the city and in our last stroll I kept noticing lottery advertisements everywhere as if they were beckoning to [...]

“.. for the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth” (genesis 8:21) Three senior regulators were apparently very surprised by the behavior of financial institutions and especially investment banks and the part they played in the current crisis. Where they really that naïve? I find it a bit hard to believe. What the [...]

Talk of investment risk is abundant but what is investment risk really? Stock investments are risky; Investing in corporate bonds is less risky but still carries some risk; Investing in government bonds is risk free; we each have our own risk preferences and should invest accordingly, and so on and so forth. We all know [...]

Risk management is a relatively new and evolving field. Risk management usually refers to the process of identifying, measuring, controlling, and minimizing uncertainties which may directly or indirectly affect a desired outcome of a system. A great challenge indeed. Any process or procedure we can think of holds many uncertainties. Risk ...