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The Independent Investor: The More You Look, The More You Lose
By Bill Schmick,
01:05PM / Friday, August 26, 2016

How many times a day, week, month or year do you check your tax-deferred savings account? Did you know that the more you look, the higher your chances of losing money? For most of us, once a year is more than enough.

There are clients of mine that check their retirement accounts several times a day. To say they are addicted to doing so would not be an understatement. Some of them are retired and have nothing else to do each day but sit in front of the television watching financial channels. They are usually male, have control issues and have substituted watching TV and their investment accounts for their old job.

The sad facts are that the more you look, the higher the

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@theMarket: Fedspeak Occupies A Dull Market
By Bill Schmick,
06:16PM / Friday, August 19, 2016

It is late summer and a time when the rumor mills work overtime. Financial news departments, confronted with a paucity of breaking news, are desperate to publish "informed opinions" and comments from any public or private sector big name they can find. This week a squad of Fed officials was happy to accommodate.

Never mind that after a week of speeches on "will they, or won’t they” hike rates in September (or December, or anytime in between), investors are no closer to the truth than they were last week. As long as raising-interest rate decisions continue to be data-dependent, the markets remain in nowhere land.

I am not going to add my two cents to the

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The Independent Investor: Health Savings Accounts a Good Idea
By Bill Schmick,
03:14PM / Thursday, August 18, 2016

Does your employer offer a health savings plan? Many do, especially if your company's health insurance has a high deductible. If you aren't taking advantage of it, you should and here's why.

Health Savings Accounts (HSA) were created as a way to help control rising health care costs. An HSA is an account, similar to a personal savings account or an IRA that you can open at work or on your own. Employers consider it a supplement to their high deductible employee health insurance plan (HDHP).

How do you know if your health insurance plan qualifies as a high deductible? Usually, HDHPs won't start paying out until after you've spent at least $1,300 (individual)

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@theMarket: Three in One
By Bill Schmick,
04:24PM / Friday, August 12, 2016

On Thursday, all three U.S. benchmark averages — the S&P 500, NASDAQ and the Dow Jones Industrial Average—registered historical new highs on the same day. You don't want to know what happened the last time this happened.

That was in 1999. The year after ushered in the Dotcom boom and bust where some averages lost 20-30 percent and sent the markets on a roller coaster that did not end until 2003. Am I saying that will happen again? No, but I am expecting a pull-back soon in all three averages.

It is not something that most investors need to worry about. As I mentioned in my last few columns, stocks are overbought and valuations are being stretched higher and

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The Independent Investor: Why the Nation's Productivity Matters
By Bill Schmick,
02:31PM / Thursday, August 11, 2016

The headlines paint a stark portrait of the amount of goods and services that American workers produce in any given year. We are in the longest decline of American productivity since the 1970s. That fact has economists pessimistic about the future chance of continued growth in this country.

Labor productivity has declined for nine straight months and fallen 0.4 percent over the last year. There is nothing complex about productivity statistics. Output per worker, according to the numbers, is drifting down when it should be going up. The last time this happened was in the 1970s, just before a nasty double-dip recession.

Increases in productivity are what makes America's

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