Skybridge Capital founder Anthony Scaramucci remains bullish on bitcoin, dismissing the notion that the potential benefits of the upcoming halving are already priced in. He emphasized that bitcoin has significant room for further growth, noting that the crypto could “trade to half of the valuation of gold,” which translates to a potential six to tenfold […]
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The price tag for a college education has never been higher — and it’s only going up.
The cost of attendance at some schools, including New York University, Tufts, Brown, Yale, and Washington University in St. Louis, is now nearing six figures a year, after factoring in tuition, fees, room and board, books, transportation and other expenses.
Among the schools on The Princeton Review’s “The Best 389 Colleges” list that have already set their costs for the 2024-25 academic year, eight institutions have a sticker price of more than $90,000 per year so far, according to data provided to CNBC.
Considering that tuition adjustments average roughly 4% a year, those institutions — and others — could cross the $100,000 threshold as soon as 2026, according to an estimate by Bryan Alexander, a senior scholar at Georgetown University.
However, that’s not what many families pay.
More from Personal Finance:
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This could be the best year to lobby for more college financial aid
“Crossing a school off the list of consideration based on sticker price alone is a mistake,” said Robert Franek, editor-in-chief of The Princeton Review.
He said about two-thirds of all full-time students receive aid, which can bring the cost significantly down.
Net price: Your net price is tuition and fees minus grants, scholarships and education tax benefits, according to the College Board.
The Princeton Review even ranked colleges by how much financial aid is awarded and how satisfied students are with their packages. These are the colleges that came out on top.
At Washington University in St. Louis, for example, the average scholarship award is just over $65,000 per year, The Princeton Review found, which brings the total out-of-pocket cost closer to $26,000.
In fact, when it comes to offering aid, private schools typically have more money to spend, Franek said.
“When you factor in the average grant, these schools become some of the most affordable in the country,” he said.
The amount families actually spent on education costs in the 2022-23 academic year was, on average, $28,026, according to Sallie Mae’s annual How America Pays for College report.
While parental income and savings cover nearly half of college costs, free money from scholarships and grants accounts for a more than a quarter of the costs, and student loans make up most of the rest, the education lender found.
The U.S. Department of Education awards about $120 billion every year to help students pay for higher education. And beyond federal aid, students could also be eligible for financial assistance from their state or college.
But students must first fill out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, which serves as the gateway to all federal money, including loans, work-study and grants.
This year, problems with the new FAFSA have discouraged many students and their families from completing an application.
As of the last tally, 6.6 million FAFSA forms have been submitted. That’s a fraction of the approximately 17 million students who use the FAFSA form in ordinary years. And under the new aid formula, an additional 2.1 million students should be eligible for the maximum Pell Grant, according to the Department of Education.
“You cannot get away from the value of the FAFSA form even in these difficult times,” Franek said. “This is the key for unlocking the majority of financial aid dollars.”
Already, high school graduates miss out on billions in federal grants because they don’t fill out the FAFSA, experts say.
In total, the high school Class of 2022 left an estimated $3.6 billion of unclaimed Pell Grant dollars on the table, according to a report from the National College Attainment Network.
Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) stock’s stunning rally since the beginning of 2023 was primarily driven by the rapid growth of the company’s data center business, which benefited from the booming demand for its artificial intelligence (AI) graphics cards.
In the company’s recently concluded fiscal year 2024 (which ended on Jan. 28), the data center business produced a record $47.5 billion in revenue, accounting for 79% of its top line. That was a massive increase of 217% from the year-ago period.
The data center business recorded a much stronger year-over-year increase of 409% in revenue to $18.4 billion in fiscal Q4, significantly outpacing the segment’s annual growth.
This suggests Nvidia’s data center business is still gaining momentum, which also explains why the company’s outlook for the current quarter was well ahead of consensus estimates. Nvidia expects revenue of $24 billion in the first quarter of fiscal 2025, which would be a 233% increase from the year-ago period.
Given that Nvidia relies on sales of chips that are being deployed in data centers for AI training and inference purposes, it can be easily concluded that this business segment can continue to be a major catalyst for the company.
However, investors shouldn’t ignore the progress Nvidia is making in its second-largest business segment — which was originally the company’s bread and butter before AI arrived — as it has the potential to supercharge the company’s already impressive growth.
Nvidia brought major innovation to personal computers (PCs) in 1999 when it introduced what it calls the world’s first graphics processing unit (GPU), an additional processor tacked on to a PC’s motherboard for running graphics-intensive workloads such as video games.
Nvidia’s GPU technology evolved over the years, and it is now being used in multiple industries ranging from automotive to digital twins to AI. But at the same time, the company continues to be a major player in the market for discrete PC graphics cards with a share of more than 80%. The good part is that this dominance is leading to robust financial gains for Nvidia.
The company generated $10.4 billion in revenue in fiscal 2024 from the gaming segment, an increase of 15% from the prior-year period. That’s a nice recovery considering that the gaming GPU market was not in great shape a year ago on account of poor PC sales and oversupply. However, Nvidia’s 56% year-over-year increase in gaming revenue in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2024 suggests that this market gained tremendous momentum.
One of the reasons why that’s happening is because of the recovery in the PC market. Market research firm Canalys estimates that PC sales could increase by 8% in 2024 following last year’s drop of 12.4%. AI is going to play a key role in this growth. According to IDC, AI-enabled PCs capable of running generative AI applications locally could gain solid traction from 2024 with shipments of 50 million units.
IDC predicts that annual shipments of such AI-enabled PCs could climb to an impressive 167 million units in 2027. Even then, this emerging niche will have a lot of room for growth as AI PCs are expected to account for 60% of overall PC shipments in 2027. For Nvidia, the adoption of AI PCs will unlock a massive growth opportunity, and the good part is that the company has already started capitalizing on this nascent market.
In its latest earnings release, Nvidia said that it enabled generative AI capabilities for an installed base of 100 million users who are using the RTX series of graphics cards.
Moreover, the company released new RTX 40 Super series graphics cards starting at $599 in January, which come equipped with generative AI capabilities. In a presentation in October 2023, Nvidia pointed out that 47% of its installed base of discrete GPU users were using RTX graphics cards. Meanwhile, only 20% of the installed base is using a graphics card more powerful than an RTX 3060, a chip that’s now more than three years old.
So, a big chunk of Nvidia’s user base can be expected to upgrade to its new, AI-capable GPUs as generative AI adoption gains steam. At the same time, the increase in the adoption of AI-enabled PCs suggests that there is a huge addressable opportunity for Nvidia to tap into.
Annual shipments of AI-powered PCs could hit 167 million units in 2027, as per IDC. The researcher also points out that these PCs will be equipped with dedicated chips to run generative AI workloads. Nvidia’s latest RTX 40 series GPUs come with Tensor Cores to enable AI workloads. These Tensor Cores offer between 242 and 1,321 tera operations per second (TOPS) of performance.
This puts Nvidia’s RTX 40 series GPUs in the category of advanced AI chips, IDC said. It said AI PCs equipped with a dedicated chip that offers more than 60 TOPS of performance are categorized as advanced AI PCs.
Nvidia controls 80% of the AI GPU market. If the company can maintain that share in 2027, it could sell a whopping 133 million AI GPUs for PCs that year. If Nvidia can maintain an average selling price of even $400 per AI GPU, which is significantly lower than the $599 starting price for the RTX 40 Super Series, it can generate a whopping $53 billion in annual gaming revenue in 2027.
That would be more than 5 times Nvidia’s gaming revenue in the latest fiscal year, suggesting that the company could still enjoy solid growth in a market that propelled it into the limelight years ago and was its bread and butter for a long time. Throw in the potential growth the company could witness in the data center business over the next five years, and it won’t be surprising to see it sustain its red-hot stock market rally in the long run.
That’s why investors would do well to buy this semiconductor stock while it is available at an attractive 33 times forward earnings, which is almost in line with the Nasdaq-100 index’s forward earnings multiple of 31.
Should you invest $1,000 in Nvidia right now?
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Nvidia Is Making a Lot of Money Selling Artificial Intelligence (AI) Chips, but You May Be Surprised About How Much It Could Make From This Traditional Market was originally published by The Motley Fool
The stock market looks similar to the periods that preceded the dot-com and 2008 market events.
David Rosenberg pointed to the exuberance for AI, which has sparked a “raging bull market.”
The “speculative mania” carrying the stock market could soon end, he warned.
The stock market is flashing the same warning signs of “speculative mania” that preceded the crashes of 2008 and 2000, according to economist David Rosenberg.
The Rosenberg Research president — who called the 2008 recession and who’s been a vocal bear on Wall Street amid the latest market rally — pointed to the “raging bull market” that’s taken off in stocks, with the S&P 500 surpassing the 5,000 mark for the first time ever last week.
The benchmark index has soared around 22% from its low in October last year, clearing the official threshold for a bull market. The index has also gained for the last five weeks and has been up for 14 of the last 15 weeks — a winning streak that hasn’t been seen since the early 1970s.
But the stellar gains are a double-edged sword for investors, as the market looks dangerously similar to the environment prior to the dot-com and 2008 crashes, Rosenberg wrote in a note on Monday.
“With each passing day, this has the feel of being a cross between 1999 and 2007. It is a gigantic speculative price bubble across most risk assets, and while AI is real, so was the Internet, and so were the high-flying stocks that populated the Nifty Fifty era,” he said, referring to the group of 50 large-cap stocks that dominated the stock market in the 60s and 70s, before falling by around 60%
Other Wall Street strategists have warned of the parallels between today’s market and similar stock booms in the past. The hype for artificial intelligence pushed the Magnificent Seven stocks to dominate most of the S&P 500’s gains last year, and a major price correction is on the way as valuations soar to unsustainable levels, Richard Bernstein Advisors said in an October 2023 note.
“This is the problem when a group of mega cap ‘concept’ stocks trade at double the multiple of the rest of the market. The lesson is that (i) the higher they are, the harder they fall, and (ii) there are dangers when too much growth gets priced in,” Rosenberg said. “Being real in an economic sense does not mean we have not entered a realm of excessive exuberance when it comes to the financial markets,” he added, referring to the hype surrounding AI.
The outlook for stocks is also shadowed by an uncertain economic picture. Geopolitical risks, recession risk, and the risk that the Fed will disappoint investors hoping for rate cuts aren’t being priced into markets at the moment, Rosenberg added.
“I don’t find speculative manias a turn-on and in my personal finances, I avoid them like the plague. Not everyone likes to hear that, especially since I missed so much of this rally but that’s how I roll,” he said.
Rosenberg has warned investors to tread carefully before, given the slew of risks he sees ahead for markets. Previously, he said that the S&P 500 looked “eerily similar” to 2022, the year the index plunged 20%. That’s partly because a recession that “few see and few are positioned for” is coming for the economy, he wrote in a post on LinkedIn last month.
Read the original article on Business Insider
Defense attorneys representing Sam “SBF” Bankman-Fried questioned the former FTX CEO before a jury for the first time as they prepared to rest their case.
According to reports from the New York courtroom on Oct. 27, Bankman-Fried denied defrauding FTX customers and taking their funds while leading the crypto exchange. The former CEO reportedly said he knew “basically nothing” about digital assets when launching crypto hedge fund Alameda Research.
“FTX declared bankruptcy,” said SBF in response to a question from his lawyer, Mark Cohen. “A lot of people got hurt.”
Cohen questioned SBF about Alameda’s operations in Hong Kong, asking how he believed risk at FTX could have potentially affected the hedge fund. At the center of allegations against Bankman-Fried are claims he directed efforts that resulted in Alameda using FTX customer funds without their knowledge. He faces seven criminal charges in his current trial.
it seems SBF thinks he can deploy the same tactics he used with journalists on the way up: answering a slightly DIFFERENT question than the one asked or diving into a convoluted word salad & hoping no one notices. Judge Kaplan & the prosecutors are NOT having it.
— Tiffany Fong (@TiffanyFong_) October 26, 2023
“Alameda was a market maker [for FTX],” said Bankman-Fried, according to reports from the courtroom. “If an account went negative, we’d start selling off, but if late, we had backstop liquidity.”
SBF added, over the objection of prosecutors:
“We increased the number of servers, for the risk engine. But we learned that if there was an erroneous liquidation of Alameda, or any other large account […] it would be catastrophic for FTX.”
According to Bankman-Fried, he told former FTX chief technology officer Gary Wang to “stop such liquidations of Alameda’s account,” also suggesting Wang implemented the “allow negative” feature without SBF’s prior knowledge. Wang testified on Oct. 6 that Bankman-Fried had ordered him and former FTX engineering director Nishad Singh to implement the feature in 2019.
At the time of publication, Bankman-Fried had yet to face cross-examination by the U.S. government for his testimony before a jury. Judge Lewis Kaplan had SBF “preview” his testimony before prosecutors and defense attorneys on Oct. 26 without the jury present.
Related: Sam Bankman-Fried has no way to ‘outfox’ prosecutors: Scaramucci
Before Oct. 25, it was uncertain whether Bankman-Fried would testify in the criminal trial. As prosecutors were preparing to finish questioning the last witness in their case, defense attorneys told Kaplan they were preparing to call only a handful of witnesses, including SBF.
The trial is expected to end within a few business days, with prosecutors and defense lawyers delivering closing arguments to the jury. Bankman-Fried is scheduled to face five more criminal counts in a second trial expected to start in March 2024. He has pleaded not guilty to all charges in both cases.
Magazine: Can you trust crypto exchanges after the collapse of FTX?
High earners could see a significant tax increase under a Democratic proposal to bolster Social Security and Medicare.
A financial advisor can help you respond to potential changes to tax laws and regulations. Find a fiduciary advisor today.
The proposed legislation – called the “Medicare and Social Security Fair Share Act” – would require taxpayers with over $400,000 in income to pay more into Social Security and Medicare. While most workers pay Social Security taxes on all their income, neither earnings above the $160,200 cap nor investment income currently contribute.
This bill (S.1174), introduced in April by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., with the aim to increase the solvency of Social Security and Medicare. To do so, taxpayers with incomes over $400,000 to would contribute more, via:
Wages, self-employment and investment income would be subject to heftier taxes above $400,000.
Close a tax loophole that allows pass-through businesses to circumvent Medicare and other taxes.
The move comes in response to estimates that the Old-Age & Survivors Insurance (OASI) trust fund that supplies cash for Social Security payments is projected to run out of money as early as 2033. At that point, the Social Security system would only be able to cover 77% of benefits unless Congress allocates additional money for the program.
Besides the move to apply the payroll tax to incomes of more than $400,000, an option promoted by Republican lawmakers and some Republican presidential contenders is to cut Social Security benefits for younger Americans.
The Social Security Administration recently delivered its analysis of the Medicare and Social Security Fair Share Act and concluded that it would extend the OASI trust fund by approximately 75 years.
“The new analysis from the Social Security Administration shows, we can protect this bedrock program for all and improve our broken tax code – a win-win in my book,” Whitehouse said in a statement.
Companion legislation is being introduced in the House by U.S. Rep. Brendan F. Boyle, a Democrat from Pennsylvania who added, “This legislation saves Social Security and Medicare for generations to come.”
A 2020 study from the National Institute on Retirement Security found that 40% of seniors receive only Social Security income for their retirement, with just 7% of retirees drawing income from the traditional “three-legged stool” of Social Security, pensions and personal savings. Whitehouse noted that Medicare covers health care costs for more than 60 million beneficiaries, including 20% of with less than $15,000 in savings.
High earners would have to pay Social Security and Medicare taxes on income that exceeds $400,000 under legislation that’s been proposed in the Senate. The legislation also aims to close a tax loophole that Democrats say allows pass-through businesses to avoid paying Medicare and Social Security taxes.
A financial advisor may be able to help you optimize your tax strategy and save money in the long run. Finding a financial advisor doesn’t have to be hard. SmartAsset’s free tool matches you with up to three vetted financial advisors who serve your area, and you can interview your advisor matches at no cost to decide which one is right for you. If you’re ready to find an advisor who can help you achieve your financial goals, get started now.
While asset allocation is a key tenant of investing, asset location is almost just as important. This strategy aims to make the best use of your various accounts by keeping tax-efficient assets in taxable accounts and placing the assets with the heaviest tax burdens in tax-free and tax-deferred accounts.
Photo credit: ©iStock.com/Kobus Louw, ©iStock.com/Kameleon007
The post Are You a High Earner? You Could Pay a Lot More in Taxes Under This Proposed Law appeared first on SmartReads by SmartAsset.
Scanning your iris to become a “verified human” in exchange for digital currency sounds like a Black Mirror episode. But this is not the story arc of a dystopian science fiction show — it’s happening now with one of the latest projects in Web3.
The launch of Worldcoin on Optimism has left many wondering whether this project is subverting Web3’s promise of decentralization to build just the opposite. And yet, more than 2 million people in underserved areas have already signed up to share their biometric data with Worldcoin in exchange for 25 WLD, worth less than $100 at the time of writing.
This is not just strange — it also presents serious privacy risks and creates a honeypot for bad actors. More so, there’s an argument to be made that it could even interfere with the sovereignty of foreign countries.
Worldcoin was founded to solve for the expected externalities of its sister company, OpenAI — the creator of ChatGPT and other popular AI products. One hand is solving the problems the other hand is creating.
2024: Bitcoiners trying to save the children from Sam Altman’s WorldCoin orb eye scans pic.twitter.com/ZeAWuNdSJs
— ₿it₿ry (@bchinella) July 26, 2023
In the words of its founders: “If successful, we believe Worldcoin could drastically increase economic opportunity, scale a reliable solution for distinguishing humans from AI online while preserving privacy, enable global democratic processes, and eventually show a potential path to AI-funded UBI [universal basic income].”
Despite the ambition and promise to safeguard privacy, a whole new set of problems arises from the fact that this is being done by a single, currently centralized company. The irony is not lost on ChatGPT. Some of its answers when prompted “What are the risks in having one company own biometric data for individuals in underdeveloped countries?” include:
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has echoed some of these concerns as well.
Having one company own biometric data for individuals in underdeveloped countries poses significant risks for individuals. On a broader societal scale, these are even more significant when coupled with UBI payments to foreign citizens.
Biometric data like irises is highly sensitive and unique to each individual. It can reveal information such as sex, ethnicity and, perhaps, medical conditions. If a single company controls this data, there’s a high risk of privacy violations, as it can be used to track and monitor individuals without their consent.
Related: The world could be facing a dark future thanks to CBDCs
Who’s to say that the company would not exploit the biometric data for commercial gains, such as targeted advertising or selling the data to other entities? Isn’t that diametrically opposed to what we have been trying to achieve for the last few years?
Centralizing biometric data also puts it at a higher risk of being targeted by hackers and cybercriminals. This is what’s known in security sectors as a “honeypot” when used for controlled purposes. A large amount of attractive data is stored by a single entity in order to study a potential breach under the understanding that it will eventually be hacked.
Related: CBDCs will lead to absolute government control
A data breach at this scale could lead to severe consequences, including identity theft, fraud, and unauthorized access to the personal information of millions of people.
This data could also fall into the hands of governments to subpoena the data and obtain citizens’ personal information without a warrant. There are fewer protections when you sell your data to a third party. A corrupt government may use this data to manipulate behaviors, limit dissent and suppress opposition, essentially turning underdeveloped regions into surveillance states.
More so, if the company operates across borders, it could wield undue power and influence over governments and societies. Financially supporting a large number of foreign citizens under a universal basic income model could ultimately reduce the autonomy and sovereignty of a country’s democratic processes.
When visiting Worldcoin’s Orbs to scan their irises, registrants are given a promotional sticker that reads “Verified Human.” There’s a slight feeling of discomfort in being referred to simply as human here — not person.
In the context of selling your identity for a few bucks to a cryptocurrency project with ties to AI development, it almost sounds like a Freudian slip. It’s as if personhood is a forgotten idea, and now we’re just humans in a massive database of biometric data.
Sometimes reality really is stranger than fiction.
Matthew Niemerg is a co-founder and board member of the Aleph Zero Foundation. He holds a Ph.D. in Mathematics from Colorado State University and currently serves as an expert on the EU Blockchain Observatory and Forum. He is also a co-founder of Cardinal Cryptography.
This article is for general information purposes and is not intended to be and should not be taken as legal or investment advice. The views, thoughts and opinions expressed here are the author’s alone and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views and opinions of Cointelegraph.
Contrary to what Wall Street is saying, another advertising and marketing agency confirmed that the technology sector appears to be having a lot of trouble when it comes to discretionary spending on advertising and marketing.
Shares of Interpublic Group of Companies Inc.
IPG,
plunged 13.3% to close at $32.87 on Friday, enough to lead the S&P 500 index’s
SPX,
losers, after the company missed second-quarter revenue expectations and cut its full-year growth outlook in half, citing weakness in the technology sector. The stock suffered the biggest one-day selloff since it tumbled 15.3% on March 12, 2020.
That comes just two days after fellow ad agency Omnicom Group Inc.’s stock
OMC,
tumbled 10.4% to pace the S&P 500’s decliners, after also missing on revenue and providing a somewhat downbeat outlook, amid a “pause” in tech-sector spending as clients have become “more cautious.”
And the companies also said they saw softness from tech-sector clients in their first-quarter reports.
That might seem counterintuitive to investors, given that the technology sector has been the S&P 500’s strongest this year. The Technology Select Sector SPDR exchange-traded fund
XLK,
has soared 41.5% year to date, while the S&P 500 index
SPX,
has advanced 18.2%.
Interpublic Chief Executive Philippe Krakowsky said Friday on a post-earnings call with analysts that the tech sector is moving through a “challenging period” that has included significant cost and workforce cuts.
“[W]hat we have seen is that the sector is under a lot of stress,” Krakowsky said, according to an AlphaSense transcript.
He said the pressure Interpublic has seen in sector isn’t from smaller tech companies, or those backed by venture capitalists, but a “relatively small group of large companies.”
And given a “modestly more uncertain” macroeconomic environment, Krakowsky said it’s clear that pressure on the tech sector “is not abating.”
“[I] don’t think that we’re going to be able to call the turn,” Krakowsky said. While he’s confident the tech sector will eventually bottom, “it’s just they’re clearly going through something that is more protracted than any of us thought.”
Interpublic reported before Friday’s open second-quarter net income that rose to $265.5 million, or 68 cents a share, from $229.6 million, or 58 cents a share, in the same period a year ago. Excluding nonrecurring items, adjusted earnings per share of 74 cents beat the FactSet consensus of 61 cents.
Revenue fell 2.5% to $2.67 billion, below the FactSet consensus of $2.39 billion.
For 2023, the company cut its organic growth guidance range to 1% to 2% from 2% to 4%.
Wells Fargo analyst Steven Cahall said that the disappointing earnings reports from the two companies this week are a worrying sign of “gathering clouds” for ad agencies, with risks of a “derating” of the stocks on the horizon.
“It doesn’t feel like a soft landing,” Cahall wrote in a note to clients.
Interpublic’s stock has lost 1.3% year to date and Omnicom shares have tacked on 2.8%, while the S&P 500 has gained 18.2%.
It takes more than $2 million to be wealthy, according to a new survey of everyday Americans. But it takes just a quarter of that figure for them to feel wealthy themselves.
That’s one takeaway from Charles Schwab’s seventh annual modern wealth survey, which polled 1,000 Americans about saving, spending, investing, and wealth.
When asked what amount they considered wealthy, the survey respondents came back with an average of $2.2 million. Yet, among the 48% of Americans who already see themselves as rich, their average net worth was $560,000, survey found.
The results reveal the public’s shifting perception of what being rich means, with many associating wealth with wellbeing rather than simple net worth. But financial planning still plays a role in feeling wealthy, however one defines it, experts said.
“People define wealth differently when they’re asked about how to define a dollar amount or when they’re asked what it means to be wealthy,” Rob Williams, managing director of financial planning, retirement income and wealth management at Charles Schwab, told Yahoo Finance. “I think the actionable point that we would suggest is to think carefully about what wealth means to you comprehensively.”
More than 3 in 5 Americans said having a healthy relationship with loved ones is a better way to describe wealth than “having a lot of money.” The survey also found that 40% of Americans mentioned “well-being” when asked about wealth, versus 32% who responded with “money” and 26% who said “assets”.
For instance, when asked to describe what money means to them, 70% of Americans said “enjoying experiences” over “owning nice things.” Also, 69% of Americans chose “having a healthy work-life balance,” while less than half that share — 31% — selected maximizing their earnings. Around 63% chose good health, while 37% chose being successful.
“I think COVID probably caused some of this,” Williams said. “[We’ve] all reevaluated what it means to be healthy, to be wealthy, to be confident about our financial lives, and a little bit more about our current lifestyles.”
Some financial planners have observed this change in perception among their clients as well.
“Clients aren’t coming in asking, ‘How do I get one or two million in my portfolio?’. They’re asking, ‘How do I have enough so that working is an option, or so that I can go part time?,'” Kassi Fetters of Artica Financial Services, told Yahoo Finance.
“They’re asking, ‘How do I lower my expenses, so that I can spend time with our new baby instead of working all the time?’. Time and flexibility are considerations that go along with the term wealth now.”
The survey also revealed that only a third of Americans have a financial plan, which Williams said is integral to cultivate the lifestyle that’s most meaningful to them.
“We all feel like we have a plan. You may say, ‘I’ve thought about it, I guess, sure, I plan to retire someday.’ But it’s not very tangible. It’s not written down,” he said. “So that’s like, ‘I want to run a marathon.’ Well, okay, that’s a nice aspiration. What have you documented? What steps are you going to take to get there? [It] takes discipline, takes patience.”
Sean Lovision, a financial planner from WJL Financial Advisors, LLC explained that a detailed financial plan can also make clients “feel wealthy” because it highlights “the long-term sustainability of their portfolio and demonstrates how it can support their desired lifestyle.”
“By showing clients how many years their portfolio can last, the plan quantifies the value of their assets in terms of their longevity and reinforces a sense of financial security,” Lovison said. “This makes the value of the assets seem more ‘real’ and helps clients gain a better understanding of the true worth of their portfolio, helping to foster a feeling of abundance and confidence in their financial future.”
Wes Battle, a financial planner who works with federal employees, said a financial planner can tailor a plan to Americans’ individual needs and desires. For example, a financial plan could help someone balance the goals they want to pursue while also attending to aging parents.
“If we can talk through and build a plan to get them to maximize their own retirement first, and then work on additional savings, they can find peace [and] wealth in the fact that, one, they will not need to rely on someone else in the future, and two, that they are fulfilling a duty that is important to them,” Battle said.
According to the survey, 70% of Americans who came up with a detailed financial plan said they “felt more in control of their finances” and 90% said they felt confident they would “reach their financial goals.”
“Financial planning helps clarify what you want your current and future life to look like and how we’re going to get there,” Fetters said. “I believe that pursuing financial planning is akin to pursuing an intentional life.”
Dylan Croll is a Yahoo Finance reporter.
Click here for the latest personal finance news to help you with investing, paying off debt, buying a home, retirement, and more
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To claim that student loan debt is a problem in the U.S. would be an understatement. Americans owe a collective $1.78 trillion in student debt, with the average payment per borrower amounting to $337 a month.
Of course, student loan debt levels can vary by state. California, Texas, and Florida have the most student loan debt, while North Dakota, Alaska, and Wyoming have the least. In fact, Wyoming holds the distinction of having less outstanding student loan debt than any other state.
Image source: Getty Images.
That said, borrowers in Wyoming still owe $1.7 billion in educational loans. And that’s hardly a small amount of money.
No matter what state you live in, it’s important to get a handle on your student debt so you don’t fall behind on it. Here are some moves that could help.
When you owe money in any shape or form, it’s important to budget carefully to help ensure that you’re able to keep up with your payments while also working toward other important financial goals. If you’re not on a budget, create one.
Use a spreadsheet or app to record and track your expenses so you’re able to make the most of your paychecks. If you see that you’re at risk of not making your loan payments, make changes to your non-essential spending.
Many people pick up side jobs to boost their incomes for various purposes, whether it’s buying a house, saving for retirement, or socking funds away for a vacation. A second job could make it easier to keep up with your student loan payments. If you’re hoping to pay down your student debt ahead of schedule, a side hustle could be your ticket to making that happen.
If you’re having trouble keeping up with your student debt, you may have different options for repaying it — especially if you took out federal loans. Federal student loan borrowers can apply for different repayment plans. Some may extend the loans, while others are income-based. Either would result in lower monthly payments. Research your options if your current monthly payments are putting a massive strain on your budget.
If you took out private loans for college, you may not have many options for changing your monthly payments. But it’s worth reaching out to your lender and asking.
If you show proof of your income, your lender might agree to extend your repayment window to make each monthly payment of yours less expensive. Of course, going this route could mean paying more total interest on your loans, but it might give you some much-needed relief on a monthly basis.
No matter where you live and how much money you owe in student loans, it’s important to keep up with those payments and take steps to ensure that they don’t wreck your finances and hinder your goals. Budget carefully, consider getting a side job, and explore different payment-plan options to keep your loans manageable until you’re able to shake them for good.