https://paulmerriman.com/
Paul is a retired financial advisor. Since he retired, he's been spending his time trying to educate people on investing. I first ran across him as a regular contributor to
www.marketwatch.com.
He had lots of articles, charts, and recommendations.
He has created a new class/curriculum to teach investing at, I think, the Univ of Washington.
He gives not only advice on the actual investing, but also advice on how to choose a financial advisor.
His main advice is to purchase multiple low cost index funds spread across multiple asset classes and hold them for the long term. The way that he's chosen the asset classes is based on historic long term performance. Ie, he has checked every 40 year period for the last 100 years (or something like that) and checked all of the numbers. He backs all of his analysis with charts and figures. Yes, he admits that past performance is no guaranty of future performance, but it's the best that we've got to go on until you find someone that can actually tell the future.
The basic break-down is
Tax deferred
90% equities divided as follows
1/2 domestic, 1/2 international
1/2 large cap, 1/2 small cap
1/2 growth, 1/2 value
and then the remaining 10% split 50/50 between international and domestic REITs
His recommendation for taxed investments is the same but to leave out the REITs because their returns are taxed as short term cap gain, IIRC.
He calls his plan the "
Ultimate Buy and Hold strategy"
Quote:
Paul Merriman is a nationally recognized authority on mutual funds, index investing, asset allocation and both buy-and-hold and active management strategies. Now retired from Merriman, the Seattle-based investment advisory firm he founded in 1983, he is dedicated to educating investors, young and old, through weekly articles at Marketwatch.com, and via free eBooks, podcasts, articles, recommendations for mutual funds, ETFs, 401(k) plans and more, at his website.
In 2013 he created The Merriman Financial Education Foundation, dedicated to providing comprehensive financial education to investors, with information and tools to make informed decisions in their own best interest and successfully implement their retirement savings program. A major project of the Foundation is funding the curriculum development and teaching of the 4-credit course, “Personal Investing” (for non-finance majors), at Paul’s alma mater, Western Washington University, which began Fall 2013.
In his retirement, Paul remains fervently committed to educating and empowering investors. In 2012, he wrote and published the “How To Invest” series, distilling his decades of expertise into concise investment books targeted to specific audiences – “First-Time Investor: Grow and Protect Your Money,” “101 Investment Decisions Guaranteed to Change Your Financial Future,” and “Get Smart or Get Screwed: How To Select The Best and Get The Most From Your Financial Advisor.”
Paul is also the author of four previous books on personal investing, including Financial Fitness Forever: 5 Steps To More Money, Less Risk and More Peace of Mind (McGraw Hill, Oct. 2011). The book was part of the “Financial Fitness Kit” offered on the TV show, “Financial Fitness After 50,” created exclusively to raise funds for local Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) stations.
Paul’s book, Live It Up Without Outliving Your Money! Creating The Perfect Retirement, published by John Wiley & Sons, was released in an updated edition June 2008.
Over the years Paul has led more than 1,000 investor workshops, hosted a weekly radio program and has been a featured guest on local, regional and national television shows. Paul has written many articles for FundAdvice.com, a service of Merriman LLC. This website was identified by Forbes as one of the best online resources for investors.
Paul’s weekly podcast, “Sound Investing,” was named by Money magazine as the best money podcast. Paul has been widely quoted in national publications and has spoken to many local chapters of the American Association of Individual Investors (AAII). Twice he has been a featured guest speaker at Harvard University’s investor psychology conference.
Paul began his career in the 1960s, working briefly as a broker for a major Wall Street firm. He concluded that Wall Street was burdened with too many conflicts of interest and decided to help small companies raise venture capital. In 1979, he became president and chairman of a public manufacturing company in the Pacific Northwest. He retired in 1982 to create his independent investment management firm.
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