Dear Germany: Please Let Me Pay You For Borrowing My Money

At the Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting in May, 2009, a slide depicted a trade ticket from December 19, 2008, showing a Berkshire sale of $5 million of Treasury bills. They were coming due on April 29, 2009. Berkshire sold the … Continue reading
True Wealth Design Makes List of Top Financial Planners in Cleveland Area

Crain’s Cleveland Business recently published their annual list of the Cleveland area’s top financial planners, ranked by assets under advisement. True Wealth Design made the list for the second year in a row and had the second highest growth rate … Continue reading
Kevin Kroskey In The Press: “Rethinking Distribution Planning”

I was pleasantly surprised to see myself mentioned for contributions in an article in May’s edition of Financial Planning magazine on the topic of distribution planning. It has been my opinion that many advisors overestimate the degree to which expenses … Continue reading
What We Can (Re)Learn From JP Morgan’s $2B Trading Loss

Large banks and brokerage firms are in the news again, with word that J.P. Morgan Chase suffered a $2 billion loss while trading for its own investment portfolio. If you’re inclined to be amused by such things, word had apparently … Continue reading
A Wall Street Tale: Of Muppets and Men

By Kevin Kroskey, CFP®, MBA Of Mice and Men was one of the first books I actually read cover to cover. According to author John Steinbeck, the book’s title came from a poem by Robert Burns that contains a line … Continue reading
Buffett on Gold: Who Has the Midas Touch?

By Kevin Kroskey, CFP®, MBA Over the course of a lengthy and illustrious business career, Warren Buffett has offered thoughtful opinions on a wide variety of investment-related issues—executive compensation, accounting standards, high-yield bonds, derivatives, stock options, and so on. In … Continue reading
Kevin Kroskey In The Press: On Dividends

I was recently interviewed by Financial Advisor magazine, a leading industry publication, for contributions to a story about dividend investing after the author had read an article I wrote in June of 2011 entitled “Should Investors Favor High Dividend-Paying Stocks?” … Continue reading
Retirement Is Not A Financial Event

by Kevin Kroskey, CFP, MBA When the term “retirement planning” is used, most think of the financial aspects of retirement myopically through a material lens. However, the social, emotional, and physiological stresses that transitioning into and throughout retirement impose are … Continue reading
Selecting Individual Stocks Can Lead to Investor Ruin

by Kevin Kroskey, CFP, MBA Anyone studying the long-run history of American business cannot help but observe how many of the prominent firms of one era fail to make it to the next. Market economies are characterized not only by … Continue reading
What Markets Tell Us About U.S. and Europe Default Risks

by Kevin Kroskey, CFP, MBA With the strained balance sheets of governments in the Europe and US being the focus of so much media and market attention in recent times, it is understandable that investors would fret about the credit … Continue reading