At Northstar, our relationship isn’t just with your wealth, it’s with you and your whole family. We want to collaborate with you to ensure that your plans are in place, that transitions are smooth, and that you feel comfortable that your needs are met during your lifetime. We’ve known many of you for a long…
If you are going to retire and attempt to live off the returns from your investment portfolio, you should be familiar with something called “sequencing of return” risk. What this means is that while over a long period of time, say 25 years, you may get good returns in your portfolio, if they come in…
To figure out how much you need for retirement, you need to know how much you can reasonably distribute from your retirement portfolio each year. In the world of finance, we’ve been operating under something called the “4 percent rule” for the last 20 years or so. This rule basically says that if you distribute…
The recent bankruptcy filing by former retail giant Sears proves that the retail sector is continuing to experience a vast disruption. Struggling for years, Sears had closed 300 stores and cut more than 20,000 employees already this year. Whether Sears can survive remains to be seen. But even if it joins the growing graveyard of…
There’s been a lot of talk lately about how watching the bond market can provide important clues about where the economy is heading. In particular, experts often point to the yield curve as a predictor of recessions. The yield curve is a graph showing the interest rate or yield on bonds with different maturities. In…
While Northstar does not have a Socially Responsible Investment (SRI) model, clients do occasionally express an interest in aligning their investing with their personal values. We are always happy to have discussions around client preferences in this area and usually we are able to adjust investments as requested. That is one of the many benefits…
At Northstar, we talk often about the importance of owning companies that pay a dividend. In addition to paying a current dividend, we also want to own companies that have the potential to grow their dividend payments. Yet, dividend growth is another aspect of portfolio returns that many investors don’t understand or focus on. The…