Who We Are
 The Proper Mindset
Getting Ahead
Debt Doctrine
Subscribe
Contact the Editor
Home

Money Focus
Mutual Funds
Insurance
Mortgages
Labor
Three Links
Disclaimer

Who We Are
The BlueCollarDollar was designed as a place you could go to find the complicated world of finance, debt, insurance, mortgages, retirement, and your investments explained. We have a common sense approach to money. You earn it, you should know what to do with it. We want you to be debt free and we will work at getting you there. We want you to have a financially stable retirement, that is both comfortable and healthy.

Is there such a thing as good debt? What do you suppose bad debt is? And what kind do you have? Debt
All content is © copyright (1999-2002)
BonPaulProductions (all rights reserved)

Order your copy of Building Wealth in a Paycheck-to-Paycheck World by Paul Petillo. It is packed with safe, proven wealth-building strategies that cover all the major components of a balanced financial plan, including:

  • Straight talk on mutual funds, bonds, real estate, and annuities
  • Techniques for avoiding financial disasters
  • Tools to help readers track their debt and create a plan for staying out of it
  • Road maps to buying a home and saving for college and retirement


Balance Matters


Mutual fund companies are out in full force making effort to get you to realize that they are not going to be able to do what they had done in the past. As a matter of fact, they need you to take to heart the warning, now sounding promissory, that past performance is no guarantee of future results. They would like you utter that mantra before you send them money.

In other words, the days of double digit expectations are over. Now the word is balance. This downplay of expectations is not part of full disclosure but merely after party pledges to not drink to excess in a market whose hangover lasted more than two years. There is little likelihood that returns on either stock or bond funds will break out of this single digit range, most notably when inflation is adjusted into the return.

Pay no attention to any recent runs in the market. Disregard anyone who tells you that the recovery will spill over into the stock or the bond market. There is no group of economist, analysts, or market mavens that has a firm handle on what will happen next. Growth defeated by earnings ruffled by world unrest and tripped by less than encouraging numbers are going to keep this market side stepping any real returns.

If you had invested $1,000 in a portfolio that was split 60/40 between stocks from the S&P 500 and long term U.S. government bonds in 1990, the value of that portfolio would be over $3,700. But this period was not the historic average by any means. Historic averages of the years preceding 1990 would have valued the same investment at $2,500.