Articles and Podcasts from MaxiFi's Founder, Laurence Kotlikoff

Expected Utility Maximization figures out how aggressively or cautiously you should spend and invest your money to produce the highest lifetime happiness averaged over all the different living standard paths you may experience.

$75K sounds like a great starting salary for a college grad. It's surprisingly not, especially if we're talking making it in LA.

Target date funds can be far off target. They can be far too risky when young and far too safe when old. The proper fiduciary default investment is TIPS (Treasury Inflation Protected Securities), not a target date fund.

As Kitces suggest, many if not most practitioners interpret the replacement rate rule of thumb as an income replacement rate. Interpreted in that light, this couple's replacement rate is not the vaunted 70%, nor the often higher 85% figure bandied about. Instead, it's zero or essentially zero in seven of the eight cases considered.

Conventional financial planning uses two rules of thumb. One is the 70% replacement-rate, retirement-spending rule. The other is the 4% retirement-asset, spend-down rule.

Over 4,000 people divorce each day in our country. Some do so after many years of marriage and in the context of very unequal spousal incomes. Such divorces often require alimony to achieve a fair settlement. The question is how much alimony should be provided and for how long? Economics and advanced software can help answer these questions.

You can't rely on Social Security to provide accurate information on your options. In my experience, over half of what Social Security staff tell people is either flat out wrong, incomplete, or misleading. But now I've come to lear that you can't even rely on Social Security's benefit statement to be accurate.

These days mortgages are financial and tax losers. If you have the cash to immediately pay off your mortgage, you can potentially make a bundle with zero risk.

Two years ago today, the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) released their report A-09-18-50559 which estimates that over 11,000 widows have been cheated out of more than $130,000,000 - an average of over $10,000 each .

Cashing out your 401(k) and using the proceeds to pay off your mortgage lets you borrow at a low rate and invest at a high rate and do so at no risk.