Moshe Milevsky, associate professor of finance in the Schulich School of Business, recently published Your Money Milestones: A Guide to Making the 9 Most Important Financial Decisions of Your Life, as noted in this article by Michael Posner which appeared in The Globe & Mail on February 24.
Moshe Milevsky never intended to write another book about financial planning. But then the 42-year-old York University finance professor in the Schulich School of Business watched in horror as his family’s net worth shrank by nearly 50 per cent in the great market crash of 2008.
It wasn’t because he was highly leveraged or had taken unnecessary risks. A cautious investor, he had stacked his portfolio with stock in some of the biggest, supposedly safest, most successful American firms – GM, AIG and Lehman Brothers, among them.
To help recoup some of his losses, the industrious Milevsky…returned to writing. Within a matter of months, he had produced Your Money Milestones: A Guide to Making the 9 Most Important Financial Decisions of Your Life (FT Press,2010). It’s his seventh book and a timely one, especially for those contemplating their annual contributions to retirement savings plans.
Written during an academic sabbatical which saw Milevsky lecturing at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School and in Sydney, the book incorporates some of the lessons he learned from the market meltdown. Central among these is the that the old paradigm – the stock market as a casino game in which savvy investors carefully calculate the odds of any particular wager succeeding – must be discarded.
In its place is the nuclear paradigm, so-called because no historical data would be of any value in predicting the next nuclear reactor accident. It therefore abandons all possibility of determining odds. In the new investing environment, a nuclear accident can occur at any time, without warning, making bets on stocks, even blue chips, inherently unpredictable.
So what are the milestones?
- Education
- Real estate
- Debt
- Income taxes
- Investments
- Saving
- Insurance
- Children and marriage
- Retirement
For the entire article, visit the Globe & Mail.
Posted by Elizabeth Monier-Williams, with files courtesy of YFile – York University’s daily e-bulletin.