“Trees grow” is an adage that has stuck with me over the past several years.

In a post financial crisis interview, a successful investment manager was talking about his decision to load-up on Citigroup and a handful of other banks in early 2009 when the decision to do so was difficult to say the least.

Don MaNay is a financial columnist, a Huffington Post contributor and an expert in the field of structured settlements. 

Don’s financial guidance is refreshingly straightforward, filled with good common sense, and geared towards a Main Street audience.  His most recent book is titled Wealth Without Wall Street: A Main Street Guide to Making Money. 

We had an opportunity to speak to Don about his financial practice and his most recent book.  

The Wall Street Journal recently published an interview (see the video below) with entrepreneur and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban.

The interview is interesting for a number of reasons.  Cuban talks about investing his own money and he offers some suggestions for regular, non high net worth investors. 

In a nutshell, Cuban strongly believes that the “buy and hold” approach to investing is a worthless strategy.

It is the afternoon (markets are closed) of August 9 2011, and millions of retail investors around the world must be asking themselves whether they can continue to stomach the gut-wrenching capital market volatility. 

The issue and questions about staying-power take on another dimension for those who are close to retirement or in retirement.  Retirement spending plans and the viability of retirement plans in general are brought into question. 

Two recent articles continue the often contentious debate on equity indexed annuity returns. 

The first article—titled Real-World Index Annuity Returns—appears in the March edition of the Journal of Financial Planning.  The three authors offer an exploration of equity indexed annuity returns based on actual contracts that were sold. 

Anyone thinking about retirement income should pick-up a copy of Retirement Portfolios by Michael Zwecher.  This recommendation applies to both financial services professionals and consumers who are approaching or at retirement. 

Zwecher’s book is the definitive guide to constructing and maintaining portfolios that generate sustainable retirement income.  

There is a strong case to be made for health care as the linchpin of retirement planning.  Virtually every major aspect of the retirement planning process is somehow correlated to or contingent on health status.  For example, health status has an impact on each of the following retirement planning components:

Risk Management Solutions (RMS) is well known as a leader in the area of catastrophe modeling and analytics.  The company provides its services to a broad range of insurers, reinsurers, consultants and capital markets participants who are active in the property and casualty insurance industry.

Jack Marrion heads a research consultancy focused on the annuity industry and John Olsen is a practicing financial advisor.

Both Jack and John have previously published books that are widely recognized as authoritative resources for the industry.

I had an opportunity to speak to them about their most recent book titled Index Annuities: A Suitable Approach (click here to visit the website for the book).

Meir Statman is the Glenn Klimek Professor of Finance at the Leavey School of Business, Santa Clara University, and Visiting Professor at Tilburg University in the Netherlands.

His research on behavioral finance has been supported by the National Science Foundation, CFA Institute, and Investment Management Consultants Association (IMCA) and has been published in the Journal of Finance, Financial Analysts Journal, Journal of Portfolio Management, and many other publications.