Earlier in the week Barry Ritholtz posted this chart from Bronson Capital Markets Research. It shows 139 years of nominal returns for equities (probably somewhat familiar to you) along with 139 years of real returns.

The following is an excerpt from The Financial Crossroads.

How then, can you determine how to find a truly professional advisor, or if you already have an advisor, how do you know that he or she is a professional?  Here are six criteria to which a truly professional advisor should be held.  Your advisor should be:

1. Educated

Here we go with the second round of Free Money Finance March Money Madness (if you wonder what's going on in these posts, see my article announcing March Money Madness and/or click on my March Money Madness category link and scroll down to read all the posts involved in this subject.)

The more of life I experience, the more I realize that the most valuable thing a person has in their life is time. The cost of a book is trivial compared to the value of the time spent reading it. The cost of raising a child in terms of dollars is far less than the value of the time spent rearing the children.

Time is the one thing I wish I had more of.

Time and again we hear that investment diversification is a must, and rightly so. Diversifying investments – by investing in a variety of different types of index funds and/or ETFs, for example – is a wise strategy for reducing risk.