Every year, we hear from market prognosticators telling us where the market will be a year from now, the future direction of interest rates and when the economy will or won’t go into recession. But does anybody ever keep track of the accuracy of these forecasts?

You may be aware that on December 20, President Trump signed something called the SECURE Act (Setting Every Community Up for Retirement Enhancement) into law. But what does that mean for financial consumers? Among other things, the new law increases the tax credit for small businesses to set up new retirement plans for their employees, from $500 to $5,000. It allows small employers to automatically enroll their employees and allows smaller companies to create multiple employer plans with other companies in the area, reducing the obstacles to offering 401(k) and other retirement plans. A great deal of insurance industry lobbying support went into another provision that requires all qualified plans to show participants how they can convert their existing balances into “lifetime income” through an annuity.

One of the oddities about the American financial marketplace is how so many consumers prefer to keep their assets at the large Wall Street firms. This is odd because these firms famously have sales cultures driven by multi-million-dollar bonuses for their brokerage sales agents and whose BrokerCheck reports read more like rap sheets than profiles. (Don’t believe us? Type a famous brokerage firm name into the second box in the BrokerCheck website—https://brokercheck.finra.org/—and you’ll get hundreds of thousands of listings of specific broker transgressions, fines, and examples where customers received arbitration awards after various kinds of financial abuse.) 

Estate planning is complicated. There are many moving parts to organizing your finances and determining where they will go after your passing. People often sign a stack of documents at their attorney’s office and think the job is done.

It’s pretty common knowledge these days that every time any one of us participates in social media (liking, retweeting, posting, etc.) buys something online, logs onto an app or views an ad on a phones or computer, that information is collected, stored—and used. The music you download gives a strong clue about your age. Living in certain census tracts hints at your racial or ethnic heritage.

It’s fun to think about what the future will look like, but of course we’re usually wrong. Looking ahead from the 1960s and 1970s, movies like “Back to the Future” and cartoon shows like “The Jetsons” had us flying around in our cars, while still talking on land line phones and faxing documents from place to place. The Internet was undreamed of, and who imagined there would be computers in every home?

Global stock markets have been spooked by the escalating trade disputes between the world’s two largest economies: China and the United States. And there is no evidence that the dispute is about to be resolved. Recently, U.S. President Donald Trump raised tariffs on $200 billion worth of Chinese goods and began taking steps to tax nearly all of China’s imports. The new tariff levels are an unprecedented 25% of the value of the Chinese goods coming into the U.S., raising the costs of seafood, luggage and electronics. China, meanwhile, has placed tariffs on nearly all of America’s exports into the Middle Kingdom, including agricultural products.

When people want to protect important papers like their wills and trust documents, or valuables like rare coins or precious jewelry, they understand that it’s not generally wise to keep them laying around the house. Much better—so goes the conventional wisdom—to put those items in one of the 25 million safe deposit boxes at local bank branch offices around the U.S. There, they’ll be protected by a foot-thick steel door and a system with two keys, one kept by the customer, one by the bank.

Chances are that you know that the Social Security trust fund is due to run out of money—or “deplete its reserves” as economists put it—by the year 2035. The actual time frame depends on some forecasts, including economic growth, number of workers who remain in the workforce and the number who retire—but the clear point is that Congress is going to have to take action in the next few years if it wants to prevent a lot of angry seniors from heading vengefully to the polls.