Today I am releasing A Preservation Tale.  It is the last of the 5 tales that deals with understanding the relationship between the rate of return, the rate of inflation, the distribution rate on portfolios and what it means to preserve purchasing power.  I suggest the reader read this tale along with A Required Return Tale, An Inflationary Tale, A Distributive Tale and A Purchasing Power Tale as often as is necessary to understand what they are up against.

In the next series of Tale releases I will start focusing on particular solutions as I see them.  I will explain how rate of return actually works, then explain what a High Mar Ratio is and why it my chosen path towards long term money management and then review certain products, stocks, indices, money managers and mutual funds to see how they fare when judged in the harsh light of the Mar Ratio.  I think of the Mar Ratio as a Behavioral Ratio where the lower the Mar Ratio on a product or strategy the more likely it is to get abandoned.

I have also started including an Ask Financial Tales portion to the site so that readers can ask me questions directly.  These I plan to answer on an ongoing basis and then assemble in a case study or solutions tab at a later time so that readers can see how I would solve certain situations as they arise.  I have already received a number of questions such as

1) Is this a good time to buy a house? or

2) I am interested in buying an indexed annuity is this right for me or

3) I own a portfolio of actively manged mutual funds but I’m thinking of switching to passively managed exchange traded funds, what do you think?

Keep sending your questions.