Youalready know that low costs are absolutely critical to long-term investmentsuccess, which is likely one of the reasons you invest with us. You’re not onlybuying at the low-cost fund shop, you’re also being frugal with your fundselections.

We’re living in unprecedented times, so we certainly can’t predict what 2017 will bring. And if you know Vanguard, you should know not to expect hot stock tips or “sure bets” from us either. But I do have four suggestions that I believe can help your clients reach their goals.

 When the Federal Reservewraps up its December meeting Wednesday, Chairwoman Janet Yellen will mostlikely announce an increase of 25 basis points (0.25 percentage point) in itstarget for the federal funds rate. The bump in the benchmark interest rate will get the headlines, but it’sjust one piece of communication in a dialogue between the Fed and the markets.        

As an advisor, you likely manage your clients' investment portfolios according to your own set of investment principles. In doing so, you're bound to run into clients or prospective clients whose ideas conflict with your beliefs about investing and what's in their best interests.

I’m always a little surprised when people talk about active and passive management as if it’s an either/or question. At Vanguard, we believe the right conjunction¹ is not or. It’s and. Both active and passive strategies have earned spots in your clients’ portfolios. 

While the title may raise a few eyebrows given the equity market’s rocky start to 2016, its inspiration is Glenn Frey, the legendary singer-songwriter for the Eagles, who passed away on January 18, 2016. “Take itEasy,” cowritten by Frey, was the Eagles’ first single and one of their biggesthits. As an Eagles fan, I headlined this post with the song’s title both to pay tribute to the great Glenn Frey and to capture my thoughts about recent market turbulence and the danger of extrapolating too much information from a month of performance.

My colleague recently explained how he moved from a furnished apartment to an unfurnished one, requiring him to get some furniture.He thought about renting because there was a chance he might move back into a furnished apartment sometime in the future. He decided to buy instead. How long he planned to stay in this apartment was a deciding factor. He calculated that the monthly costs of renting the furniture would exceed the upfront costs of buying the furniture at some point in the future.

Recently, there’s been a lot of talk about rising interest rates and what that means for bond investors.One “solution” (suggested mostly by active fund managers) is to use active management for the bond portion of your portfolio. The argument goes that active funds are better in a rising-rate environment because they can shorten their duration, reducing losses from rising rates. What they don’t point out is, for this strategy to work, the manager has to get four things right: when rates go up, how much rates go up, the shape of the yield curve, and when rates stop going up. A miss on any of the four can turn a possibly successful strategy into a losing one. That’s a lot of things to get right or, looked at another way, a lot of things that can go wrong.

Reflecting on National Save for Retirement Week, my co-workers and I have been thinking a lot about those close to or in retirement. However, we shouldn’t ignore the fact that our advice might actually be more helpful to folks at the beginning of the journey than those approaching their retirement destination. There are more of these folks than you may imagine; millennials have surpassed the population of baby boomers,according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Yet too often this is a generation forgotten. So, I asked one of my colleagues, Zoe Odenwalder, a 20-something millennial herself, to provide a few suggestions to make the trip to retirement a more relaxing one. Read Zoe’s unique insight below.

As the holidays approach, I begin to evaluate my clients’ portfolios and look for year-end opportunities. Here’s a list of 6 financial to-do’s to check off before year-end to ensure that you’re not leaving anything on the table.