WASHINGTON, May 23 (Reuters) – If you work with an investment adviser, there’s a decent chance that sometime during the last year, you’ve had a conversation about alternative investments.

There’s also a decent chance you emerged from that conversation without understanding exactly what your adviser was talking about. Don’t feel bad – there’s a lot of jargon surrounding what Robert Maloney, a Holderness, New Hampshire, financial adviser, calls “the flavor of the day.”

Strictly speaking, an alternative investment can mean anything that isn’t a plain vanilla stock or bond, but now it represents a trendy grab-bag category that can include everything from gold or currency to mutual funds that employ hedges, leverage, options, short-selling, derivatives and more.

This entire category is being heavily promoted to financial advisers, who are in turn pitching it to their clients, as a way of limiting portfolio risk — and justifying the adviser’s fees.

“Alternative investing today is a dominant theme at all the conferences I go to,” said David Wright, a managing director at Sierra Investment Management, in Santa Monica, a firm that advocates and employs alternative strategies. “A whole lot of it is market hype.”

Money has been flowing into these funds, even as it flows out of traditional stock funds. In 2008, alternative funds held $78 billion in assets; that number almost tripled in three years to $218,700 in 2011, according to Cerulli Associates, a research firm that sees the market continuing to expand.

A majority of advisers — 66 percent of a mix of commissioned brokers and fee-only advisers — are inclined to employ alternative investment strategies, even for middle market clients, according to a study released earlier this month by Natixis Global Asset Management.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The Securities and Exchange Commission is taking its own sweet time coming up with a rule that would make all investment advisers put their clients’ interest first.

Almost a year and a half after saying it was going to pursue this so-called “fiduciary standard,” the agency seems stuck. That’s because it is trying to contort the standard in such a way that brokers who are paid commissions to sell products could fit under that definition.

For many individual investors seeking guidance, that defies logic. How can an adviser put my needs first, if he is paid to sell only one shelf-full of products? And paid more to sell some than others?

It’s no wonder that the financial services industry remains among the least trusted the United States, according to an annual survey by public relations firm Edelman. Fewer than half of consumers said they trusted financial services firms, and more than half of them said they think financial companies need more government regulation.

In the meantime, the financial advice industry is moving on without the SEC. Traditional brokers are leaving the field and instead becoming independent registered investment advisers who must adhere to a traditional fiduciary standard.

“The wirehouses (big brokerage companies)are losing their grip on high net worth investors,” Tom Nally, a senior executive at TD Ameritrade, recently told a meeting of independent advisers. TD Ameritrade is a brokerage company that holds assets and does trades for clients of many independent advisers.

Nally told members of the National Association of Personal Financial Advisers, or NAPFA, meeting in Chicago that his firm has seen an 11 percent increase in the number of ‘breakaway brokers’ since last year.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – It wasn’t that long ago that high school seniors and their parents met astronomical college loans with a shrug and a signature: Whatever it took to send junior to his “first choice” school was a small price to pay.

Now, opinion seems to have moved 180 degrees in the opposite direction. With total student loan indebtedness topping $1 trillion and outpacing total credit card or auto loan debt, many are talking about the “bubble” in college financing. Any loan is a bad loan and students who take them out will soon be trapped in interest-impoverished lifestyles, goes the new argument.

Neither view is completely correct.

Borrowing crazy amounts of cash at high interest rates to fund a low-earning career may be questionable. But borrowing a reasonable amount to get a college degree – still an appreciating asset and a great investment – is a much better use of credit than many things you can borrow money to buy.

There are good and bad ways to borrow money for college. Of course, one family’s ‘crazy’ is another’s ‘reasonable.’

Opinions about student borrowing vary wildly. These are mine.

GOOD LOANS – FEDERAL STAFFORD

WASHINGTON, May 9 (Reuters) – It wasn’t that long ago that high school seniors and their parents met astronomical college loans with a shrug and a signature: Whatever it took to send junior to his “first choice” school was a small price to pay.

Now, opinion seems to have moved 180 degrees in the opposite direction. With total student loan indebtedness topping $1 trillion and outpacing total credit card or auto loan debt, many are talking about the “bubble” in college financing. Any loan is a bad loan and students who take them out will soon be trapped in interest-impoverished lifestyles, goes the new argument.

Neither view is completely correct.

Borrowing crazy amounts of cash at high interest rates to fund a low-earning career may be questionable. But borrowing a reasonable amount to get a college degree – still an appreciating asset and a great investment – is a much better use of credit than many things you can borrow money to buy.

There are good and bad ways to borrow money for college. Of course, one family’s ‘crazy’ is another’s ‘reasonable.’

Opinions about student borrowing vary wildly. These are mine.

GOOD LOANS – FEDERAL STAFFORD

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Pay off the house before you retire. That’s the conventional wisdom, and there’s some evidence that people are following it.

Older families aggressively rid themselves of mortgages between 2007 and 2009, according to Federal Reserve data. Some 45.5 percent of households headed by people between 65 and 74 had mortgages in 2007; by 2009, only 41.6 of the same households held home loans. Only 15.1 percent of households headed by people over 75 (in 2007) still had mortgages in 2009.

That data is complex and could cover a lot of different situations: mortgages being paid down as people age, borrowers losing homes during the housing crisis, and more. But it does point to a disinclination by retirement-age people to hold mortgages.

The question is: Are they – and the conventional wisdom – right? The answer: Maybe not.

With mortgage rates still skirting historic lows, the “pay-it-off-before-retirement” argument is less compelling. It may even make more sense to keep that mortgage as long as you possibly can.

Pre-retirees who aren’t sure how to handle their mortgages should consider a lot of factors, including their tax situation, what else they might do with the money, and how long they think they will stay in their house.

Here are some ways to approach that calculation:

WASHINGTON, April 25 (Reuters) – Every day for the next several weeks, dozens of publicly held companies will release their quarterly reports. Welcome to earnings season.

Sigh. So many companies, so little desire to slog through all those financial statements.

But slog you must, if you are a person who invests in individual companies. “People buy individual stocks because they want greater control over their portfolio,” says Charles Rotblut of the American Association of Individual Investors. “But if you want that control, then the tradeoff is, you have to put in extra time to read those reports.”

Of course, journalists at Reuters and elsewhere read so you don’t have to. Many news articles about earnings reports cut to the chase with the important information up high, so you can skim the story to get the gist of it.

Here are some other earnings season shortcuts that can help you extract the most important information without giving up your entire spring season to do it.

– Read, don’t trade. Unless you are a cyborg, you’re not going to beat the computer traders who move stocks (often after the markets are closed) immediately upon release of the earnings reports. “You will never be fast enough to profit from trading on these reports,” says David Hultstrom, a Woodstock, Georgia, financial adviser.

Companies’ share prices already reflect what the market players expect to see in the report, he says. If earnings do better than expected, traders will immediately reprice the stock higher. If they do worse, the price will immediately go down.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Usually, when people talk about someone “going through a stage” they are talking about a 2-year-old or a teen. But there’s another age at which people go through a key transitional period, also marked by angst and rebellion: Call it pre-retirement.

It sets in by the time workers hit their late 50s, even though they are told they should work for another decade or so to maximize their retirement security. But it hits for real about five years before an expected retirement date. It’s the period that Prudential Financial Inc calls “the red zone” and another insurance company, Allianz Life Insurance Company of North America, calls “the transitional phase.”

Both of those companies talk about that pre-retirement period in the context of selling annuities — insurance products that offer tax benefits and lifetime income in exchange for large sums of money. But buying insurance or some other financial product is the easy part of retirement planning; the hard work should happen first.

Here are some guidelines for getting through that phase with a minimum of stress and strain.

– Get specific about life planning. This can be the most challenging part of the exercise; the rest is just numbers. What are the activities you really care about? Where do you want to travel and need to travel? What kind of lifestyle do you think you will have? There are ways to get help with this. The University of North Carolina at Asheville runs “Creative Retirement Exploration” weekends (here). A variety of books and websites claim to be able to help with lifestyle planning. Mutual fund company T. Rowe Price has a new interactive online exercise called “Ready 2 Retire” (here) that walks older workers through some of these questions.

– Become a Social Security savant. The program is complicated, but will make a significant contribution to almost everyone who retires in the United States. There are a series of strategies you can use to maximize your benefits, especially if you are married. Couples can tag-team their benefits, claim them and suspend them, defer them and more.

It makes sense to get a good numbers person, an actuary or an accountant, who understands all of this, to help you figure out which strategy is best for you. At least one company, Social Security Solutions (www.socialsecuritysolutions) claims to have all of that down to a science. For a fee, it will come up with a comprehensive benefits plan for you.

WASHINGTON, April 11 (Reuters) – By various accounts, Apple Inc. is now bigger than Spain, Portugal and Greece (combined), or the entire retail sector of the U.S. economy, or 13 Warren Buffetts. What are we to think about that?

First, a disclosure. In my two-person household are three Apple laptops, two Apple desktops, two iPhones, one iPod, two healthy iTunes accounts, a fair amount of iPad lust, and 200 shares of Apple stock, purchased by my husband roughly two decades ago, and making up a large share of his retirement account.

He would have had 400 shares, but – as he frequently reminds me – I talked him into selling 100 shares (pre-split) back when it was selling for an eye-popping $65 a share, a price I thought was frighteningly high. It is selling today for about $628 a share.

So, (1) No sane person would take buy or sell advice from me; and (2) I have a vested interest in everyone plowing more and more into this company until it’s worth more than every other company put together, or I can convince my husband to sell more. However, that isn’t the point of this column.

Rather, it’s to offer some perspective on this gorilla of Wall Street and the people who own it. And to warn individual investors that, even if they don’t live in an iCult ashram like mine, they may own Apple stock.

That’s because the most commonly held mutual funds have been plowing cash into Apple, and when a company gets that big, it can dominate even a diversified mutual fund portfolio.

And so, a few points to consider.

WASHINGTON, April 4 (Reuters) – The generation that invented “helicopter parenting” is moving into its grandparenting years with a wad of cash and strong ideas about how their precious posterity should live, so get ready for Granny and Grandpa Baby Boomer to shake things up.

Already, today’s first-time grandparents are the youngest ever, with an average age of 47, according to an AARP survey. Boomers have the highest median household income of any age group, according to the U.S. Census; by some accounts they control as much as 70 percent of American net worth and stand to inherit another $8 trillion or more.

What could be more American boomer-esque than spending that money on the grandchildren, indulging them and exerting influence along the way? Roughly 36 percent of the grandparents surveyed by AARP said “spoiling (grand)children by buying them too much” was a part of a grandparent’s financial role.

And it’s fun. Ask George Marotta, who is not a baby boomer. The 85-year-old Palo Alto patriarch has turned helping his 10 grandchildren into a hobby that has paid off for multiple generations. He and his wife started in the mid-1980s, and over the years have plowed cash into bank accounts, 529 plans and Roth IRAs for all of the grandchildren.

Their total investment of just under $700,000 into 529 college savings plans has already put five grandchildren through college; four more are now in college and one is still in high school. And there’s $708,335 left to fund medical school for one, divinity school for another, and graduate school and continuing education for all.

“We had more than we needed for ourselves, and so we thought we would help the grandchildren,” Marotta said, noting that he and his wife became financial planners in Palo Alto in the mid-1980s, just around the time the dot-com boom was taking off. Widowed 10 years ago, Marotta has since remarried and is now a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institute.

“I recently sent an email to my 10 grandchildren, saying ‘Don’t worry about your career; do something you really would like to do. Experiment if you want,” said Marotta. “We’ve got you covered.”

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Over the next week, most colleges will give high school seniors the good news — who got in where — and the bad news — how much it will cost.

Then it will be crunch time for a full month, as parents try to make the numbers work so their kids can give colleges their final answers by May 1.

Parents will check bank balances and sofa cushions for the cash to make it happen. Financial aid officers will steel themselves for the calls they know are coming, as parents appeal for bigger and better awards. “This is the month of negotiating,” says Bob Ilukowicz, a financial aid consultant in Smithtown, New York.

There certainly is aid out there. Ilukowicz says he is seeing his clients get fatter offers for the 2012-2013 school year than he saw in recent years. The College Board estimates that the average private nonprofit four-year college charges $38,590 for tuition, fees, room and board in the 2011-2012 school year, but that grants and federal tax breaks (which it now counts as “aid”) shave about $15,530 off that.

Almost 80 percent of full-time undergraduates get some kind of aid, according to the U.S. Department of Education, and roughly 64 percent get the good kind — grants that don’t have to be paid back.

But burdensome student loans still make up about half of all financial aid, and with tuition alone over $40,000 at more than 100 pricey schools(“obscene,” says Ilukowicz), how much aid is ever enough? And how can you get it? Here are a few strategies for “haggle month,” and beyond.

– Ask for more. Roughly two-thirds of parents who appeal their Amherst College aid awards get more money, admits Joe Paul Case, the school’s financial aid administrator. And Amherst is a school that doesn’t offer merit aid or meet competitive offers just to win over a student; Case runs a strictly needs-based aid office. At schools that have discretionary funds to offer merit aid and meet competition, the rewards for asking for an upgraded offer are even better.