Rod Meloni, who has covered business -- and the odd triple murder, political corruption and other news for WDIV-TV -- for two decades, has a second career: certified financial planner.
He's now published a book, "My Checklist System for Investors," that lays out a system to help people who don't have the time or inclination to plan for retirement.
Meloni writes:
The system had to give step-by-step guidance on exactly what to do and look out for; a system providing the questions to ask and help evaluating the answers. We knew not to require learning a lot of financial gobbledygook.
We did dozens of iterations and settled on the five point checklist that provided one more important service: show you exactly how to understand whether your relationship with an investment adviser is a good one.
If you have investments in a 401k or with a financial adviser, do you know what you own? Do you know why you own it? Do you know how your investments are doing? Compared to what? What are you paying for the privilege?
For most of us the answer is no to all of those questions, but there is a cost for not knowing. Depending on decisions you made in the dark, it could be many thousands of dollars. Let’s go about the business of stopping that bleeding.
