dsmWealth July 18, 2019

After careers in Iowa, Doug Peters and Martha Schut retired to Italy where they have been accepted as locals' friends and neighbors.

La Dolce Vita: Retirement in Italy
BY STEVE DINNEN

Martha Schut fell in love with Italy when she lived there in the 1970s and told herself, "I’ll be back." She made good on that pledge in 2015, when she and her husband, Doug Peters, left Iowa for permanent retirement living in the ancient town of Spello, in the center of Italy.

Schut was a psychotherapist in Iowa City, and Peters was a minister who served United Methodist churches in Iowa. As they neared retirement (he in 2010, and she in 2015) they made numerous and progressively longer trips to Italy, taking language classes and checking out where they might live.

On one trip they visited Spello, where Schut had learned that one of the churches had a beautiful chapel painted by the Renaissance artist Pinturicchio.

"We spent the day walking the labyrinthine streets and alleyways, later stopping in another church, where a golden shaft of sunlight caused the altar to appear on fire," Peterson said. "I said, 'It’s a sign,' I never say things like that."

So they moved to Spello. They rent an apartment there year-round, but return to Iowa during the summer, when tourists crowd Italy.

Before moving, Schut and Peters visited the Italian Consulate in Chicago to get permission to become elective residents. That included a visa and a permesso di soggiorno, which allows them to come and go as they wish.

Banking has been easy – they just visit a nearby ATM for cash and also use a local bank. Health care has worked well, too: As elective residents they were able to buy into the country’s national health care plan (and it’s good throughout Europe).

Italy’s bureaucracy is legendary but having someone to ask is incredibly helpful, Peters said. "Being able to speak some Italian is necessary at times because many people don’t speak English," he said. "You will sign more papers than you can imagine."

That said, they’re convinced Spello is a delight. The Spellani – people of Spello – have become their friends. They socialize with Italians all the time.

"We don’t do a lot of traveling to other areas," Peters said. "We are content to live in Spello and to participate in the lifestyle there, walking everywhere, since we don’t have a car. We do go to Rome [two hours away] when meeting family at the airport. Each Thanksgiving we pick another Italian town to celebrate for a couple days. We have children in England, the Netherlands and Malaysia, so we do travel to see them."

In Spello, Peters and Schut participate in the town's festivals and programs as their time allows. And the Spellani have made them official American "ambassadors" for a cultural group preserving the old ways. They have even given them sashes and medallions to wear at official functions.

"In short, it feels like home," Peters said.

Buy a house in Italy for 1 Euro? Believe It
BY STEVE DINNEN

Italy is on sale – for cheap. Like $1.12 cheap for an entire house. Of course, it’s in horrible shape and you’ll spend tens of thousands of dollars to fix it up. But municipal leaders across Italy – mainly in the south – are trying to repopulate rural areas by offering abandoned homes to new-age settlers, as it were, for as little as 1 Euro.

In 1968 an earthquake trashed Salemi, in Sicily. Homes were abandoned and citizens drifted into big cities. To try to stem the population decline, Salemi’s mayor cooked up an idea to sell homes to anyone with 1 Euro, and cash enough to rebuild the home in a set period of time. The deal spread, and now dozens of communities offer title to properties to those who commit to rebuild them.

You can look into this further at 1eurohouses.com.

Feeling more industrious? Swing to aldeasabandonadas.com and its listing of entire hamlets in Spain that are for sale. The government estimates that 3,000 villages have been abandoned. A 14-home, 200-acre parcel near Barcelona is on sale for under $300,000. Sellers seem motivated.

The Liverpool (England) council is chipping away at a stock of 6,000 derelict homes on offer to anyone with 1 pound to purchase them and tens of thousands of pounds more to restore them.

Do You Still Need Bonds in Your Portfolio?
BY SIMON MOORE, for Forbes

With the U.S. Treasury 10-year yield close to 2% and many other government bonds in Europe and Japan yielding negative rates, does it still make sense to hold bonds in a portfolio?

Generally bonds offer stability and income to a portfolio. In fact, the asset class is sometimes referred to as fixed income. The main alternative to bonds, the stock market, can offer a wild ride in the short term. Seeing the stock market halve over a couple of years is quite possible and 10% dips can be annual events based on history. Unless you have nerves of steel and no short-term need for the cash you've invested, then being all-in in stocks can be too much risk for most people to bear.

Also, though the major stock markets do generally come back from dips to ultimately make new highs, there is no ironclad guarantee that this will always be the case. Read more >>

Credit Card Mismanagement Adds to Millennials' Woes
BY SHEILA BAIR, former Chair of the FDIC, for CNBC

Once derided on the cover of Time magazine as the "Me Me Me Generation," millennials have, in fact, become the "Owe Owe Owe Generation."

This group originally showed a healthy aversion to credit card debt. From 2008 to 2012, only 41% of those in their 20s had a credit card. That number has grown to 52%, as millennials seem to be succumbing to our credit-crazed culture.

Unfortunately, a large percentage are mismanaging that debt. To that point, 8% of millennials’ card balances were seriously delinquent in the first quarter of this year, according to the New York Federal Reserve Bank. That is by far the highest for any age group.

Millennials are already saddled with $370 billion in student loans and have lower net worth than their predecessor generation at the same stage in life. They obviously can ill afford to be taking on this additional financial burden. Read More >>

Lessons From the 10 Best Years in Stock Market History
BY BEN CARLSON, for the website AWealthyofCommonSense.com

Valuable lessons for investors today can be learned from the 10 best years in stock market history (for the Dow) going back to the year 1900.

The list was initially compiled in the book "It Was a Very Good Year" by Martin Fridson, which uses these high-flying years in the stock market to provide a historical look at what was going on leading up to and during those periods.

Fridson’s book was published in the late 1990s. Since then the Dow has seen gains of 28.0% (2003), 22.5% (2009), 29.4% (2013) and 28.0% (2017) but nothing good enough to crack the top 10. Read more >>