“Every financial plan ever produced is wrong” – Joe Duran, United Capital I have to admit, as someone who creates financial plans, when I first heard one of our industry’s thought leaders make that statement in an interview I cringed a little. But, when I considered what he was saying, and the real implications of […]
Market Volatility Survival Guide
Market volatility,while never fun, is a fact of life. Over the years, we’ve written about market volatility now and then, usually as questions are coming in from clients asking what they should do with their portfolios when things aren’t steadily climbing.The answers that we write, generally, do not change from one market event to another. […]
Socks and Stocks: Why Market Volatility Can Be Your Friend
“Whether we’re talking about socks or stocks, I like buying quality merchandise when it is marked down.” – Warren Buffett Nobody likes a volatile market. Behavioral economists have shown many different ways in which we feel psychological pain when we lose money (see my favorite non-investing investment book, Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel […]
Understanding Required Minimum Distributions
After you turn 70 ½ years old, you will need to take a minimum amount out of your traditional IRA accounts each year, as well as your 401k or 403b accounts if you are no longer working for the businesses sponsoring those plans. The minimum required amount, referred to as your required minimum distribution, or […]
Understanding Federal Student Loans
In order to plan for funding your student’s college education, you must understand the student loan landscape. I won’t take up space here with scary statistics about the amount of student debt American families are amassing and what that may mean for our society’s future. If used correctly and in the right amounts, student loans […]
Lessons from the Financial Crisis
Ten years ago, we were in the middle of the Financial Crisis. Between October 2007 and March 2009, the S & P 500 lost 50% of its value. Home values plummeted. Banks and mortgage companies went from boom to bust seemingly overnight, and our entire financial system seemed to hang in the balance. I’ve often […]
A Practical Approach to Paying for College
Paying for college creates a financial planning dilemma for many families: How can working parents save for their own retirement while also saving for their children’s educations? As a profession, financial planners have not always been as helpful as we should have been in this area. College planning advice has focused on saving for retirement […]
Understanding Qualified Charitable Distributions
If you have an IRA and are required to take annual distributions, and you are charitably inclined, listen up: the new tax law means you might want to consider Qualified Charitable Distributions as your means of making donations. A Qualified Charitable Distribution (QCD) means donating all or a portion of your annual required minimum distribution […]
Saving for College with 529 Plans
If you are putting away funds dedicated for your child’s higher education expenses, a 529 College Savings Plan is tough to beat. These plans allow parents and grandparents to put away funds for a child’s education, and the growth on the account is tax – free when used to pay qualified education expenses. In some […]
Protecting Your Identity and Privacy: The Equifax Data Breach
Protecting Your Identity and Privacy: The Equifax Data Breach No doubt you have heard that Equifax, one of the three major credit reporting agencies, had a data breach and as many as 143 million American’s may have had sensitive information stolen. Names, addresses, Social Security numbers, birth dates and other identifying data may have […]