Is it possible to have too much money? Really? Are you kidding me? If we posed this question to 100 people, the odds are that 98 would answer “no” with the remaining 2 speechless. As with most things in life, people tend to believe that more is better; but we believe that an exception to… Read more »
Why do we care what other people are doing; and what are the implications for our personal financial situations? What makes this question so fascinating is that most people claim to march to the beat of their drum, unbowed by social convention. They may think this, but the hard truth is that whether we realize… Read more »
Before the financial crisis in 2008 we used the tag line, “More than Riches – A Rich Life” to describe our philosophy about money. Put more succinctly, our services were not so much directed toward helping clients build their net worth, as using the money they had accumulated to build a rich life, in a… Read more »
Most of us would like to view our lives, or at least our life expectancy, as a continuum projecting our lives out to infinity. The unfortunate truth is that our lives can more practically be viewed as being on an arc comprised of a beginning, middle, and an end. For some odd reason, perhaps self… Read more »
This week, I had a meeting with a client we have worked with for several years. It was time to get her risk profile updated. We had sent her a link to complete, but when she came into the meeting her “homework” was still not completed. When I inquired why her profile was still… Read more »
Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was famous for quotes such as the following: “There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we… Read more »
My mom used to tell me that there is nothing as powerful on Earth as an idea whose time has come. Historically, we can point to the fall of the Berlin Wall, the founding of our Republic and the advent of digital technology as but a handful of examples of this truth. While each of… Read more »
Today, anyone who deals with people’s personal finances seems to refer to themselves as a financial advisor. Since the term “financial advisor” is not regulated, this leaves a lot of room for confusion. Using the term “financial advisor” is an attractive way for a salesperson to disarm their prospective client. Most people would prefer to… Read more »
This year’s budget deliberations have turned traditional year-end tax planning strategies on their head. As financial advisors, we are being asked to make savvy decisions based on our suppositions of what may or may not be decided by the president and Congress as they negotiate the sun-setting Bush and Obama era tax cuts. Traditionally,… Read more »