I made my first impression on the FPA community in the spring of 2019 when I posted on the FPA Activate page, complaining about what I perceived as a lackluster keynote lineup for FPA Retreat. That complaint haunts me to this day in, what I think might be the FPA Staff’s favorite karmic justice, as my testimonial about the quality …
Shopping Your Insurance
There’s a question I ask every financial planning client when they start a financial planning relationship with us. “Would you like us to shop insurance for you to see if we can get better coverage for the same price or the same coverage for a better price?” It’s not a promise of results or a pitch for a sale, given …
Lethal Interactions
It is well known that many innocuous substances when combined, can produce unintended outcomes. For example, someone taking opiate painkillers who then drinks alcohol can end up with symptoms as mild as nausea and extreme as stopping breathing and going into a coma (assuming the former doesn’t simply result in death!) These issues are a large part of the specialized …
Pop Science in Finance
Over the weekend I spent a great deal of entertainment time listening to a new podcast called “If Books Could Kill.” The basic premise of the podcast is that bloggers and podcasters Michael Hobbes and Peter Shamshiri read books sold at the airport, often made up of “pop science” topics such as behavioral psychology, self-help, political topics, and personal finance, …
Reverse Mortgage – Villain or Vindicated?
You see a verdant green forest and a well-groomed dirt path. A moment later, the Magnum PI, Tom Selleck, appears and begins to tell you about how this isn’t his first rodeo and he wouldn’t be talking to you about reverse mortgages if he thought they were a scheme to rip you off or take your home away from you. …
Hearn’s Law
A colleague of mine, a CPA by the name of Michael Pharris, has a framed piece of paper in his office. The header reads, “Hearn’s Laws”, written by Professor Hearn, an instructor when Michael was in undergrad studying accounting. While there are many good tidbits on the paper (“he who signs the other man’s form, takes care of the other …
Everyone is Bad at their Job, So SVB Failed
I am a fairly demanding person in my professional relationships. I expect my attorneys to be sharp, accountants to be fastidious, and so on. However, this puts me in a position to be often disappointed, and to be fair, what can I expect? The tier-one customer service agent at a big tech company can’t really be expected to be “the …
Target Date Funds or Target Dud Funds?
Well, it’s official: as of yesterday, March the 6th, I’m an “All But Dissertation” or “ABD” Ph.D. Candidate (as opposed to a student!) In honor of the occasion, I’m summarizing a recent piece of research that I enjoyed and talking about the issues leading into the research and the takeaways therefrom. The piece is “Off Target: On the Underperformance of …
Looking Under the Hood
There’s some age-old wisdom in car buying: “Don’t buy a lemon, look under the hood.” The basic idea here, of course, is that before you buy a car you should look not just at the outside of the car but the interior and the actual mechanical workings. While this is seldom a concern when buying new (and thus the premium …
The Chicken or the Egg?
If you review any nationally representative dataset (the Survey of Consumer Finances, the National Financial Capability study, the National Longitudinal Survey, the Health and Retirement Study, among others), you will find an incredibly consistent data point: The higher the income, the assets, and the overall financial affluence of a household, the more common it is that they will have a …