Hello! My name is Samantha Rauch and I am from a small mountain town called Basalt, Colorado, just outside of Aspen, Colorado. My family and I have lived in Basalt my entire life. I attended Basalt High School where my graduating class was a mere 63 people. Some things I really enjoy doing outside of school include working with children, …
I don’t like to bring up that I’m a Veteran very often. It’s not out of some sense of secrecy, shame, or other emotional motivator. Rather, simply that I’d rather not identify myself forever more by a six-year period of my life. I was fortunate enough that my time in the military was unremarkable, and moreover lucky that it was …
I recently posted on social media my humble honor of being asked to be one of the faculty for the Financial Planning Association’s 2020 Summer Externship. The Externship is designed to provide hundreds of students around the country (over 500 as of today), with a replacement for their internships that have been cancelled due to structural or budgetary issues caused …
Often a growing business will look to add staff as quickly as possible. After all, a growing business is limited by the bandwidth of it’s human workforce, each of whom come with their own personal complications (i.e. work life balance). It is not uncommon for me to hear a business consultant or even an owner toss out something about trying …
Leadership is a tough gig, possibly the toughest. You always lead the way and you are responsible for everything that happens, good, bad, or otherwise. The leadership of a lot of people is being tested right now. Politicians are having to balance the interests of the economies they represent while simultaneously trying to protect the vulnerable from sickness. Healthcare workers …
Insurance is boring. Really boring. Experimenting eating paint chips might be more entertaining, if significantly more hazardous for your health. This boredom, along with education and training on how to evaluate insurance, costs consumers over a billion dollars a year in fees, conflicts, and opportunity costs. You too, probably find insurance pretty boring, but when you’re given an opportunity to …
“Be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful.” – Warren Buffett It’s a simple but powerful piece of wisdom that the Oracle of Omaha shares with others when the markets are booming or crashing. Human nature often compels us to wait until things are past the point of ideal to get involved in something, and often …
“A full layout” is a dreaded phrase for those who have been in the military. It involves being given a packing list for some sort of operation, typically dozens of items long, which must be crammed into a rucksack. From that point, a full layout is the forced process of pulling the contents of the rucksack out and laying them …
It’s an expression you’ve heard before. “Riding out the storm.” Usually it’s quite literal: families staying at home during a hurricane, huddling in the living room around the fire during a blizzard, and so on. But the idiom comes with a much more literal background. In naval excursions, particularly over long distances and upon the ocean, storms can reach peaks …
Good news! The market is on sale. Why do I view it so optimistically when the average news report makes it sound like the world is ending? Well, a bit of context is required. My first year as a financial planner was an interesting one. Within a year we had Chinese market volatility, the first big drop in the preceding …