I’ve flirted with fitness trackers for the better part of a decade. I originally picked up a Jawbone UP in 2013, even spending the money to upgrade my brick cellphone to my first smartphone so I could use the thing. There was something appealing or futuristic about knowing your heart rate and how many steps you’d taken; now step tracking …
There’s an odd term that often comes up in business school: “Highest and best use.” The fundamental point of the term is the argument that only certain professionals are enabled to perform certain tasks either by skill, experience, or licensure. Consequently, the business phrase “highest and best use” refers to ensuring that those professionals spend as much time as possible …
Like most obsessions, my obsession with saving didn’t start with saving or as an obsession. In fact, to go back in time a few years, you’d think I had an issue with money avoidance. Today I wanted to take some time to trot down the personal path and share how it came to be that I effectively deploy over 40% …
At the battle of the Chosin Reservoir in the Korean War, the Chinese and North Korean armies surrounded the United States Army X Corps and First Marine Division with over 120,000 troops. The winter conditions and a cold front out of Siberia sent temperature plunging as low as -36F, causing blood and plasma supplies to freeze, and injuring thousands of …
Our firm is a passive investment management firm. Literally, every investment we select for clients is an index-based exchange traded fund that tracks a benchmark such as the S&P 500 or a bond index. We do this for a number of reasons: first, the research shows that the majority of actively managed investment products fail to outperform their benchmarks over …
A common question many clients have had over the years as they’ve asked us to take on managing their investments is “how do you manage my money?” Our answer to this for many years has been that we use a long-term focused strategy, accomplished through the use of low-cost passive index funds. A caution we give on a regular basis …
On New Year’s Eve we saw an enormous fire that destroyed over a thousand homes and businesses in Superior and Louisville. Concurrently, every insurance agent I know is working around the clock to process claims and get their clients taken care of in the face of such an awful catastrophe. While I can’t go back and coach anyone who suffered …
Compensation by its nature is one of the most important and yet most taboo topics in our society. Despite the well-accepted fact that if everyone talked about money more, we’d likely all be doing a bit better by the simple merit of having more information in our salary negotiations and price discovery, we tend to keep our numbers close to …
As paradoxical as it seems, the wealth gap is not increasing in the United States. Not in any meaningful way, at least. While not a month passes that we don’t hear about a billionaire who barely paid any taxes, or another that has accrued billions in a tax-free account, the fact of the matter is that wealth in the United …
This week we’re taking a break from our normal business of writing about one issue at length to talk about two issues in shorter form. Two things come into effect on the 1st of the year, and it’s noteworthy that while one is already law, the other is making its way through Congress at the moment. We’re talking about Colorado’s …