A few weeks ago, an anonymous Redditor posted the following story on the “Millennials” Reddit: “My wife and I have spent almost two decades of leveling up in jobs and careers and are now in our late 30s with two small children in a HCOL state. We scraped and suffered to buy a small ranch house and two used larger …
Cash Management
As the Fed has finally lowered rates and signals that it anticipates up to another half of a percent decline by the end of the year, both accumulators and retirees are faced with the question of what to do in a declining rate environment. For many clients, a relatively straightforward strategy for cash management for the past two years has …
Best Financial Planners, Technology Updates, and Q4 Planning
Apologies for a shorter blog than usual, but it’s been a busy few weeks! Best Financial Planners For those who were wondering, “What happened to the blog last week?” The answer is as amusing as it is mundane. While normally the blog gets written and published on Tuesdays, last week a good chunk of time was absorbed by flying to …
Hybridization of Financial Planning & Tax Professionals
I’ve opined multiple times over the past few years that there’s a bright future of collaboration and possibly integration between financial planners and tax professionals. After all, both frequently are on other sides of the same coin, and the divide between them often boils down to whether work is being done in arrears (e.g., tax professionals taking what’s already been …
Never Discount
It has been observed in one form or another that the only store in which people will run screaming when a sale starts is the “stock market.” Yet, despite the strange inclination of consumers to flee deep discounts when they present themselves in the world of investments and to only be tempted to buy when prices go up, today we …
Avoiding Career Bottlenecks
It is not uncommon for a financial planner to find that many clients have hit a proverbial “ceiling” in their career trajectory. As we’d observe it, this is seldom because of any limitation in their capabilities or capacity but because of a classic problem: The person on the next rung of the career ladder is happy where they are, or …
Boulder County Minimum Wage Research
For several months, an economic analysis has explored the possibility of installing a “regional” minimum wage in the Boulder county area, which would technically be implemented as a county-level and city-by-city level minimum wage, including the cities of Boulder, Erie, Lafayette, Longmont, and Louisville. Curiously, as this study got off the ground, a video produced by the research task force …
Who’s Paying Your Planner?
For those who wondered, “What happened to the blog last week? Heck, where was the blog yesterday?” The answer is as fun as it is mundane. Rather than writing a blog for July 30th, I was in Chicago attending the summer leadership meeting for the National Association of Personal Financial Advisors, or “NAPFA,” for which I sit on the west …
The Age of AI?
In 1961, during an Antarctic expedition, Leonid Rogozov came down with appendicitis. While this condition is typically solved with relatively minor surgery, there was just one problem: there was only one doctor on the expedition, Leonid Rogozov. Faced with a choice between certain death or an insane attempt at performing his own appendectomy, Dr. Rogozov chose to live. With a …
The Necessity of Fiduciary Financial Planning
Last week, WSJ reporter Jason Zweig broke the story of Powerball winners who were exploited for millions of dollars in commissions and fees. For those without the time to read the full article, succinctly, a couple won a $180.1 million dollar lottery in 2008 and walked away with $59.6 million after taxes. Shortly thereafter, they started a charitable foundation to …