Best Of

Which is worse: Being destitute while still alive or dying happy and provided for with a little extra?

Sophisticated tax planning can be effective at any age. However, with great complexity comes great opportunity.

It is perfectly fine for you to underspend your assets. You don’t need my permission, but you have my blessing anyway.

We haven’t seen high interest rates in many years, but high interest rates do not remove the potential benefits of having a mortgage.

Adding more Stability to an asset allocation isn’t an easy issue. It takes science to know how much bonds you need. It takes artistry to gradually adjust your asset allocation over time. 

In this article, I am defending the use of self-control in your financial habits.

Because so much of your net worth is in traditional IRA, how quickly you expect to withdraw from your retirement account assets will heavily influence how quickly or slowly the math would advise that you convert.

Inflation is like the rain. You must prepare in advance in order to stay dry.

One obscure way we bring value to clients is how we bill them.

If you receive Social Security benefits, the portion of those benefits which will be taxable depends on your income. The taxable portion can be anywhere from 0% to a maximum of 85% of your benefits.

Regardless of what you do with the money earned, continuing to work is a worthwhile journey.

In this podcast, we discuss why spending is the core of your financial plan, how to align your spending with your goals, and how to use Core Values Budgeting to identify budgeting changes.

Bitcoin satisfies some of the characteristics of a currency, but there are at least seven areas of concern.

I expect that eventually Bitcoin will either develop a real, useful value for investors or the bubble will burst.

Saving for long-term care, if done early enough, is not too expensive and helps to protect yourself from this potential financial shock.

You can easily update your contact information online through Schwab Alliance.

These credit cards won’t change your life, and they shouldn’t, but they can get back a very small portion of the money you spend each month.

Hard work can often only be learned by struggling. You can’t teach your children to live within their means if you always supplement their means.

Yes, many retirees may die with significant assets. However, this helps to ensure that they have sufficient assets to support their lifestyle should they make it to age 100.

The annual drag of taxable account taxation may seem like a small amount, but the effect over long periods of time such as 30 years is significant.

These complex formulas help decide when highly appreciated investments should be sold and the proceeds put in a different investment philosophy.

I recently received the following paraphrased questions from a prospective client and here were my replies.

Doing some conversion is usually much better than doing no conversion at all. We offer these four simple but effective strategies to calculate a good-enough conversion target for this year.

Given the purposeful complexity and limitations to structured products we suggest you avoid them.

All of these factors contribute to the low inclusion of people of color among those holding the CFP® certification.

Here are the most common elder scams and how to prevent them.

To help you get a good financial start as parents, here’s a financial checklist for new parents.

If you are still in your 60s, the good news is your decision doesn’t have to be permanent. You actually have two ways in which you can change your benefit amount.

Home bias is the tendency of investors to invest a majority of their assets in companies domiciled in their home country. Recency bias is the tendency for humans to believe that what has happened recently will continue to happen in the future.

Even if the world was ending, I still want to have a mortgage.

In this talk, David demonstrates how Roth conversions can be extremely valuable even if a client is always in the same tax bracket.

Don’t delay getting your finances in order until you get your finances in order. Ask for help today and see what wisdom a financial advisor has to share.

By decoupling your standard of living from the size of your income, you have taken the first step toward financial freedom.

The worst cause of employer stress is the fact that there exist many financial salespeople who offer plans which benefit themselves at excessive cost to the employer and their employees.

By flowing money through a 529 account, a Virginia tax payer could receive a $575 discount on their private school tuition.

If you have a tax credit eligible charity where you like their work better than the state government, then consider redirecting your state tax to fund the charity instead.

The SECURE Act of 2019 changed several things, so here is an updated review of this complex subject.

If you have a charity among your heirs, there is the possibility for tax savings.

Not every custodian is willing to accept the complexity, but I am grateful that Schwab is.

While an efficient frontier graph cannot hand you a perfect asset allocation, it remains a useful tool in analyzing what the past can tell us about a wide variety of investments.

As fiduciaries, we are on your side to ensure that your goals are met. Protecting you from elder fraud is just one of the many services we can offer as a part of comprehensive financial planning.

I’m turning 60 this week. Even though I plan on working as long as possible, this is an important check point.

No matter how small your savings or when you start accumulating them, those small changes have large effects over time.

In these ways, rebalancing can be of great value to a long-term investor’s portfolio.

In this article, I am reviewing the quantitative measurements and performance metrics of Freedom Investing to see how its risk and return compare to the EAFE Index, its benchmark.

After you have opened your account, there are many methods of contributing to or funding your Charles Schwab account. The best and easiest four methodologies are as follows.

Once you know how to file it, it is a simple and easy process.

These findings together demonstrate how Economic Freedom seems to have been a valid factor for higher expected returns than investing in the EAFE Index alone.

We strive to provide the necessary resources for anyone to prepare their own investment plan and meet their financial objectives for free on our blog, but we offer more services than that to our clients.

Sometimes, you don’t get a second chance to be brave.