Empowering You to Live Your Best Financial Life
Our expertise in financial, investment, and retirement planning will guide your path to financial fulfillment.
Four Hard Truths
Whether your plan is in your head, in an Excel spreadsheet, or managed by a professional, there is no doubt that these four hard truths must be accepted for your money to have a chance at outliving you.
How To Get Paid In Retirement
In retirement, you will begin spending down your assets and stop receiving a paycheck. This is one of the most difficult mind-shifts we go through in our lifetime. But it doesn’t have to be.
What a Great Financial Planner Can Do for You
In this “bullet point post,” I’ll share what I believe you need from your Financial Planner (even if that might be you!)
Your Path to Financial Improvement Begins With This Question
There is always room for change or improvement when it comes to your finances. But what you really should be asking yourself is this: Am I looking to optimize my current situation, or am I looking for tremendous improvement? In fact, for most people, simply understanding their current situation – what they own, what they make, what they spend, and what they owe – can be a radical improvement. This type of realization helps you grasp the bigger picture rather than spending energy on some minor issues.
How To Achieve Financial Fulfillment
What comes to mind when you hear the word fulfill? Phrases like “to achieve,” “to carry out,” “to realize,” or “to put into effect” stand out, right? I always think about living out a dream, or finally achieving a goal that I’ve set for myself. The type of fulfillment I want to talk about today is financial fulfillment. Why? Because this, in essence, is when you are able to live your best financial life.
How To Define What You Want Out Of Life
If I were to ask you what your goals are for your life, would you be able to answer? Or, would it evoke a sense of overwhelm or fear that you won’t be able to achieve or accomplish everything you want to in life? That you can’t or won’t do “enough.”
8 Investment Strategy Mistakes to Avoid
When was the last time you truly forgave someone? I’m talking about a time when someone did wrong to you with no explanation — leaving you bewildered as to why you were treated that way. And, unfortunately, you had no real recourse, except to pick yourself up and move on. But before you could truly do that, you had to forgive that person.
Why Volatility is Good
Higher risk must be accompanied by higher potential rewards. To get that, we have to accept more volatility and that’s what the stock market provides. Even a well-diversified portfolio will move up and down with the markets, so let’s structure a portfolio so we can live within the good times and the bad!
Faith In The Future
People do it all the time. In the face of their worst imaginable fears, they do it. Probably not because they want to. They do it, maybe, because that’s the way we humans are wired. What do they do? They continue. And the only thing that might be driving them is faith in the future. A faith that the future will be better.
What is Financial Planning?
Financial Planner. Financial Advisor. Investment Advisor. Or even an Investment Adviser. Do these terms create vibrations of stress in your life? I’m going to tell you exactly what I do for clients – not as a sales pitch, but so that you may be able to take some of this away and apply it in your life.
Protect Your Assets by Understanding Your Exposure
Many of my clients originally reached out to me because they have a lot of company stock and don’t understand what it is or when to sell it. They are aware they lack “diversification,” but don’t know what to do about it—or if diversification is a big deal at all.
How to Manage Your RSUs
Running on autopilot can be dangerous. If a pilot’s course is off by 1 degree traveling from San Francisco to New York, they will end up 40 miles out in the Pacific Ocean. Likewise, if you don’t recalibrate your financial autopilot settings, you’ll miss your destination of financial security.
Get Value (and Joy) Out of Your Spending by Knowing Where Your Money Goes
A friend recently told me that all he wants to know about his finances is how much money he needs before retiring. He doesn’t care about understanding his spending—or even looking at it! He knows his spending is high today, but he believes he can reduce it at any time, and the best time seems to be retirement. This mindset will not lead you on the path to financial success.
Give a Job to Every Dollar You Have
In today’s busy world, you might often feel like you’re drowning in responsibilities to your family, coworkers, clients, and even your neighbors. There’s always someone or something saying you ought to be doing something.
Why You Need a Family Trust
Having a family trust in California is vital for protecting your estate and the financial well-being of your loved ones. It helps preserve family harmony, avoid lengthy delays and expenses associated with probate, and keeps your affairs private.
Don’t Set It and Forget It
Ok, so you’ve bought into ignoring short-term market fluctuations, but it’s likely not that simple. In my experience the idea of investing for the long run can fade quickly when the market gets stressed.
Unlocking the Power of Diversification: The Key to Financial Success
It is unfortunate, but to understand why diversification works, we must understand a little math. This mathematical magic is the key to constructing a portfolio that your well-thought-out financial plan deserves: a beautifully diversified investment strategy!
Why Diversification Works
It is unfortunate, but to understand why diversification works, we must understand a little math. This mathematical magic is the key to constructing a portfolio that your well-thought-out financial plan deserves: a beautifully diversified investment strategy!
Retirement May Not Mean You Actually Retire
How much time do you have left?Knowing the answer to this question would greatly ease your financial planning process. But, of course, this is one of the many variables we don’t know.
Why It’s Best to Ignore Individual Stocks
Buying an individual stock is like placing your money on a single number in roulette, but much, much worse. In the United States, there are hundreds of large investment firms trying to pick the best stocks. Within these firms are talented, educated and well-connected analysts whose sole responsibility is to know whether to buy or sell 5-10 individual stocks.
The Importance of Having Access to Your Money
Needing access to your investment accounts in an emergency creates enough of a logistical hurdle but holding investments that may take weeks or months to sell can really cause a problem.
Here’s a Secret: Your Financial Plan Is Wrong
They say close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades. Close also counts in financial planning if you are diligent enough to continue to plan. Today’s financial tools offer terrific detail regarding your financial future.
Get to Clarity, Control & Intention
What is Financial Planning? I like to think about it in a very simple way. You need to have clarity in your finances before you can have control. Once you have control, you can be very intentional.
Understand Your Plan Will Not Come True
Think back to your time in school. Where did you think your life was headed? Has that come true? Now think back just five years and again, where did you think your life was headed?
Change Your Financial Plan
It might seem strange that I would suggest this given I don’t even know what your Financial Plan is, or even if you have one. But hear me out.
Take Advantage of Lower Capital Gains Tax Rates
We all know we get taxed many different ways, and it’s important to understand them all at least to some degree. I want to focus on the capital gains tax and how we can use these rates to our advantage.
Have a Long-Term Portfolio Strategy in Place for Your Cash from Selling Company Stock
Once you have a plan in place to sell your Company Stock over time, be sure that money has some place to go. We don’t ever want our money to be without a job and the cash you get from your Company Stock is no exception.
Have a Strategy for Each Block of Vesting Shares
No longer should we simply let these (newly vested shares) drift into our portfolio without a strategy or reason to hold vs. sell. Instead, we are going to develop a strategy for each block of vesting shares.
Know the Tax Effect of Selling Your Company Stock
Taxes are a fact of life. I talk to a lot of people who are trying to find the super-secret way that people with money avoid paying taxes. I’m here to tell you – it doesn’t exist.
Risk-Reward of Your Company Stock
We make decisions in everyday life based on seeking a reward given the risk we are willing to take. Without risk, there is no reward.