Empowering You to Live Your Best Financial Life
Our expertise in financial, investment, and retirement planning will guide your path to financial fulfillment.
Don’t Let Your Investment Plan Crash With The Markets
In many cases, philosophies are the basis for how we think and plan. If you can see how my simple driving philosophy helped here, perhaps you can see how an investment philosophy may help when it comes to your money and the market.
Does Your Financial Advisor Buy Lottery Tickets?
When we trade our cash for things, we are either investing or making a purchase, and it is imperative to understand the difference. For me, buying a lottery ticket every once in a while gives me the chance to dream a little bit of what life would be like if I were to win. At no time do I actually believe I will win – we all know how steep the odds are – but I know for a fact that I won’t win if I don’t buy a ticket.
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.
7 Mistakes Investors Make
We all make mistakes – I know I’ve made my share. But for some reason, when it comes to investing, we are prone to repeating our mistakes – over and over. I think it’s because the “lesson” we tell ourselves we learned isn’t the right one.
Rely on the Wisdom of the Crowd
If we invest in a market-like portfolio, with wide diversification and diligence around our appropriate asset allocation, we can predict the return it will provide fairly well. It takes planning to ensure we can do everything we want given the realistic returns we can expect from such a strategy.
Successful Investing: The Value of a 5-Year Cash Flow Plan
How should you invest the money you plan to spend in 2 years to buy a house/boat/car or go on a trip? The answer is, you shouldn’t. In this blogpost, we discuss how to truly get into the mindset of a long-term investor by projecting your net cash flows over the next five years and being sure NOT to invest them.
The Limited Significance of Your Money: Exploring its True Value
There are only four things you can do with your money: pay taxes, spend it, invest it, or give it away. That’s it. Not very exciting, is it. What is important, is how you use your money to get the life you want.
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.
Why SVB Is Important For Your Portfolio
On March 8th, SVB was trading at $267 per share. By March 10th, you couldn’t give your SVB stock away. Investors lost $16 billion in 2 days. It’s easy to say, in hindsight, that it couldn’t happen to you, but there are some 8500 employees who just lost tens of millions of dollars in their company stock.
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!
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.
Your Investments Should Be Experienced
When investing, it is easy to be attracted to the various vehicles, sectors, and strategies that surround us. Wall Street (and other financial agitators) knows this and they invent new angles every day with the primary goal of getting into your pocket.
Don’t Just Do Something! Stand There!
The annual update to DALBAR’s Quantitative Analysis of Investor Behavior (QAIB) study confirmed once again that when we make moves in our portfolio, we are much more likely to be losers rather than winners.
Guns vs. Butter
We have limited resources, be they friends, family, money, skills, experience, or whatever. There is nothing we have that is without limit. The key to finding your own financial happiness is allocating your resources appropriately.
Pay No Attention to the Financial Media
The old school big firms in the financial industry make their stock market money one way. By processing transactions. They don’t care if you are successful as long as you do something and pay them a fee or commission.
Be Patient
I’m so glad that today’s culture has finally given a name to something that has killed many investors in the past. FOMO. When you hear about the fear of missing out, doesn’t it make you realize that this is something you should not be concerned with?
Have an Investment Philosophy
Here’s how most people invest: Act on impulse, React to things they see in the news, Do what their friends are doing, Do their own research and convince themselves they can see what the future holds, Bet their life savings on tips and hunches. Don’t be like most investors!
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.