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 […]
Category: Spending Plan
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. A particular setting that I find […]
How to Avoid Financial Hits by Understanding Your Exposure
Many of my clients originally reach 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. Meanwhile, the stock keeps going […]
What is Financial Planning?
Financial Planner. Financial Advisor. Investment Advisor. Or even Investment Adviser. Do these terms create vibrations of stress in your life? Yeah, me too. You see, I don’t really know what they mean! Every one of these people who calls themselves by one of these titles seems to do something a little bit, if not completely, […]
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 a faith in the […]
Why Volatility is Good
My wife makes fun of my driver. Every time we play golf, she has not one, but several “witty” comments during the round. Every time. But, you see, I like my driver. Yes, it’s 25 years old. Yes, it’s very small (or, I like to think of it as normal-sized as all the drivers these […]
Net Worth
When it comes to our finances, one significant part of the early stages of planning is understanding your resources and determining your net worth. This is one of the most overlooked steps. People don’t want to see where their trouble spots are in their financial landscape. While it may only be a small piece of […]
No Budgets for Old Dogs
A spending plan is a guesstimate of what you will spend over a period of time. It is not a hope, a dream, or any sort of limit that you place on what you spend. It is merely a personal projection of where the money you spend will go and how much. Before you can […]