Why I Don’t Budget And What To Do Instead

It might be odd to hear that a Financial Advisor doesn’t budget.  Kind of like hearing that the butcher doesn’t eat meat. It makes you pause for a second.  Do they really believe what they say? Do they eat their own cooking? And it’s true, I don’t budget.  At least not in the traditional sense of the term.   I used to have complex spreadsheets in Excel that tracked everything that I spent.  And I looked at it every month to…

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Planning For Your Passing

Now we all know the reality, none of us are getting out of this alive. But despite people knowing that intuitively, there’s still a lot of procrastination around this type of planning. Depending on where you look, only 30 to 40% of people don’t have an estate plan in place. And while there are no statistics on this because it’d be impossible to determine, I can tell you from first hand experience as a financial advisor who talks to other…

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Beware of the Financial “Expert”

We all search for people to learn from that we hope to eventually know, like, and trust. Especially when it comes to the complex financial world we live in. Instead of trying to figure it all out ourselves, it makes all the sense in the world to seek out experts who can help us understand the financial world around us. As a result, many of us develop an affinity to these so called financial experts. They are people we’ll never…

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What Happens When You Mix Politics And Investing

Hello everybody welcome back to the blog. I am excited to be back and owe you all a big apology for going dark for 8 whole months! It was a nice break and I’m hoping that going forward I will do at least 2 blogs a month.  Now let’s just into today’s blog, about what happens when you mix politics and investing. For some background, I have been a financial advisor since 2015, right before Donald Trump announced his run…

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What’s Going On With Inflation, The Federal Reserve, and The Stock Market? And What Should I Do Next?

So far in 2022, we have experienced a wild ride in the stock market.  We started the year by going down 20% or so over 6 months, then we recovered half of those gains in the next 6 weeks or so, only for the market to fall back down below it’s previous lows.  As of this post being published, the S&P 500 is down around 21%. So what in the world is going on?  In today’s post, I am going…

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Should You Put 1% Of Your Money Into Crypto? Ric Edelman Says Yes. I’m Not So Sure.

Unless you have been living under a rock for the last few years, you have heard about the most recent craze to make money, cryptocurrency.  Now there are tons of people talking about cryptocurrency, and like everything in life, be careful on whose advice you take.  There are just starting to be a number of prosecutions of insider trading in the crypto space, and my guess is we’re going to see a lot more in the months ahead.  With something…

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3 Reasons Why I Disagree With Warren Buffett’s Investment Advice

One of my favorite people to learn, inside the financial world and even outside of it,  is Warren Buffett.  I have been a big fan of his for a long time, and even went to his annual conference with my Dad in 2017.  And I tend to agree with him most of the time.  But he offers some investment advice on a regular basis that I can’t quite get behind. Now if you don’t know, Warren has a company called…

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The Most Important Thing To Determine Before You Retire

If you’ve been planning to retire in the next few years, odds are that you’ve spent a lot of time reviewing your investments, including the account balance, the specific investments you own, the asset allocation you have, and even reading about proper distribution strategies.   While all of that is important, you’re actually missing the most important thing to know before you retire:  Your Retirement Expenses! Simply put, nothing else matters until you figure out how much you want to…

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15 Things I Wish Every Retiree Knew

As we all know, there is a lot of noise out there coming from TV, newspapers, friends and family members as to what we should do with our finances, and how we should plan for our retirement. A lot of it, frankly, isn’t such great advice. So I’ve been thinking: If I had the ability to speak to everyone close to or in retirement, what would I tell them? Well, this is what I would say. 15 Things I Wish…

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4 Reasons Women Are Better Investors Than Men

Do you want to become a better investor?  If so, I’d encourage you to look at the lessons that female investors can teach us. During the last decade, there has been a plethora of research on the investing differences between men and women.  At the outset, it wasn’t exactly clear what the research would show. But by now, the evidence is clear: women have qualities that make them far better investors than men. A study by the University of California…

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