When a prospective client over the age of 55 calls my office, more times than not, it is someone who is thinking about retirement. He or she has been working for many years, has accumulated some significant assets, may or may not be eligible for some type of pension and will have social security income. …
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A 401k plan can be a wonderful savings vehicle, but many employees don’t know how to navigate the plan to maximize the benefits it can offer in retirement. Contribution levels, matching opportunities, investment options and costs are all factors that need to be considered. Here are five steps to help you optimize the potential benefits…
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As a fiduciary advisor, you might already be able to guess what our take is on current market news: Unless your personal goals have changed, stay the course according to your personal plan.
Still, it never hurts to repeat this steadfast advice during periodic market downturns. After all, we understand that thinking about scary markets isn’t the same as experiencing them. So, what’s going on? Why did U.S. stock prices suddenly drop after such a long, lazy lull, with no obvious calamity to have set off the alarms?
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Here are the top 10 action items that will help energize your wealth management efforts and get you closer to reaching those goals of yours.
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As soon as the Thanksgiving dinner is cleared from the table (sometimes even before), conversations center around the holidays – the perfect gift for your spouse, tokens to remember colleagues and teachers, the hottest new games and gadgets for the children, ideas for those on your list who already have “everything.” It’s all about the…
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With Hurricane Irma now in the rearview mirror, I can gratefully say how lucky we were. My home sustained minimal damage and we thankfully never even lost power. However, we had no internet, we had no cable, our cell service was spotty at best and we had no landlines. As we were busy trying to regroup and clean up, we learned that our air conditioners had been leaking, our dryer was the victim of a power surge and our pool heater had sprung a leak virtually draining our pool!
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The way in which we respond and react to events that unfold in our daily lives are often the result of our past experiences. This is especially true when it comes to money. Whether you grew up in an affluent household, you grew up in a home where having food on the table was not a foregone conclusion or you grew up in a home somewhere in between, it is likely that the way you think about money today is influenced by some of these first experiences.
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The purpose of social security is to replace a portion of the income you earned over your life once you are retired. How exactly your social security benefit amount is calculated is dependent upon several factors.
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Whether it’s sudden and unexpected, the culmination of a lengthy illness or merely the result of old-age and the normal cycle of life, there’s nothing that can prepare you for losing your spouse.
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“When you know better, you do better.” These words, famously spoken by Maya Angelou, suggest that the more knowledge we have, the better we can do for ourselves. If we know something is bad for us, we will avoid it, if we know something can enrich our lives, we will seek it out and as we learn more about the world around us, boundaries will continue to be stretched and advancements will continue to characterize our society. But knowledge in and of itself is not enough. We must use this knowledge to change our behavior.
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