All three of time, interest or passion, and knowledge are required to be successful at anything. I might have the knowledge of how to mow my grass properly and I might enjoy mowing my grass but if I don’t have the time to mow my grass, then my lawn eventually becomes a mess. Alternatively, I [...]
1) Turn off the financial noise machine. Information overload is the norm in today’s world. We demand it. We expect it. Your mind, my mind, and all of our minds are wired to digest information, emotionally respond to the information, and then to do something as a result. This is why and how advertising works. [...]
"Describe your perfect day." Such a simple interview directive rarely fails to provide the most telling of replies. Responses are almost never scripted in advance and usually provide productive insight into what motivates the interviewee, what passions she has, her creativity, or how she organizes her day. Responses from previous experience posing this question (even [...]
If you have ever run a businesses or worked in corporate finance, you are likely familiar with the concept of zero-based budgeting (ZBB) as an alternative to traditional budgeting. The traditional form of budgeting - and the one most commonly used in corporate America - uses the amount spent last year in each category (or [...]
I'm learning to fly, but I ain't got wings I recently spoke with a pilot about how he obtains and handles the forecasts for in-flight turbulence in advance of a flight. Before each flight, he gets a fairly precise report of weather along the route and something called a turbulence plot, which is based on [...]
An important consideration in divorce and estate planning that often gets ignored, underappreciated, or just poorly evaluated is the relative comparison of different account types: tax free accounts, tax deferred accounts, and taxable accounts. While many people tend to think of $100,000 as $100,000, the account type in which the money resides can make a [...]
Earlier this month, we published an article explaining why investors would be well served to organize their portfolios like their kitchens. This process, one that the finance industry calls ‘asset location’, is simply intended to make the most of the existing tax code. The IRS sets the rules with different tax treatment for different account types [...]
Oxyphenbutazone is a non-steroidal, anti-inflammatory drug used mostly in eye-drops that was pulled from markets worldwide in the mid-1980’s for its link to bone marrow depression. More interestingly, but perhaps just as trivial, Oxyphenbutazone represents the highest possible scoring play in Scrabble. Play it across three triple word score squares and eight already-played, perfectly positioned [...]
Few things in our profession are more frustrating than when financial advisors deliver bad financial advice. It doesn’t have to be that bad financial advice is dishonest or delivered for the wrong reasons (like it is so often, for the benefit of the advice-provider). It is just that misguided or blatantly wrong financial advice hurts consumers and [...]
Let’s start with a debatable, but widely held fundamental concept of investing: the best predictor of future returns for stocks is the current valuation. This is generally true of a single stock, a sector, or an entire country’s stock market. Academics and practitioners debate whether important factors like gross profitability, price momentum, earnings momentum, yield, [...]
