My family’s kitchen will not be profiled on HGTV as a model of organization. We face the practical limitations of 25-year old builder-grade cabinets and constrained space. We also face the reality confronted by many parents of young children. That is, the focus of children emptying a clean dishwasher is on getting it done quickly [...]
In a country founded on the idea of individual freedom, Americans value the idea of choice. We inherently believe that maximizing individual freedom increases our individual welfare or happiness and that the best way to maximize individual freedom is to maximize choice. A bar with 120 beers on tap is perceived better than a bar [...]
Related Posts: Part II: High Income Earners and the Math of 529 Contributions Is Overfunding 529s Really so Terrible? More than 50,000 visitors in 2021… click here to sign up for our newsletter and never miss a post! (Don’t worry, we will not take up too much space in your inbox. After four fun introductory [...]
Related Posts: When ROTH is Wrong: Follow-Up Q & A Opportunity for High Income Earners – the Backdoor Roth Conversion More than 50,000 visitors in 2021… click here to sign up for our newsletter and never miss a post! (Don’t worry, we will not take up too much space in your inbox. After four fun [...]
Following the When Roth is Wrong post, readers responded with various questions and, sometimes, with a different form of the same question. We address several of those questions below since they're good questions and may be helpful for other readers. Q: If we end up leaving the retirement accounts to our children, doesn’t that make [...]
Hats off if you’re maximizing your 401k deferrals and reaching the federal employee contribution limit each calendar year: $19,000 in 2019 if you’re age 49 or younger or $25,000 in 2019 if you’re age 50 or over. Note: these limits have increased to $19,500 and $26,000 respectively for the tax year 2021. Additional congratulations if you’re [...]
The financial services industry has invented and promoted many ways to rip off people. Fake bank accounts, excessive and unauthorized account churning, non-traded REITs, cross-selling high fee products, pump and dump stock schemes, egregious variable annuity sales, and probably another financial abuse strategy exposed in the business section of this morning’s newspaper. In fairness, there [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
