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 [...]
The House of Representatives passed a bill on May 23rd known as the SECURE Act (Setting Every Community Up for Retirement Enhancement Act of 2019) which would initiate the biggest changes to retirement accounts in over a decade. The bill had bipartisan support, passing with a vote of 417-3. It now heads to the Senate [...]
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 [...]
The following paraphrases a conversation that I have had many times before with friends and clients. It is obviously never the same dialogue but the underlying advice is the same - that you should generally not own your favorite investment or can't-miss stock idea in a traditional IRA. Me: Did you buy this stock because [...]
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 [...]
What do Arnold Schwarzenegger, Steven Tyler, Stevie Nicks, Billy Crystal, and my father all have in common? At least two things. They will, God willing, all celebrate their 70 1/2 birthdays in 2018 and join the ranks of approximately 25 million others in the United States over this age (assuming, of course, that they all [...]
Like it or not, the Affordable Care Act will again rule the health insurance marketplace in 2018 regardless of what happens in Congress with tax legislation or whether the individual mandate holds up over the coming weeks. Also like it or not, there has been a dramatic increase in insurance premiums from the onset of [...]
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 [...]
