As we close out the third quarter of the year, it's a natural time to pause and take stock of your progress toward your financial goals. By this point in the year, nine months of progress, challenges, and decisions have shaped where you stand today. With three months ahead, there's time to fine-tune your approach, close gaps, and position yourself to finish the year strong.
As we approach the year's final quarter, it’s the perfect time for a retirement plan check-up. Even if you set your 401(k) contributions months ago, life has a way of shifting the numbers — salary increases, bonuses, or payroll changes can all affect how much you are actually putting away.
As we embark on a new year, there's no better time to take control of your financial future by thoroughly reviewing your cash flow. If having a vision and establishing goals is the touchstone for a financial plan, this essential financial practice sets the foundation for achieving your goals and ensuring long-term financial stability.
Anyone who has gone through a divorce knows how emotionally challenging and financially complex it can be. While attorneys handle the legal aspects, a Certified Divorce Financial Analyst® focuses specifically on the financial implications of divorce. This specialized designation equips professionals with the expertise to guide clients through the intricate financial aspects of divorce proceedings, ensuring better outcomes for their financial future.
Anna Marie Mock, a fee-only certified financial planner at Highland Financial Advisors, discusses the dynamic interplay between art and science in financial planning. Drawing inspiration from Leonardo da Vinci's philosophy that "everything connects to everything else," she emphasizes that financial planning is an art involving subjective goal-setting and a science-driven by objective analysis tools. In this video, Anna explains how the scientific method can be applied to financial planning, using equity compensation as a concrete example.
The changes made to the tax code by the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) of 2017 are now being felt full fledge, and despite early fears, some filers have been pleasantly surprised by their tax returns for 2018. Historically, one of the more loathsome tax rules over the years was the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT) which disproportionately impacted earners in the Northeast and West Coast where wages and cost of living are higher. In 2018, the rules around AMT have changed increasing the amount of income you must earn to be impacted by the tax.
Nobody likes paying taxes. Even though taxes are necessary to keep our schools open, communities safe, roads clean, and governments running, it’s not a fulfilling experience to see a percentage of your hard-earned income or investment gains vanish into thin air. With that being said, there’s no way of escaping taxes (without risking legal repercussions, of course), but that doesn’t mean there aren’t things we can do throughout the year to reduce the amount of taxes you ultimately end up paying.
Author Nancy Hatch Woodward once wrote, “Snow brings a special quality with it – the power to stop life as you know it dead in its tracks.” Anyone who lives in the Northeast knows this all too well.
On Thursday, November 15, 2018, the New Jersey/New York area was hit with one of the more notable November snowstorms in history. Parts of Northern New Jersey and New York City received upward of six inches of snow, with some areas getting hit with as much as ten inches.
The story of the millionaire next door has been told at nauseum. Since authors Thomas J. Stanley and William D. Danko first released their book “The Millionaire Next Door: The Surprising Secrets of America’s Wealthy” in 1996, the book’s themes have been used as an attempt to promote good savings habits.
A retirement calculator is a great tool for most investors. It lets you input a number of variables such as current age, planned retirement age, annual salary, annual savings, current retirement savings balance, and expected annual return and the calculator computes your estimated accumulated retirement account balance at retirement. Some calculators will even translate that lump-sum balance into an annual withdrawal amount. This is a straight-forward way to see if you are on track to meet your retirement goals and compare what you have with what you will need. If you don’t like your results, you can play with the inputs to determine what changes you should make.
Over the past few weeks most of our posts have focused on putting the recent stock market volatility in perspective and subduing concerns about the strength of the U.S. economy.
One of the important points we have stressed is the importance of remaining disciplined to your investment strategy because capital markets have rewarded long-term investors. One of the graphics we often show to illustrate this point is the chart included below. This chart shows the growth of $1 from January 1, 1926 through December 31, 2018 had you invested in US small cap stocks, US large cap stocks, long term corporate bonds, long term government bonds, and cash.
How often in the past month have you received a credit card offer with a large sign-up bonus and lofty on-going rewards? Sign-up bonuses can be a flat dollar amount, say $500, or a promise to match any cash back rewards you may earn within the first 3 months. On-going rewards can be cash, points, or travel perks. No matter your need there is sure to be a credit card issuer out there trying to entice you to sign up for their card. Some people accept the sign-up bonus and on-going rewards and don’t think twice about it. Others, though, see these offers and wonder, “What’s the catch?”
What a difference a year makes. This time last year we were highlighting a picture-perfect year for global stocks. In 2017, both the S&P 500 and the MSCI All Country World Index ex USA were positive for all twelve calendar months. This was the first time either index accomplished this feat and it happened with near-record low volatility while enduring geopolitical tensions, political dysfunction, massive natural disasters, and tighter monetary policy. 2017 was defined by synchronized global expansion whereby most global economies were getting stronger, with the United States leading the charge.
In the 1950s psychologist Solomon Asch conducted a series of experiments to investigate the extent to which social pressure from a majority group could affect a person to conform. Asch’s experiments were simple vision tests. A group of eight male college students were placed in a room, shown a card with a line segment on it, and then shown another card with three line segments labelled A, B, and C. One of the line segments on the second card was the same length as the line segment on the first card, while the other two line segments were clearly of a different length. Participants were asked to write down their answers and then give their answers aloud. Seems like a pretty straight forward experiment, but there was a twist.
Over the past 80 days, the US stock market has declined about 11%, and over the last 365 days, it is down about 1%. Foreign stock markets have declined about 9% over the last 80 days and are down about 10% for the last 365 days as well. The US bond market, typically a good hedge to the risk of stocks, hasn’t delivered much protection during the same time periods, being up about 1% in the last 80 days and down about 1% for the last 365 days.
Prior to the passing of the Tax Cut and Jobs Act (TCJA) in December of 2017 you likely enjoyed the tax deduction that came with your charitable contributions – no matter the size of the donation. If you lived in a state where you paid state income taxes and had high property taxes you were probably itemizing your deductions (See NJ, NY, CT, and MA – just to name a few).
Earlier this month I had the opportunity to attend the 29th annual SRI Conference in Colorado Springs, Colorado. The SRI Conference is the premier annual gathering of sustainable, responsible, and impact investment professionals working to direct the flow of investment capital toward a truly sustainable future.
Over the past few weeks the focus of our weekly posts has been on the volatility in the global equity market. We have sought to provide some insight into what’s driving global stocks lower and provide perspective on how frequently drawdowns like the one we are currently mired in occur. We hope these insights and perspectives have been valuable for you and helped to give you peace of mind.
It goes without saying, this has been a challenging year for investors. Every asset class has experienced significant loss at one point or another – International Equities, US Bonds, and recently, US Equities. As much as we say uncertainty and risk of loss is the cost of realizing long-term capital returns, times like this can make even the most rational long-term investor fear the future.
Over the recent past, more individuals have been taking advantage of Health Savings Accounts (HSAs) offered in tandem with high deductible health plans (HDHPs). It is estimated that deposits into HSAs will increase by 22% to $53.2 billion from 2017 to 2018 with direct employer relationships being the leading driver of new account growth.
Exchange-traded products (ETPs) have been lauded by investors and investment professionals for helping to democratize investing. The most popular type of ETP is the exchange-traded fund, better known by its acronym ETF. Exchange-traded notes (ETNs) are a lesser known type of ETP. ETNs differ from ETFs in that ETNs don’t hold underlying securities, like stocks or bonds. Rather, they are unsecured debt instruments issued by a bank that promises to pay the performance of an underlying investment, typically an index or basket of securities.
