Happy 2018 and I hope your year is off to a great start! I wanted to provide you with our thoughts on the current investing environment, go over the impact of the tax cuts and how it may affect portfolios over time, and go over a few thoughts going into
Tax Planning for Year End 2017 Although nothing is certain, Congress appears to be getting closer to enacting significant federal tax law changes that would take effect for 2018. Based on what we know today, the standard deduction amounts will be doubled from current levels and personal exemptions will be
Two of the biggest future cost retirees will face is the rising cost of healthcare plus the cost associated with providing long term care which are not typically covered by Medicare. These two unknown cost must be addressed in a typical retirement plan. Today Americans spend approximately 3 trillion dollars
Section I: Portfolio Performance What a year! In addition to this newsletter please know that your quarterly portfolio reviews have been uploaded to your client portal as of 10-13-2017. To date almost every major asset class is positive and some asset types, like emerging markets, are up over 25% year
October 2017 Costs matter. Whether you’re buying a car or selecting an investment strategy, the costs you expect to pay are likely to be an important factor in making any major financial decision. People rely on a lot of different information about costs to help inform these decisions. When you
October 2017 It will soon be the 10-year anniversary of when, in early October 2007, the S&P 500 Index hit what was its highest point before losing more than half its value over the next year and a half during the global financial crisis. Over the coming weeks and months,
Should You Refinance Your House Now? Here is my financial tip of the month! Make sure you check mortgage rates to see if you should be REFINANCING now! Rates fell precipitously last year and then popped up. Now they are giving you another chance to lock in these
Following up on my earlier comments about blocking spam calls to mobile phones, one reader says: “I use Google Fi as my cellphone and they (having way too much info on everything) are able to change the color of spam calls to red. This is great since I don’t have
Last week, Equifax, 1 of the 3 largest credit card monitoring companies, announced that hackers stole half of the US population’s Social Security numbers in what will likely end up being one of the worst data breaches in history. Below we have listed simple steps we think our clients
The following video by one of our peers at IFA does an outstanding job of explaining how Dimensional Fund Advisors’ methodology captures more of the 3 factors that drive higher expected returns. (Click HERE to see what the 3 Factor Model is) When compared to Vanguard and other index fund