With the economic concerns, people want to make sure they have money available to them, and yet they’re being penalized by doing it. Really, they are losing money safely. You may earn enough to buy a candy bar if that’s about it. And all of those accounts, CDs, savings, and money markets, you’re also being taxed on anything you do earn. That may seem irrelevant because you’re not making much,  but when you add in that and you add in the inflation woes, the truth is you’re really losing money safely. So if you have a CD or a money market or savings account, or a brokerage account that is trying to be very conservative and you are making less than 3%  then this is for you. Read the Full Article

Before I get into talking about the estate tax changes, I just want to take a minute and kind of define the term beneficiary. Often when we think about a beneficiary, we just think about who’s going to get the money when we’re gone. But if you really think about it, the meaning of beneficiary is who is benefiting from … Who’s the beneficiary of what you have worked hard for and saved for? Hopefully, the first beneficiary is you! You’ve spent the time, the energy, the money, working in your career, or building a business, or running the farm. The point is, you’ve spent that time to build up what you have, and so the beneficiary of everything, first and foremost, should be you. But if we continue that in that thought when we think about setting up beneficiaries. Who do you want to benefit from your hard work, your sweat, and tears, your diligence and saving? Personally, I want my kids to benefit from my work.  I also want the beneficiaries to also be my kids in Haiti. They’re benefiting from our hard work, not just mine, but other people that are donating to them. So when you think of a beneficiary, it’s who’s benefiting from it and you, of course, should be the first beneficiary. View the Full Blog Here

You've probably already heard lots of talk about the $3.5 trillion spending bill being talked about in Washington right now, and you might have wondered how it's going to impact you.

There's a lot of risk in retirement for sure, and sometimes you're tricked into thinking you are safe or that something you're invested in is safe or protected when it's not. You don't want to be tricked with your retirement. Make sure that you are protected and that your retirement accounts are protected from all the risks that are out there. Full Article

When we talk about risk to your retirement, oftentimes people just think in terms of market risk, and while that is actually a big risk, there are really four different big types of risks and each one of these types includes multiple risks. For instance, you have equity risk, which is the risk most of us think or you might say stock market risk. But in equity risk, you also have currency risk and business risk. View Article

There is an indexing strategy where no matter if the market is up or if the market is down, you win. So what is indexing? Does it work as an investment strategy? How does it work? Let’s first define two ways of indexing. View Article

In honor of National Life Insurance Awareness Month, I want to spend some time today talking about the different types of life insurance and a few of the different reasons why we might want to use each type View Article

Success is defined in many ways, but I would say for someone to be successful, one of the traits that they have to have is a good work ethic. If they’re not committed and don’t have a good work ethic, no matter which way you define success, you’re probably not going to be successful. So how do you know if you’re successful financially? If you’re if your money is successful? I would say it has to have a good work ethic, but what we’re seeing is too often people have lazy money. View Article

Is financial education important? How do you know your financial advisor is good? We all know people who are book smart and common-sense stupid. People that have all kinds of knowledge in general who you feel like they could tell you the dictionary word by word, but yet when it comes to the normal common-sense things, they can’t apply it. So having all of the knowledge and information in the world doesn’t do us any good unless we know how to apply it and how to make it make sense for us in our situations. Truthfully, I’d rather have somebody who is street-smart with me rather than someone who is just book-smart. The thing about being book-smart is that they can’t apply it. The same is true for every other area of our life, including our financial life. View Article

We’re continuing our series on common portfolio wisdom where we’re examining things that have often been said and looking at it to see if it’s really true or a half-truth. What we’re covering today is whether professional management always equals better returns. A professional singer is always going to be better than me. We think because we have professional management, we’re going to get better returns. But the fact of the matter is that that doesn’t always work. There are always different market strategies like modern portfolio theory or all these different tactical management strategies and they all do well in certain markets, but the truth is that it doesn’t really matter. It’s market trends that matter. View Article