The biggest success determinant has nothing to do with cleverness or timing. Instead, it has everything to do with having a plan and sticking to it.
Amid all the noise in today’s world, it’s easy to get distracted from the foundation of your financial plan. By returning to those core principles, you can recalibrate to your highest priorities, both for now and the future.
If your income doesn’t rise to match inflation, your lifestyle must fall to compensate. That’s not pessimism but basic math.
Among the greatest long-term threats to retirees and investors is inflation. The world was reminded in recent years — and almost overnight — just how quickly inflation can roar back to life.
I want to start with a story that’s uncomfortable and all too common.
A man dies at 73 with $2.4 million. He lived in the same modest house for forty years, drove an aging car and clipped coupons until the end. He never took the big trip or upgraded anything to make daily his life easier. Instead, he just kept stacking dollars in the bank.
Shortly after his funeral, his children split the money. Flush with cash, they purchase new homes, cars and consumer goods to upgrade their lifestyle — until the money runs out.
When I entered this business in the late 1970s, I quickly realized that markets weren’t the real challenge — people were. Not because they lacked intelligence or information, but because the human mind is wired for survival, not investing.
I meet monthly with thoughtful, experienced investors who genuinely seek the best decisions. Despite any savviness, however, they often fall prey to a similar mental trap: anchoring. It’s not one of ignorance but of human nature. Anchoring is the tendency to grab onto a familiar price, memory or belief and let it shape decisions long […]
The one force in finance that remains stubbornly misunderstood is compounding. Human brains have evolved to understand straight lines, not curves. We grasp addition and subtraction, but our intuition breaks down around exponential growth. We expect the world to follow a ruler, but compounding moves like a spiral. And given enough time, that spiral becomes […]
As we settle into another Colorado winter, my mind shifts toward the seasons — their predictability, their necessity, and how much they reveal about what truly lasts. Even as the final bits of a colorful autumn fade, the gardener knows that winter isn’t something to fear but to anticipate. Their landscape hasn’t died. Under the […]
Target-date funds have quietly become the default investment choice for millions of Americans. In workplace retirement plans, they’re the path of least resistance — simple, convenient and automatic. Select the year you plan to retire, direct your contributions to the corresponding fund, and you’re done. This feels responsible and prudent, and for many savers, it’s […]
Every investor I’ve met has, at some point, asked a version of this question: “Given what’s going on right now, what should I do?” As a financial advisor, I always consider this a reasonable thought. The world is unpredictable: Wars flare up, elections divide, inflation gets sticky, interest rates go up and down, markets swing, […]
When a top American business leader starts rattling off reasons to fear today’s market, investors get uneasy. But in the echo chamber of media-made doubt, Jamie Dimon’s recent message got lost. To prepare for the worst, he recommended beefing up reserves, fortifying capital, and stress-testing for varied shocks. He didn’t advise hiding under the nearest desk but rather putting in the work, preparing and carrying on.
Toward the end of the Cold War, a new kind of landscape emerged — defined by turbulence, ambiguity and interconnection. In that moment, folks at the U.S. Army War College coined the term VUCA, an acronym for Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity.
If we believe the headlines, an artificial intelligence revolution is upon us. For investors who experienced the dot-com boom, the vibe sure feels similar. But remember what human nature loves most: the chase. As history shows, it rarely ends well.
Remember that as investors, we are constantly on the precipice of uncertainty. We can never confidently know how anything will play out. No one can. So what should we do? With everything changing, we think we should be adapting. New circumstances require portfolio changes, right?
As a student of markets, I believe history is a roadmap for the future. The past may not repeat, but it certainly tends to rhyme. So when I came across “A History of the United States in Five Crashes” by Scott Nation, I was hooked.
Most people think of financial planning as being solely tied to numbers. But a quiet assumption is built into nearly every person’s plan, whether they recognize it or not: They assume the future will cooperate. But life never has been, nor will it ever be, linear.
