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.

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.

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…

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…

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.