Investment
September 1, 2021
It’s finally time to retire. Now what? Do you spend time on the golf course? Are you looking forward to spending your days with your grandchildren? Do you already have a month-long vacation booked to Europe? Retirement looks different for everyone. It largely depends on age, lifestyle preferences, and personality. It’s about freedom and carefree days, right? So why does it matter what you do during retirement? The truth is that the days during your retirement matter just as much as the days preceding it, especially when it comes to your finances. Here are some tips on what you could […]
September 1, 2021
As an advisor in the greatest country in the world, I’m blessed to work with fantastic clients. They have long aspired to a work optional lifestyle. Some chose to work part-time or volunteer for incredible causes. But most are fully retired, traveling the country, hiking, biking, enjoying family and grandkids, attending sporting events, pursuing hobbies, boating, skiing… the list goes on. Was it pure luck that landed these clients in such a great spot? I can tell you with 100% confidence that all of them are where they are because they envisioned it. They planned to become financially independent years […]
July 20, 2021
‘Rethinking Forward’ has been a life-long pursuit of study that began in college, continues fervently today, and will continue for the remaining time that I’m on this beautiful and amazing blue and green planet. ‘Rethinking Forward’ means going against the crowd, skating to where the puck is going to be, avoiding groupthink, and looking for the true meaning in the investment markets. In planning for being work-optional, it means not using the last 48-hour news cycle to plan for a 30-year retirement. Or to put it another way, it’s avoiding the recency bias of current information in making long-term decisions. […]
June 17, 2021
These days, planning to retire —or as we like to call it, making work optional— isn’t a luxury; it’s a necessity. Making work optional has become too complex to just pick a day and stop showing up to work. And it’s more than complex— it is also expensive. You have to factor in expenses, taxes, and other spending. There are many ways to pay for it, but which ways are the best ways? How much do you need to save? How should you invest? Many pre-retirees don’t know the answers to these questions. As a result, there are several common […]
September 28, 2020
The dominance of large growth companies these past 10 years is no secret. Every day we listen to reports about Facebook, Amazon, Apple, NVIDIA, Netflix, Google, and Microsoft. But to truly appreciate their dominance in the stock market, one needs only to look at the graph below that illustrates the outperformance of Growth vs Value. The higher up on the graph, the more the outperformance of large growth companies. Today’s outperformance dwarfs the early 2000s and the 2008/9 Great Financial Crisis. Since 1995, the outperformance of growth over value has never been higher. S&P 500 Growth Value < Source: Bloomberrg Now that […]
January 16, 2020
2010-11: Aftershocks of the Great Recession The best way to see how much can change in a decade is to remember how things were at the end of the last one. In 2010, we were coming off the worst decade for stocks since the 1930s. The Great Recession had devastated the retirement savings of millions of people. Many of the world’s most famous financial institutions had collapsed. And the national unemployment rate was near 10%.1 It was a scary and uncertain time. Many investors had fled the markets entirely by 2010, some for good. As a result, they missed a […]