Blog

28 Aug 2025 “Don’t Be a Monkey”

Posted at 18:16h in The Friday Brief by Ellen Martin

Even if you didn’t attend an Ivy League school, you can still learn from their investment mistakes. Jason Zweig’s recent Intelligent Investor column highlights how several elite universities were caught with too many illiquid assets when they needed cash and relearned a lesson they should...

18 Aug 2025 The Power of Good Decisions

Posted at 18:50h in The Friday Brief by Geoff Hall, CFP®, RICP®

Lately, I’ve been thinking about how much good decisions matter—in every part of life, but especially when it comes to personal finance. Why does it matter so much? For one, good decisions compound. Each one creates a stronger foundation for the next, shaping the opportunities we encounter...

13 Aug 2025 What Will You Spend in Retirement?

Posted at 18:02h in The Friday Brief by Daniel Logan, CFP®

One of the most important pieces of a long-term financial plan, and often the hardest to predict, is what someone's spending will look like in retirement. It seems relatively simple - just take what you are spending now and inflate it over time. Collective experience...

07 Aug 2025 The Perfect Time to Invest

Posted at 14:22h in The Friday Brief by Ryan Smith, CFP®, RICP®, CTS™, MSFP

The S&P 500 has covered a lot of ground this year. After rising more than 4.5% through the first seven weeks, it stalled out as investors braced themselves for President Trump's early-April tariff announcement. As we all remember, the tariffs were significantly higher than expected,...

31 Jul 2025 More Bendy, Less Breaky

Posted at 13:52h in The Friday Brief by Jared Korver, CPA, CFP®

Just over ten years ago, Seth Godin wrote the following: It's tempting to invest time, money and emotion into gaining control over the future. Security guards, written policies, reinforced concrete—there are countless ways we can enforce our control over nature, random events and fellow humans. The problem is...

24 Jul 2025 2025 Ch-ch-changes

Posted at 18:55h in The Friday Brief by Ellen Martin

We recently had an internal team vote about whether Seinfeld or Schitt’s Creek did a better job humorously highlighting a common misunderstanding around how tax write-offs work (Seinfeld won). In both shows, characters very wrongly assume that a tax write off just means you spend...

17 Jul 2025 What If You Don’t Know When You Want to Retire?

Posted at 16:24h in The Friday Brief by Geoff Hall, CFP®, RICP®

One of the lessons I’ve learned—and keep learning—as a financial advisor is the importance of asking good questions. But in my early days, I asked a lot of mediocre ones. High on the list was this classic: “When do you want to retire?” I asked it...

10 Jul 2025 Tax Free Social Security? Not Exactly.

Posted at 17:33h in The Friday Brief by Daniel Logan, CFP®

As you have likely seen by now, the new tax bill (commonly called The One Big Beautiful Bill) has passed both chambers of Congress and been signed into law by the President. Ryan has previously touched on the draft bill here and here. A few items...

26 Jun 2025 How “Trump Accounts” Might Work, And Are They Any Good?

Posted at 13:01h in The Friday Brief by Ryan Smith, CFP®, RICP®, CTS™, MSFP

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the G.O.P. tax bill that had recently cleared the House. It contained a provision scheduled to go into effect in 2026 that would create what are called "Trump Accounts" (The House bill called them "MAGA Accounts," but the...

19 Jun 2025 Make Sports Betting Fringe Again

Posted at 12:48h in The Friday Brief by Jared Korver, CPA, CFP®

Last summer I sort of obliquely touched on my hatred of online sports betting, but as the problem has only gotten worse and I have only gotten more disturbed by it, here is a more direct attempt: The meteoric rise of FanDuel and DraftKings is...