06 Jan 2017

Posted at 14:05h in The Friday Brief by
When I was a little kid--probably 5 or 6--my dad started taking Hebrew lessons from a brilliant woman at Sandhills Community College named Vivian Jacobson. Originally from Chicago, Vivian and her husband Ralph had retired to Pinehurst, where they became--and remain--an integral part of the community, and more importantly, close friends of my family (as well as employers of yours truly--I spent many a Saturday doing yard and house work at the Jacobson house!).

23 Sep 2016

Posted at 11:33h in The Friday Brief by
[caption id="attachment_8098" align="alignleft" width="550"]earnings-life-cycle Source: “What Do Data on Millions of U.S. Workers Reveal about Life-Cycle Earnings Risk?” by Guvenen, Karahan, Ozkan & Song[/caption] If you've been reading our Brief for any length of time you may have seen the term "lifestyle creep" come up once or twice. It's a fascinating concept with an equally emotive name, and it has all sorts of implications in the practice of long-term financial planning. Lifestyle creep is, more or less, the natural but potentially dangerous rising standard of living that occurs over the course of a lifetime as salaries increase with age (to a point). It's potentially dangerous, because if it creeps too much, then retirement becomes prohibitively expensive to fund at the level of your creeped up lifestyle, since your rate of consuming dollars will by definition have outstripped your rate of saving dollars.

02 Sep 2016

Posted at 11:42h in The Friday Brief by
Did you know that you can buy a stroller (for a baby) made by Aston Martin? Did you know that it would cost you $4,000? I present this, for now, without comment. We'll come back to it momentarily.
Sometimes, when I tell people about the sort of work we do at Beacon, I get the sense that some view our primary mission and value as simply the building of wealth. And of course, that's part of what we do, and an important one at that. No one exactly hires us to make a nice La-Z-Boy shape out of their pile of money and just sit on it for 30 years. After all, the bank will pay them a couple pennies a year to do that. But the concept and reality of inflation would make that course of action pretty detrimental to most folks, so we build wealth for clients the best we know how, harnessing the power of the capital markets as efficiently as possible, and as effectively as human behavior allows.

26 Aug 2016

Posted at 10:30h in The Friday Brief by
The BrickMy wife is a genius, and I will tell you why. Whenever we go out to eat, no matter where we go, she is strictly "no phones." I don't care if we're having a conversation about movies and one of us might be tempted to IMDB an actress, or if out of habit I pull out my phone to tweet something dumb--doesn't matter. NO PHONES AT DINNER.