On December 31st, 2024, Karen Langley wrote a piece in the Wall Street Journal titled, "Stocks Cap Best Two Years in a Quarter Century," which feels like it could have been written a quarter century ago. As I start to write this (it's Wednesday morning),...
Somehow, it’s already April. Hopefully those of us in North Carolina are almost through The Pollening and into Actual Spring. April is also the month when high school seniors compare financial aid offers and make final school decisions. The recent changes in the Department of Education...
As far as I can tell, wealth, by itself, is a bit of a nothingburger. But it isn't by itself, because nothing ever is. If anything, in a culture like ours that celebrates money and excess to an alarming extent, there appears to be a...
Six years ago, in a Friday Brief, I asked you to rate your financial well-being. I also shared my own definition of what that meant, which at the time looked something like this: Freedom from worry. The ability to spend as much time as I’d like with...
I was recently reviewing some old financial information at Vanguard (financial planners have fun hobbies) and came across the following transaction from almost a decade ago that I had forgotten about: I had sold 12.166 shares of Apple (this was pre-split, so this would be 48.664...
Over the years, there have been a few attempts to quantify the value of working with a financial advisor. Clearly, not an easy task. Clients are different, financial advisors are different. That variability makes measurement difficult. In 2001, Vanguard published a paper titled Vanguard's Advisor...
In her phenomenal book In This Economy?: How Money & Markets Really Work, Kyla Scanlon writes about what she calls the "vibes economy." So much of what happens at the macroeconomic level seems to be based on sentiment—or, vibes—and it's crazy how much power those vibes...
I suspect most of our readers know of the FIRE acronym - Financial Independence, Retire Early. I came across a recent Pew Research report that discussed how the age of young adults reaching financial independence from their parents is shifting later, so thought this week's...
Managing money often means juggling competing priorities—giving generously, saving for retirement, helping our kids with college, paying down the mortgage—all while trying to create meaningful experiences along the way. My wife, Crystal, and I strive to be intentional about where our money goes, but it’s...
It's no secret that Social Security is in trouble. For years, the annual report prepared by the Board of Trustees for the Federal OASDI (Old-Age, Survivors and Disability Insurance) program has warned us that the trust fund that bridges the gap between benefits paid...
