The G.O.P. has put forth the framework of a tax bill designed to extend the tax cuts President Trump enacted during his first term. The Tax Cut and Jobs Act (TCJA), passed in November of 2017, was a significant restructuring of the tax code: standard...
If you are in the market for some excitement and exoticism in your boring old 401(k), then boy was this a good week of headlines for you. First there was Basic Capital building a product that allows leverage within 401(k)s, and then there was Empower beginning to...
Last week, I was listening to a podcast featuring one of my favorite financial writers, Morgan Housel, when he shared a moment that stuck with me. He recalled asking Daniel Kahneman—the renowned psychologist and co-recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economics—what trait matters most for...
For those of us with 2024 taxes in the rearview mirror, now is a great time to think about your tax outcome and consider a few questions to set yourself up well for 2025. Perhaps you owed more than you planned, and had to dip...
We recently had a conversation in the Beacon office that I imagine many people around the country are having: are there any purchases that you may speed up to avoid higher prices from tariffs? The general consensus was that no one was rushing to make...
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...
