Beacon Wealthcare

06 May 2025 A Key Trait for Financial Success

Posted at 14:49h in The Friday Brief by Geoff Hall, CFP®, RICP®

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...

01 May 2025 Taxes are (maybe) done – now what?

Posted at 17:16h in The Friday Brief by Ellen Martin

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...

24 Apr 2025 Needs vs. Wants: The Tariff Tango

Posted at 14:00h in The Friday Brief by Daniel Logan, CFP®

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...

10 Apr 2025 Uncertainty, Optimism, and Pausing Tariffs

Posted at 13:30h in The Friday Brief by Ryan Smith, CFP®, RICP®, CTS™, MSFP

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),...

03 Apr 2025 Navigating College Funding Options

Posted at 19:31h in The Friday Brief by Ellen Martin

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...

27 Mar 2025 “It Doesn’t Go Away With Money”

Posted at 16:41h in The Friday Brief by Jared Korver, CPA, CFP®

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...

18 Mar 2025 Protecting Your Well-Being in Unsettling Times

Posted at 17:07h in The Friday Brief by Geoff Hall, CFP®, RICP®

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...

13 Mar 2025 The Next Best Decision

Posted at 15:27h in The Friday Brief by Daniel Logan, CFP®

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...

06 Mar 2025 What’s the ROI of Working With a Financial Advisor?

Posted at 07:05h in The Friday Brief by Ryan Smith, CFP®, RICP®, CTS™, MSFP

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...

27 Feb 2025 It’s Gotta Be The Shoes!

Posted at 19:47h in The Friday Brief by Jared Korver, CPA, CFP®

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...

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