We are pleased to introduce you to Langley Cumbie, our new Director of Client Relations at Beacon Wealthcare. She is busy invigorating our communications, event planning, marketing, and new client on-boarding processes.
Ever notice after a hurricane how some trees remain standing while others have fallen? More often than not it’s the rigid, unyielding trees that have fallen, while the more flexible survive. This fact of nature provides an important lesson for anyone who wants to plan for...
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.
My 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.