It seems to me that the most devastating, most commonly sold lie in finance is that something can be got for nothing. That the hard work can be skipped, that the process can be short-circuited, that no-pain can in fact lead to solid gains. This is an...
The Beacon office is located within the heart of Five Points neighborhood in Raleigh, appropriately named after the five-pointed intersection of Glenwood Avenue and neighborhood roads. That intersection is known for having confusing traffic patterns, speeding cars, distracted pedestrians, and unfortunately, many accidents. You need...
2022 was a tough year to be an investor. Supply chain bottlenecks, the highest inflation we've seen in 40 years, the war in Ukraine and a very aggressive Federal Reserve all ran headlong into elevated stock and bond valuations creating an unpleasant scenario for most...
As 2022 came to a close, Congress passed a spending bill that included a retirement bill commonly referred to as "SECURE Act 2.0." Its predecessor, 1.0, passed at the tail-end of 2019 and lifted the starting age for Required Minimum Distributions (RMDs) from 70 to...
An over-simplified story about the Global Financial Crisis is that when the housing market blew up, causing subprime mortgages to start drowning, causing the collateralized debt obligations backed by securitized versions of those subprime mortgages to implode, causing mass panic and the threat of bank...
Wesley and I snuck away to London for the first part of December for our delayed pandemic travel and Christmas present to ourselves. We saw the historic sights, enjoyed the city’s plentiful holiday décor, ate delicious food, and generally found ourselves able to relax and...
When I was a kid, some of my favorite books were from the Frog and Toad series by Arnold Lobel. Each book contains five silly, yet profound, stories about a tall, green, easy-going frog and a short, more serious, and sometimes neurotic, toad. The stories...
In 1974, two psychologists, Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, published the paper, "Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases." In it, they discuss biases inherent in all of us that, consciously or not (usually not) impact our decision-making. All were groundbreaking at the time and remain...
I have spent a fair amount of time on this blog writing about giving, and I can guarantee more of the same for as long as I have log-in credentials to the website. But today I'm not going to do any lecturing or cajoling. I simply...
Last week Seth Godin wrote a blog that was short enough and good enough that I won't bother trying to paraphrase: Habits are not needs It’s easy to imagine that they are, as it lets us off the hook as habits become negative, or even addictions. If someone...
