Beacon Wealthcare

26 Jan 2023 The Intersection of Market Narratives and Personal Responses

Posted at 19:20h in The Friday Brief by Ellen Martin

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...

19 Jan 2023 One For The Books

Posted at 15:05h in The Friday Brief by Geoff Hall, CFP®

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...

12 Jan 2023 How SECURE Act 2.0 Impacts IRAs, 401(k)s, 529s, and RMDs

Posted at 06:00h in The Friday Brief by Ryan Smith, CFP®, RICP®, CTS™, MSFP

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...

05 Jan 2023 You Aren’t Too Big To Fail (And That’s Okay)

Posted at 17:06h in The Friday Brief by Jared Korver, CPA, CFP®

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...

15 Dec 2022 The Whirlwind of December

Posted at 19:42h in The Friday Brief by Ellen Martin

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...

08 Dec 2022 A Garden is Hard Work

Posted at 11:42h in The Friday Brief by Geoff Hall, CFP®

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...

01 Dec 2022 Anchoring

Posted at 15:58h in The Friday Brief by Ryan Smith, CFP®, RICP®, CTS™, MSFP

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...

17 Nov 2022 An Invitation to Give: Raleigh Rescue Mission

Posted at 19:38h in The Friday Brief by Jared Korver, CPA, CFP®

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...

10 Nov 2022 Desires pretending to be needs

Posted at 14:28h in The Friday Brief by Jared Korver, CPA, CFP®

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...

03 Nov 2022 When There’s a Will, There’s Your Way

Posted at 17:22h in The Friday Brief by Ellen Martin

As I write, my college friends are scheming about how, when, and where to go see Taylor Swift in concert on her newly announced tour. We have some strong wills, pent up desire from a concert-less past few years, and I have no doubts that...

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