14 Oct 2016

Posted at 15:03h in The Friday Brief by

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...

30 Sep 2016

Posted at 09:09h in The Friday Brief by
Among my fondest memories are those late Sunday night drives back to Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia, listening to Casey Kasem’s Top 40 Countdown. The music was great, but it was Casey’s back stories of the songs and singers that made the experiences so much richer. It felt like Casey, with his melodic baritone voice, was riding beside me in the car as he told his colorful stories of those early 70's artists and their music. He had a way of penetrating the mystique of those mighty rock stars of the day, making them seem real and approachable. The music took on new meanings when Casey described how it was inspired, how it fit into the history of the genre, and how it impacted millions of fans as he shared their letters.

23 Sep 2016

Posted at 11:33h in The Friday Brief by
[caption id="attachment_8098" align="alignleft" width="550"]earnings-life-cycle 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.

16 Sep 2016

Posted at 11:43h in The Friday Brief by
It’s a straightforward question that usually evokes an immediate, reflexive, and emphatic YES! And when pressed to define what rich means, we likely respond in monetary terms. After all, money is how we describe and measure many of the things we value in our daily lives. But, unless we are careful, the logical progression is to be driven to become richer, or borrow, in order to buy more of the things we value and enjoy.