Is Dividend Stock Investing a Good Strategy?
tl;dr version: dividend stock investing isn’t inherently good or bad, but it faces an uphill battle in our current growth-stock dominated environment. I have experimented with dividend-focused investing at times through my 20-year investing career. Who doesn’t love the idea of a juicy cash yield hitting your investment account every quarter? Dividends were even etched in […]
Making Money ≠ Having Money
Oftentimes, I hear people talk about how so-and-so has a lot of money. What they really mean is that so-and-so spends a lot of money. Or, perhaps a better phrasing would be that so-and-so wants to look like they have a lot of money. However, research consistently shows that one of the strongest ongoing traits in America’s millionaires is simple frugality: […]
What are Stocks Going to do After the Election?
Ah, market timing. The holy grail of investing, right? If I can see the next big crash coming, I can avoid steep losses and thereby grow even wealthier. It sounds great, but it really is a fool’s errand. A handful of clients have recently asked for our prediction of what stocks will do following this election. […]
Beating the College Debt Trap
Our daughter Evelyn was born in June 2015, and we just had our second child, Ford, a couple of weeks ago. What better time to start planning for kids’ college than when you have two children under the age of 2? Naturally, as a financial planner, I have already been contributing to accounts for the […]
Habits of the Affluent
Growing up, I thought there was some magic formula to building wealth. There had to be a secret sauce. I wondered if I had the “It Factor” necessary to become affluent. Today, I know there really is no secret sauce. It’s about hard work and consistent behaviors. As you have probably heard us say in our […]
Drawdowns Happen
By: Mike Earl The S&P 500 bottomed in the Global Financial Crisis on March 9, 2009. Since that date, there have been 16 separate declines of greater than 5% during this Bull Market. There have been four corrections of greater than 10%. Put differently, we have seen a 5% stock market decline about twice per […]
Education Season/Thought Leadership
By: Austin B. Colby, CFP®, MBA The team and I began our yearly conference, seminar, and education travel schedule in April and have been full-tilt into the summer. All of us believe in the importance of ongoing education and improvement in our profession. Being independently owned and operated allows us the opportunity to take advantage […]
Things You Should Focus On
By: Mike Earl, CFP®, CPWA® Our emotions are mostly unhelpful in guiding our saving and investing decisions. The human brain is not naturally wired to excel at saving and investing money. It is easier for us to pontificate about the direction of the US economy than it is to review our annual savings rate over […]
The Wonderful (Much-Improved) World of Board Games
When I was growing up, the number of board games in common circulation in the US was rather limited. The perennial favorites were Chutes and Ladders, Candy Land, Sorry!, Connect 4, Uno, Jenga, Clue, The Game of Life, Monopoly, and Risk.
While each of those games is respectable in its own right, I’ve got news for you: the world of board games has gotten a lot more interesting in the past couple of decades. The challenge today is discovering the best games. On the website www.boardgamegeek.com, there are now more than 84,500 different board games ranked by gamers around the globe.
Remember Brexit?
It is hard to remember the event as vividly now, but when the United Kingdom voted to leave the EU on June 23rd, the nonstop news cycle said Brexit was a really big deal. In the course of just two days, pundits cried out that trillions of dollars were “lost” in global stock markets. The S&P 500 Index tumbled more than 5% in those two days.
