What a great way to end a quarter – a global economic crisis? Greece is once again the headline newsmaker. Greece with a Gross Domestic Product (GDP) equivalent to the city of Detroit and a land area comparable in size to Ohio. Last Friday, the Greek...
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Father Knows Best
I have three children ranging in ages from 16 to 24 years old. In other words, two of my kids are legal adults! Whoa! How does that impact our daily lives and our financial plan? The relationship between parent and child is of fundamental importance to U.S. society,...
Invest Like a Girl
While recently participating in a professional education conference, I attended a session on the subject of women and investing. Going into it, I expected a discussion around communication styles or financial planning needs that might be unique concerning female...
Socially Responsible Investing
Sustainable, responsible, and impact investing (SRI), which is a discipline that avoids or favors certain investments for moral or ethical reasons, has become big business, with an increasingly wide range of options for investors. SRI consists of three main parts:...
Treat ‘found money’ much like earned dollars
If someone gave me a $100, I would walk around as if I'm Donald Trump or Daddy Warbucks. It's a flush feeling. If we go to dinner, I'm buying. A few days later it would be back to normal with the typical $5 to $20 in my pocket. What is this behavioral phenomenon of...
Investing in Human Capital
It’s always a “smart” investment strategy... When trying to establish an individual’s net worth, most people think first and foremost about financial capital—how much someone’s house is worth or how much money he or she has in the bank. There is, however, a second...
Savings—It’s an Emergency!
How is your nest egg? If you do not have the savings that you want to have and/or do not have a plan to get there, perhaps a different approach is in order. It has occurred to me that whenever there is an emergency we drop everything else and focus on that event or...
Say What? What does all that economic jargon really mean?
With the debate over the U.S. government debt, the debt woes in the Eurozone, and talk of a double-dip recession--not to mention protestors camping out on Wall Street--suddenly fairly complex economic issues are showing up in the mainstream news. In our own...
A Letter to Yourself… How to really focus on making your future better
An interesting financial planning idea that is making the rounds these days is also one of the simplest: a letter to yourself. More specifically, a letter from your future self to you, today. Come again? Imagine yourself in five years, assuming everything has gone...
’Tis The Season… Protecting Your Identity
Whenever there's a lot of fear, there also seems to be a lot of misinformation, and sometimes good information mixed in with bad. This is certainly the case with identity theft, which now, according to a 2007 survey of the Federal Trade Commission, counts some 8...