Financial Architects
Financial Planning & Wealth Management
We are all prone to a variety of mental mistakes including (but not limited to) anchoring on irrelevant information, searching for confirming evidence rather than disconfirming data, extrapolating from small and recent data sets, etc. Some time ago I created a checklist of things to think about when making a decision – particularly an investment …
Many of our clients make regular charitable contributions. The tax laws can be fairly complicated in this area, but there are ways to give more efficiently that are worth knowing if you have charitable inclinations. While these strategies apply to most of our clients, please contact us or an appropriate tax professional before taking action as there …
While many of the financial planning issues that small business owners face are the same as everyone else’s, there are some differences – primarily in the area of risk management. Many small business owners have a large portion of their net worth tied up in their business and thus are not properly diversified. The owner …
The best known (and most parsimonious) rule of ethics is what is known as the “golden rule” which most of us learned as “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” This maxim is found throughout history and in almost all religions. For example, In ancient Greek philosophy: Do not to your …
I occasionally teach a 36-hour estate planning class to advisors seeking to become Certified Financial Planners, and we spend about 95% of the course on understanding and developing strategies for dealing with estate taxes. This applies only to a trivial percentage of the population since (under current law) estate taxes aren’t an issue until a …
Dollar Cost Averaging (hereafter DCA) is the technique of periodically investing a fixed dollar amount to reduce risk. Proponents claim this “drastically reduces market risk” by purchasing fewer shares when prices are high and more shares when prices are low. Financial research has shown, however, that DCA does not perform better than investing randomly. What …
While considering college funding, we tend to have clients fund their goals in this order: Tax-advantaged retirement plans in full. There are lots of ways to go to college but not that many ways to be retired. Many people shouldn’t even be doing any college planning – they can’t afford it. In addition, contributions to …
There are two main approaches to investment management: active management and passive management. The traditional (and by far the more popular) approach is active management. We employ the less popular passive management approach (sometimes referred to as indexing though they are slightly different). Below I will explain these two approaches, explore the pros and cons …
Many people have nagged encouraged me to convert my periodic emails to blog format and in this inaugural post I want to begin by thanking both Anitha Rao (my wonderful business partner), and Michael Kitces (the outstanding blogger of Nerd’s Eye View) in particular for their persistence. Michael & Anitha, it’s here! With this first …