It’s October! The last three months of the year are always busy for my family – both my girls have birthdays in addition to Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s. I’m sure your families have similar experiences, which is why I like to get a head start on any year-end planning items. I’ll keep this short and sweet though, so we can get back to carving pumpkins and making Halloween costumes. One of my favorite planning tools for retirees with IRAs is the Qualified

If I had to pick only one investment idea, to explain in two words, which stands the test of time the very best, it would be to “bank yourself.” We have three charts to illustrate this powerfully simple math, overlooked by most investors, that we work on every day to engineer Freedom Days for our partners. The average bank account savings rate (red line at bottom) is now 0.37% annually. Notice during this latest surge in interest rates and inflation, how well those savers hav

We learn from making charts every day in our offices. Rather than listening to complicated opinions on what should be happening, simple data clearly reveals what is happening. What you see here is a valuable lesson, not a recommendation. We were lucky that our homework led us to begin purchasing this company’s shares in our partners’ Compounders accounts in the summer of 2009. It’s what has been happening recently that is catching our eyes again and might surprise many invest

“I want to leave this place better than I found it.” Those words came from a branch manager at Smith Barney named Mike Catalano, who I met when I was a rookie portfolio manager in the office he was assigned. I became fast friends with this New Yorker who told me, “I got outta there as fast as I could!” I showed him around Houston, and we ended up living a few streets apart. We realized we were the brothers that neither of us ever had. Always the last in the office of about 10

It’s back to school! In between buying school supplies for my girls and helping them plan their first-day-of-school outfits, I am thinking about investing and their future education goals. We often hear about 529 plans being useful savings tools for college, and they can be, but how do they affect a student’s ability to get financial aid? A quick refresher – 529 accounts are an education savings tool. Investments in the accounts are able to grow tax-free. In addition, withdra

Legal documents you need when your kid turns 18 Launching kiddos can get pretty emotional for all of us, including this Dad. It’s also busy. While we are having so much fun with a graduating senior heading off to college, like Casey “Special K” Krueger here, this Season of Life post is about an often-overlooked topic that is not fun to talk about. I asked Shelley to share her experience and wisdom around this season and write a post with a simple checklist. Before we can have

There are lots of “How to invest...” questions for any good plan to answer. On the other side of those tables, we have enjoyed learning that there are two answers that last longer and make a spectacular plan. WHO you are with matters the most, of anything. Find a bigger purpose than working and saving. I’d like to honor a guy named Al, in case he can inspire you like he did all of us at Freedom Day Solutions. He changed my mind as much as anybody ever has. I met him two d

Lessons We’ve Learned on Valuation & Supply vs. Demand I have been asked a lot about SpaceX. Here are a couple of thoughts from living and working through a few moonshots and crashes in the Stock Market during my career. And there will be a few more monster-sized IPOs soon that crowds of investors will flock to, generating even more excitement and speculation. To be very clear, I am not a rocket scientist. I have no idea what will ultimately happen to SpaceX (neither do the s

The word “enough” is a funny one. It has negative uses (like me saying “Enough!” to my girls when they are arguing) and neutral uses (“No more coffee, I have enough”), but I’m more interested in its positive uses. The feeling we get when we look around contentedly and say “I have enough.” I think a lot about what it means to have enough and even reworking our definition of enough. We live in a world driven by consumption. Our lives are filled with ads and product placement

Most of the investment crowds’ research and forecasts measure the supply and demand for a company’s products or services. But never forget the most important factor in what moves a stock price next – the supply versus demand for its shares. This chart shows that almost half of all Apple shares (44%) have disappeared from the open market, no longer available for a new buyer to bid on. We wanted to share the fingerprints from one of the largest buyers of stocks in the world,

My first job in financial services was filing papers and answering the phone for my dad, Doyle. I was 15. He started a financial planning and wealth management firm in Fargo, ND, when I was 3. Even though I grew up hearing about his work and meeting his clients, I never planned on being a financial planner. I was the college kid who made it my mission to take classes in every building of my small liberal arts college and changed my major multiple times. After graduation, I sp

On road trips as a kid, my favorite snack at a gas station was a Snickers bar. If I were really lucky, and it was a fancy one with a freezer, I’d cross my fingers that they had a bombstick. Each one of those seemed fresher than anything cooked behind the glass. Gas station grub has gotten a lot better at a few stops. On a recent road trip visiting colleges with my daughter Casey, we stopped at my favorite gas station. She thought I was just being goofy, wanting a photo, becau

There should be no tax season, it’s a year-round priority for investors. The reason many put it off, and don’t like to think about it, is that too often it’s a painfully large number owed and it keeps getting more complicated – both the tax rules and investment products. Here is my nomination f or the most powerful way to slay both of those dragons for an investor. I would love to show you how we pay only a 10% effective tax rate on all the income from our largest account

This is one of our favorite memory bank deposits we’ve ever made with a partner, to celebrate our favorite season of giving.

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