When you hand your retirement savings to an advisory firm, one of the first things you want to know is who is making the investment decisions. Not a software platform. A person, or in our case, a team.
You've contributed to the TSP for twenty years. Do you know whether that money went into Traditional or Roth, and whether it was the right call for your tax situation? If you're within a few years of retirement, the answer determines when you pay taxes on a balance that took a career to build. Here's how to decide which one fits where you are now.
Your military pension is a benefit for your lifetime, not your family's. It stops the day you die, and for a surviving spouse who was counting on that income, the drop can be sudden and steep.
By Madison Bennett, CFP®, CFT-I™ The Medicare mail starts arriving in September, and most of it looks just like last September's, which can make it tempting to skim and move on. However, integrating this review into your broader financial planning…
You spent 30 years living below your means. Your adult child needs help buying a home, and you have the money sitting right there in your retirement account. Many parents in that moment aren’t asking whether they can afford it… they’re asking whether saying no makes them a bad parent. Here’s how to think through that answer without putting your retirement at risk.
Chris O'Shea took a pay cut to become a financial advisor. Then he left the firm for nearly a decade to coach high school sports and work with students at his church. He came back with a completely different sense of what this work is really about. Read his story.
By Mike McCarthy, CPA/PFS, CFP® In this business, you sit across from clients in some of life’s most difficult moments: job losses, market crashes, divorces, and deaths. But if someone asks me to name the hardest conversation I’ve ever had,…
Worried you might be making mistakes that could derail your retirement? Discover the 5 retirement planning mistakes we often see and how to fix them early.
Most people with a concentrated stock position know they should diversify. What they do not know is how to do it without handing a large chunk to the IRS. In this article, Chuck Bender walks through how a net unrealized appreciation strategy (NUA) combined with a donor-advised fund helped one client retire comfortably without an unnecessary tax hit. If you are sitting on a large position in a single stock, this is worth a read.
By Graham Ewing, CFP®, MBA, Director of Financial Planning Standards A couple came to our office not long ago with a straightforward goal: make sure they were ready to retire. The husband was considering retiring soon, the wife planned to…