The Insurance Lobby Strikes Again

Daniel YergerFinancial Planning 1 Comment

The LIFE Act has nothing to do with life. In fact, the acronym for the act is supposed to stand for “Lifetime Income for Employees Act.” H.R. 8990 was introduced by Congressmen Norcross (D) and Walberg (R). The bill is simple, less than five double-spaced, 2-inch margined pages that propose to amend the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 …

Living Your Money Values

Daniel YergerFinancial Planning 4 Comments

I’ve flirted with fitness trackers for the better part of a decade. I originally picked up a Jawbone UP in 2013, even spending the money to upgrade my brick cellphone to my first smartphone so I could use the thing. There was something appealing or futuristic about knowing your heart rate and how many steps you’d taken; now step tracking …

Highest and Best Use

Daniel YergerFinancial Planning 2 Comments

There’s an odd term that often comes up in business school: “Highest and best use.” The fundamental point of the term is the argument that only certain professionals are enabled to perform certain tasks either by skill, experience, or licensure. Consequently, the business phrase “highest and best use” refers to ensuring that those professionals spend as much time as possible …

An Obsession with Saving

Daniel YergerFinancial Planning 3 Comments

Like most obsessions, my obsession with saving didn’t start with saving or as an obsession. In fact, to go back in time a few years, you’d think I had an issue with money avoidance. Today I wanted to take some time to trot down the personal path and share how it came to be that I effectively deploy over 40% …

Thriving During a Market Correction

Daniel YergerFinancial Planning 2 Comments

At the battle of the Chosin Reservoir in the Korean War, the Chinese and North Korean armies surrounded the United States Army X Corps and First Marine Division with over 120,000 troops. The winter conditions and a cold front out of Siberia sent temperature plunging as low as -36F, causing blood and plasma supplies to freeze, and injuring thousands of …

Compromising Active vs. Passive

Daniel YergerFinancial Planning Leave a Comment

Our firm is a passive investment management firm. Literally, every investment we select for clients is an index-based exchange traded fund that tracks a benchmark such as the S&P 500 or a bond index. We do this for a number of reasons: first, the research shows that the majority of actively managed investment products fail to outperform their benchmarks over …

Stepping Off the Tracks

Daniel YergerFinancial Planning 5 Comments

A common question many clients have had over the years as they’ve asked us to take on managing their investments is “how do you manage my money?” Our answer to this for many years has been that we use a long-term focused strategy, accomplished through the use of low-cost passive index funds. A caution we give on a regular basis …

Protecting Your Castle

Daniel YergerFinancial Planning 1 Comment

On New Year’s Eve we saw an enormous fire that destroyed over a thousand homes and businesses in Superior and Louisville. Concurrently, every insurance agent I know is working around the clock to process claims and get their clients taken care of in the face of such an awful catastrophe. While I can’t go back and coach anyone who suffered …

Square Pegs and Round Holes

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Compensation by its nature is one of the most important and yet most taboo topics in our society. Despite the well-accepted fact that if everyone talked about money more, we’d likely all be doing a bit better by the simple merit of having more information in our salary negotiations and price discovery, we tend to keep our numbers close to …

2021 Wrap-Up & 2022 Vision

Daniel YergerAbout the Firm 2 Comments

Hello everyone, thank you for coming to our Ted Talk this week! Today we’re going to cover the state of the firm, the mission of the firm, and the 2022 vision going forward. A Bit of History The firm started as Daniel’s personal financial planning practice in 2015, originally affiliated with Waddell & Reed Financial Advisors as an independent practice. …