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
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
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
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. …
Education, Public Markets, and Private Markets
As paradoxical as it seems, the wealth gap is not increasing in the United States. Not in any meaningful way, at least. While not a month passes that we don’t hear about a billionaire who barely paid any taxes, or another that has accrued billions in a tax-free account, the fact of the matter is that wealth in the United …
Sick Leave and Backdoor Roth Closures
This week we’re taking a break from our normal business of writing about one issue at length to talk about two issues in shorter form. Two things come into effect on the 1st of the year, and it’s noteworthy that while one is already law, the other is making its way through Congress at the moment. We’re talking about Colorado’s …
The Best Interest Trap
Last week, investment giant Vanguard announced they would begin offering personal advisor services (“PAS”) clients their proprietary actively managed funds. This was a major shock across the financial industry where Vanguard is famous for their passive index investment options and a founding philosophy focused on the low-cost capture of the market’s movements. The stated rationale for this default selection is …
The Difficulty of an Investment Process
Speculation is in vogue right now and it’s the dearth of realistic thinking that drives it. Whether it be calls to invest in dog-based cryptocurrencies or special purpose acquisition companies (SPACs) being used to dodge SEC disclosure requirements for initial public stock offerings, you can’t take a single step in the financial world without bumping into someone who is excited …
The Billionaire’s Tax and You
It’s not uncommon that we see a headline such as: “Elon Musk made $36 billion dollars in yesterday’s Tesla surge.” The grammar of such a statement leads us to believe that the profits of Tesla were so substantial that Elon Musk was given a check for $36 billion. However, that’s not really the case. While $36 billion is an incomprehensible …
Rethinking Risk
Risk in the investment world doesn’t actually translate to the common meaning of the word “risk.” When I tell you that an investment is “high risk,” your first thought is probably that it means there’s a high chance of losing money or losing the entire investment. That could be the case, but in investment professional parlance, “risk” more typically refers …