Preserving a legacy and providing a financial safety net to your family and loved ones after you pass is a personal, nuanced and uncomfortable aspect of financial and life planning.
Saturday, 09 June 2018
Advanced planning for a substantial family wealth transfer is paramount to the success of the transfer as well as the preservation of a positive family dynamic. Transferring your wealth to benefit future generations requires communication, listening, and understanding. Here are some tips for having family money conversations early and often.
Goals and Objectives
There are often several participants involved in family wealth transfer. Having a strong understanding of each participant’s objectives for their lives and the money they may stand to inherit can help you get a better handle on how and when you might choose to distribute the wealth. Having a candid goals and objectives conversation with everyone who you plan to leave money to can help make the transfer manageable, fair and void of discord. There are things that you might not have considered that can come to light in these conversations. The clarity can be empowering and give you a new perspective on the choices you are making when it comes to your bequest.
As human beings, we can often react to events or experiences in an instinctual rather than logical or practical way. It is in our very nature and can, in many cases, not be avoided.
Friday, 08 June 2018
When you see someone else who appears successful what do you imagine he or she does, has, finds fulfilling? Do you equate success with happiness?
We don’t often ask ourselves these types of questions. But taking a moment to consider your definition of success could help you find personal fulfillment alongside financial well-being. We can only measure our success (as well as others’ success) by how we define it. This definition is likely unique to each of us. This uniqueness is one of the key components to understanding how you might go about achieving your goals when it comes to planning for your future, financially, physically, emotionally and psychologically.
In this article, we identify five key factors that can help you define and build your own success plan.
What do you picture when you think about success? Do you feel like a successful person?
Friday, 11 May 2018
When you see someone else who appears successful what do you imagine he or she does, has, finds fulfilling? Do you equate success with happiness?
We don’t often ask ourselves these types of questions. But taking a moment to consider your definition of success could help you find personal fulfillment alongside financial well-being. We can only measure our success (as well as others’ success) by how we define it. This definition is likely unique to each of us. This uniqueness is one of the key components to understanding how you might go about achieving your goals when it comes to planning for your future, financially, physically, emotionally and psychologically.
In this article, we identify five key factors that can help you define and build your own success plan.
Recently, a strong and relatively calm bull market has given way to an increase in volatility and decline in value which has resulted in renewed anxiety for investors.
Tuesday, 10 April 2018
While it may be difficult to remain calm during such periods, it is important to remember that volatility is a normal part of investing. Further, for long-term investors, reacting emotionally to volatile markets may be more detrimental to portfolio performance than the drawdown itself.
Market pullbacks are far more common than most investors realize. According to Capital Research and Management (see attached chart), intra-year declines of 5% or more happen about 3 times per year, declines of 10% or more happen about once per year, declines of 15% or more happen about once every 2 years, and declines of 20% or more happen about once every 3 ½ years. Further, intra-year declines have averaged 13.4% since 1948, yet calendar year returns have been positive in 51 of those 70 years. In 2018 the biggest intra-year decline so far is from the high reached on January 26 to the low reached on March 23, a decline of 11.6%. That decline is the first of its kind since 2016. As we have been saying in our review meetings, we had gotten conditioned to abnormally low volatility with strong returns and the equity market was overdue for a correction. Even so, this 11.6% intra-year decline is still less than the historical average intra-year decline of 13.4%. Surprisingly to most investors given how this market feels, as of the market close on April 6, 2018, the S&P 500 is down only 2.9% for the calendar year 2018 (Wall Street Journal, April 6, 2018).
