The Two Faces of Debt - Good Debt vs. Bad Debt Understanding Good Versus Bad Debt Can Help You Make Smart Financial Moves Credit card debt is a huge challenge for many people. According to Debt.org, Americans owe $986 billion on credit cards, surpassing the prepandemic high of $927 billion. While credit card debt [...]
Tools and Techniques Raising a child is expensive. From the day a baby is born until the day they turn 18, a typical family will spend about $310,605 — or about $17,000 a year, according to a recent Brookings Institution analysis of data from the U.S. Agriculture Department.1 If you’re planning to start a [...]
Erick, are there any tricks to paying down credit card debt? I’d love to put the money in my 401(k) instead! Try the avalanche or snowball method. In each you’ll focus on making extra payments to one debt — while continuing to make the minimum payment on all your other debts. With the avalanche [...]
Knowledge is Retirement Power Thanks to the passage of SECURE Act 2.0 at the end of last year, the age for starting required minimum distributions from your 401(k) has been increased from age 72 to age 73 for individuals who attained age 72 after December 31, 2022. It will increase again, to age 75, [...]
Besides slowing the economy, higher rates affect your personal finances. Unless you live on another planet, you are fully aware of this thing called inflation — whether you’re at the grocery store, a gas station, buying clothes online, hiring a contractor or doing almost any other thing that requires spending money for something. Earlier [...]
We received our final reading on Consumer Price Index (CPI) inflation for 2022 this morning, which gave us the inflation numbers for December 2022. Helped by declining energy prices, the index fell 0.1% in December, in line with economists’ consensus expectation and the largest monthly decline since April 2020. Consumer inflation advanced less than [...]
Financial Planning - The Big Picture for You and Your Family Do you picture yourself owning a new home...starting a business... or retiring comfortably? These are a few of the financial goals that may be important to you, and each comes with a price tag. That's where financial planning comes in. Financial planning is [...]
"I tell all my clients about the 3 buckets of financial planning." #1 - Emergency Have at least 3 months of savings set aside. This money should not be touched except for emergencies and should be held in a separate savings account, NOT your checking account. It is there for emergencies and to keep [...]
What goals do you have for your child? The average cost of college in the United States is $35,720 per student per year. This number has tripled in 20 years! If you hope to send your kids to college, the sooner you have a plan in place to pay that bill the better. “College is [...]
Having a strategy to protect your assets is essential to long term financial success. You’ve worked hard to build your nest egg. But what if a life event caused you to deplete your savings so you could no longer afford to live how you wanted? "Erick, we did it! We’re DONE!” My clients were nearing [...]
