Blog Posts

Revisit Your Fiscal Priorities Each Year

Building a healthy financial life is an important concern that everyone should address with diligence and care. Rather than being a one-time event, evaluating your finances—and ensuring you don’t lose sight of your goals—requires timely, purposeful attention.

Imagine, for example, if you went to the doctor, created a thorough and personalized health strategy, carefully stuck to the plan, and then didn’t have another appointment for 5 years. You might have felt as though you didn’t need to go to for a checkup because your plan helped you make healthy life choices. However, the reality is that a lot can change in a very short period of time, such as medical advancements and new ailments. Though you believed you were on the right path, you might have missed critical guidance and professional insight.

Every year around tax time, reports of email phishing scams increase, though no season is immune to its own set of scams. Phishing is the act of using computers to fraudulently acquire sensitive information such as credit card numbers, social security numbers, and user names & passwords. To accomplish this, thieves will send electronic communications designed to look like they are coming from a trustworthy entity. One example of a recent phishing scam appears to come from the IRS:

By Marc C. Shaffer

The idea of retirement and the reality of retirement can often be drastically different. For many people, retirement is the idea that at a certain age you will leave your career and enter into a life of leisure. Be it golfing, visiting sunny locations or spending time with grandchildren, retirement has been painted as the final phase of life where you haven’t a care in the world. Every day I talk with people who are retired or planning their retirement, and let me tell you, it’s time we start thinking differently about retirement. The 17th Annual Transamerica Retirement Survey showed that a majority of workers dream about traveling, spending more time with family, and pursuing hobbies, and 28 percent dream of doing some form of work in retirement. What does retirement mean to you? Does waiting until normal retirement age to pursue your dreams make sense to you, or would you like to consider an “alternative” retirement? The “what you want to do” and “how much you’re going to need” may look a lot different than you’re prepared for, so considering which type of retirement is right for you and the financial considerations to get you there are key. Let’s look at 5 types of retirement styles I talk about frequently:

At times, we can be so focused on our financial health – maintaining a healthy cash flow, monitoring a budget, building a retirement plan – that we can forget about the importance of our physical health and how it may impact our financial future. It’s much easier to talk the talk about staying young than it is to walk the walk. Starting in our 20s and 30s, we commence a long, seemingly inevitable physical deterioration. Our maximum heart rate declines, and with it the amount of oxygen-bearing blood the heart can pump. Muscle is gradually replaced with fat and weight edges upward. And decade by decade, as oxygen intake drops, it becomes a little harder to just get around. Eventually, in our 70s, 80s or 90s, most of us lose our “functional independence,” the ability to live on our own. We move to assisted-living or nursing homes because, literally, our living needs to be assisted.