One of the ways I like to give back to the community and help others is through Kiva.org. If you don’t know what Kiva is, here is a blurb from their About page: More than 1.7 billion people around the world are unbanked and can’t access the financial services they need. Kiva is an international…
Category: Money Management
Retirement Planning: Step 5 – Putting It All Together
Let’s review my five retirement planning steps in case you missed any…click on the Steps to go to the appropriate Step. Step 1 – Total all retirement accounts. Step 2 – Estimate how much social security might provide. Step 3 – Estimate what the IRS standard deduction might be during my retirement years. Step 4 – Estimate…
Retirement Planning: Step 4 – IRS Tax Brackets
It’s 2:00 a.m. on a cold February morning, do you know which tax bracket you’re in right now? If you don’t, you’re in luck because I put this table together from the IRS that shows the tax brackets for 2023. I am going to go out on a limb and suggest that tax brackets are…
Retirement Planning: Step 3 – IRS Standard Deduction
Do you know what the IRS standard deduction is and how it fits into retirement planning? First the definition of the standard deduction from the IRS: The standard deduction is a specific dollar amount that reduces the amount of income on which you’re taxed. Your standard deduction consists of the sum of the basic standard…
Retirement Planning: Step 1 – How Much Money?
Step 1 in retirement planning seems easy and straight forward but it can be a little complicated, especially if you have changed jobs, industries and types of employers. The goal of step 1 is to identify ALL the buckets of money you have in retirement accounts (tax deferred), bank and brokerage accounts (taxable) and accounts…
Are All Financial Advisors Snake Oil Salespeople?
After reading The New Retirement Savings Time Bomb by Ed Slott, it lit a fire under my feet to update my retirement plan. While retirement may be 10+ years away, I figured I’d better double check my strategy and confirm some of the choices and assumptions I’ve made. To that end I have been contacting…
Are Annuities Good or Bad? It Depends!
A friend of mine recently asked me if I thought annuities were a good investment idea. For context, her key concern was market volatility which is why she was looking at annuities. I’m not a big fan of annuities but I decided to ask an artificial intelligence to tell me what the pros and cons…
Judge, Jury and Jester Justice
I had jury duty not too long ago. I didn’t get picked for the jury but I did make a whole lot of financial observations that got me thinking about who the real victim was in the court case. The Criminal The criminal was a young man accused of committing a theft. The Crime The…
How I Charged $95,000 On Two Credit Cards In 2023
With the end of the calendar year comes lots of goodies and one of my favorite things to do is to see how much and where I spent my money. Today, I am going to cover how I spent $95,000 on two of my favorite travel cards and it ties into this post entitled, “How…
Why You Should Always Cash Out Company Stock Grants
I’m going to share the hardest money lesson and regret that I had in my career but as bad as it was, some had it far worse. The Great Financial Crisis 2008 The year was 2007 and I was hired by a company that offered me $100k worth of company stock every year as part…