How to Streamline Your Charitable Giving
God loves a cheerful giver, but researching charities, calculating tax consequences, and managing donations can make charitable giving more of a chore than a joy. And if your income varies significantly from year to year, it’s even more challenging to be consistently generous. The solution …
Can a System Designed for Business Work in Your Personal Life?
When we implemented the strategies in Gino Wickman’s book Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business in our company, I’d love to tell you that the difference was immediate and remarkable, but actually, it took time. However, just like the book describes, we started to gain traction and then we s …
Estate Planning: Are Your Heirs Prepared for What You’ll Leave Them?
Regardless of the size of your estate, everything you should consider as you create your estate plan falls into three main areas: How much you need to maintain your lifestyle. How much you want to leave your children and grandchildren. What to do with the rest. Even as you work on the numbe …
The Best Life Insurance is to Live
Live a life that’s truly priceless Life insurance is an important financial planning tool. It’s the most common way to make sure that the people who depend on your income are protected when you die. What’s more important than life insurance? Living. When it comes to financial nuts and bolts …
Planning for What You Can’t Plan For
How many lighthouses do you see? You’ve probably heard the saying, “We plan and God laughs.” Proverbs 16 says it’s human nature to want to plan our future, and I talk a lot about planning because planning is important. But even the most thoughtful, well-considered plans go awry—sometimes t …
You are Your Biggest Asset!
People seek out a wealth advisor for many reasons. In the case of a recent new client, a couple had made a substantial investment in something that turned out to be a scam. When the wife first called me, she was distraught, fearing that they would be financially destitute. I could have focu …
The War for Your Wallet is Real
Ads for financial products are everywhere these days. We’re constantly being pressured to invest in precious metals, purchase insurance, get the latest and greatest credit card, trade crypto or NFTs, and even add whiskey to our portfolios. Some of the messages are frightening—what if we die …
What’s Wrong with the FIRE Movement?
FIRE stands for Financial Independence, Retire Early. It’s a lifestyle movement of people who commit to a program of extreme savings and investment so they can retire much sooner than they would on a traditional plan. Embracing the FIRE movement includes saving as much as 75 percent of your …
Financial Literacy: What’s Your Return on Life?
by: Michelle Ogden, CFP®, CRPS®, CKA® Financial literacy is about so much more than money When people talk about financial literacy, they tend to think in terms of money—of income, expenses, budgets, investments, and return on those investments. There’s so much more to financial literacy th …
How Your Beliefs Drive What You Do
by: Michelle Ogden, CFP®, CRPS®, CKA® Though you may not be consciously aware of them, your deep-seated beliefs override what you know and influence your actions To understand how your beliefs impact your life, let’s examine the knowing, believing, and doing continuum. You start with knowle …
