October is here so time to gather around the campfire. With Halloween around the corner, we are highlighting a few spooky financial stories that have scary circumstances. These feelings typically bleed in to stock markets as well. October is often wrongly characterized as the worst month for people to invest. Primarily because people remember the big historical market drops that happen during October. But scary moves for your portfolio aren't the only thing to fear in your financial planning. For all our listeners who love movies, you're in for a treat. We've picked 5 spooky financial stories that pair up with some classic Halloween movies. Listen in for some truly terrifying financial stories.
Remember Jack Nicholson’s classic movie, The Shining? "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” Finding a work-life balance is difficult for so many of us. We had a client that saved diligently over a hard-working career. While building an impressive savings for retirement, he put off vacations, opting for promotions up the corporate ladder. But once he was finally ready to retire and enjoy his savings, he was diagnosed with a nebulous nerve condition that required daily care and limited physical motor functions preventing him from enjoying his hard earned savings. While we can't prevent crippling medical conditions, we can build in balance to our financial plans. Understanding how your savings and spending will transform throughout your life helps you make more confident decisions while enjoying time with those most important to you.
“I see dead people.” A now infamous quote from The Sixth Sense. This is because Haley Jo Osmond's character can see things others can’t. Similar scenarios occur when life is full of busyness that blinds us to opportunities that could make a noticeable long-term differences. Instead, by surrounding yourself with people who can spot things you can't see, you set yourself up for new opportunities to bolster your financial progress. The back-door Roth provides a great example. You may think you make too much money to enjoy the benefits of a Roth IRA, but maybe you didn't have enough time to fully understand and follow through with it.
The Blair Witch Project is a frightening scenario about a group of friends that wander into the woods without a plan. They lose their map and this leads them into trouble. Don’t let this be you. If you don’t have a plan you can swerve off course and lose your way to retirement. Many pre-retirees lose sleep over not having enough money because they didn’t set spending limits. You need to have a plan in place and know how much you can afford to spend and how much to save. Do you have a specific and customized plan for your life and your retirement?
Some employees are confused about how best to handle employee income incentives. This is much like the people in Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas who are confused when Christmas comes to Halloween Town. Many employees don’t have the time or expertise of how best to deal with RSUs, ESPPs, and Stock Options. Partly due to the tough decisions of when to exercise, sell or hold. So many tend to hold, where positions build and concentration risk grows. This is breeding ground for nightmare scenarios of holding too long and not diversifying. Listen to this episode to learn how to deal with the familiarity bias and ensure that all your financial eggs are not in one basket.
Ghostbusters 2 is a classic tale of reinvention. The Ghostbusters are forced to reinvent themselves after their business goes bust at the end of the first movie. But their is beauty in their resilience and how they trust in their expertise. This is a good metaphor for our own lives. It is important to invest in your own human capital and have the resilience to face negative events that can happen in your own life. If you continually improve your knowledge you will be able to bounce back from challenges and change the trajectory of your life. Investing in yourself will always bring a high return on your investment.
If you're a mid-career professional, life is full of demands. You've worked incredibly hard to get here. You're sandwiched between young kids and aging parents. Your job is challenging and life is busy. Be it a technology company, medical practice or your own small business, stress comes with the territory during this season of life. This is fertile ground for growing a financial mid-life crisis. With all that's going on, it’s hard to know if you are making the right financial choices, because you don't have time to stop and focus on the financial considerations of the moment. Understanding this, we've compiled a list of the 8 most important wealth builders for all of you hard-working mid-career professionals.
As income increases to it's highest point in life so far, higher spending follows suit during these years. Deciding how much to save brings new challenges as bigger questions come in to focus. Things like when you really want to retire, changing careers, buying a bigger home for kids, or just remodeling your current home. When entertaining life-changing transitions, taking inventory is the first step. Where have you saved to this point? How will a major life change impact the long-term picture. Weighing alternative lifestyles are ripe with complexity that only becomes clear when comparing planning customized scenarios.
Everyone loves finding more tax savings. The best way to ensure you don’t have unwelcome surprises come tax day is to dissect your tax planning at the end of each year. Many tax saving opportunities are left on the table when other priorities dominate your time. Longer work hours, traveling, and shuttling kids to events take all our attention in our 40s. Without proper attention, you never know when potential tax savings are missed.
When starting out, how much you are saving matters much more than the returns you can earn on those savings. But upon reaching mid-career higher earnings, your investment returns could become larger than the actual annual savings. At this point, your asset allocation moves front and center. Choosing how to divide your investments could pay off if busy lives don’t get in the way. Even an increase of 1.5%/year has a huge impact over time. As with many other things in personal finance, building wealth should be boring with little things adding up in a surprising way over time.
When the mid-career attention is divided, important items get ignored. Several of these include life, disability and health insurance for your family. We all know insurance can be expensive, but not having the right kind of insurance when you need it can be detrimental. Many people set up their beneficiaries when they first set up their accounts and then forget to ever update it. Part of your estate planning is choosing a guardian for your children and ensuring that the right people are the beneficiaries of your estate. Working with a professional can assure your estate is in order regardless of any eventuality.