When to Claim Your Social Security Benefits
Social Security benefits are an important component of any retirement plan. The decision of when to claim Social Security benefits should be based on your individual circumstances.
Love It or List It: Navigating Your Evolving Home Needs
The decision to move or renovate depends on a multitude of factors. Consulting with experts such as real estate professionals, mortgage brokers and financial professionals can provide valuable guidance in choosing your path forward.
Leaving a Personalized Legacy
To personalize your legacy, take a step forward with your estate planning, adopting an attitude of contemplation as you mentally meander through what you want and what you don’t want.
The Right Amount of Liquidity
Many things can affect the “right” amount of cash to have on hand. In our conversations with clients, we compare it to financial decisions involving a trade-off between security, risk, and return.
Broadening the View on Taxes
Good tax planning does not simply mean minimizing your tax bill every year. A broader view allows you to better balance tax considerations with other priorities in your life.
Power of Attorney: A Caretaking Role
Being power of attorney for someone is a fiduciary responsibility, and it’s not one we should agree to lightly. We agree to serve because it means taking care of someone we love when they can no longer care for themselves.
Sharing the Power (of Attorney)
Naming a good power of attorney and sharing your wishes, values, and financials with them will ease the transition into sharing control of critical aspects of your life and provide peace of mind.
Illuminating the Next Chapter
At its core, cash flow planning is about helping us make better decisions. It involves organizing our financial life into something comprehensible and then looking into the future to understand the range of potential outcomes.
Personalizing Your Pension Election
For employees with access to a pension plan, there is a choice between managing their own pension assets for maximum flexibility or delegating responsibility to their employer for maximum certainty.
Embracing Mental Accounting
The phenomenon known as "mental accounting" shapes how we categorize and value money, consciously or not, and influences how we behave and interact with it.
Paying for Certainty
Every decision to keep or pay down debt balances both personal and financial benefits, and not every circumstance is created equal.
Planning While the World is in Flux
Plans rarely come with a guaranteed outcome. However, the process of planning reduces uncertainty and increases the likelihood that you will arrive at an outcome that aligns with your values and priorities.
Firewise Planning
Fire season is now an annual concern for Californians. Having a plan for the risk of fire can better protect your family's financial resources.
Back to School
There are four primary avenues to paying for college: scholarships, student loans, work-study, and savings. Many families' college cash flow plans include several of these options, and each has different lessons for parents and children.
The Right Amount of Liquidity
As you build wealth over time, you start to develop a portfolio of investments beyond cash, which provides other options for funding your financial needs.
Your Retirement, Your Values
A successful transition to retirement must express your values. Understanding the motivation behind your decision, and being prepared for how you will spend your time post-retirement, are key steps to achieving a fulfilling retirement.
Two Things in Life are Certain
Taxes is one of life’s certainties and we have seen countless times that having the right professional and effective collaboration can make all the difference.
Who’s Got Your Back?
The point of estate planning is to prepare now to make things easier for yourself and your loved ones later.
Important but not (yet) Urgent
We rarely know when our estate plan will become urgent. And all too often, “later” comes too late.
Tax Extensions & Updates Amidst Coronavirus
July is the new April! At least as it applies to tax filings and deadlines. Among the many changes that coronavirus has brought, one is the extension of a variety of tax filing and payment deadlines for 2019 and 2020.