By: Laura Walton AFC® It’s Warren Buffett in beige and white trunks in the index fund corner vs. Ted Seides in red and gold trunks in the hedge fund corner – who’s winning this 10-year bet? A recent NPR Morning Edition story brought us up to date on this 2008 bet. Apparently Buffett responded to a question…
By: Laura Walton AFC® The line for charitable donations is often left blank when I create a budget with a client but that’s not to say they aren’t charitable. In 2015, a Gallup World Poll asked over 150,000 people which of the following three charitable acts they had undertaken in the past month: helped a stranger, or…
By: Laura Walton AFC® With 750,000 unique visitors to his website each month, he must have a compelling message! A friend passed along an article by Nick Paumgarten featuring Mr. Money Mustache that appeared in the February 29th issue of The New Yorker – I’ll be quoting liberally from it to introduce you to Peter Adeney and his…
By: Laura Walton AFC® When I started driving, gas was 35 cents a gallon! Adjusted for inflation that’s $2.26 a gallon today. Who would have ever imagined today’s prices would be lower than that? Below are the average annual miles driven by age group according to the Department of Transportation: Age Male Female 16-19 8206…
By: Laura Walton AFC® We are told that in order to learn from experience we need frequent practice and immediate feedback. How does this play out in money decisions? Richard Thaler’s book Misbehaving gives lots of everyday examples of how we humans make illogical decisions. Traditional economists assume we are logical thinkers and have all the relevant…
By: Laura Walton AFC® That’s what friends of ours said Friday night as we shared dinner. I was telling them about the 3rd Decade program which we’d just kicked off and it sparked a memory. Now in their 60’s, she’s a retired elementary school teacher and he continues consulting with colleges and universities. He reflected back…
By: Laura Walton AFC® We hear those words often. If only I had started saving sooner, had saved more, had spent less, had not bought that house…you fill in the blank. Those two words are the motivation for the Foundation’s new and exciting project – the 3rd Decade! This program makes available to young adults in their 3rd Decade…
By: Laura Walton AFC® This week I’m talking with seniors at the University of Hawaii at Hilo about personal finance. They have a dilemma. The median price of homes on the Big Island of Hawaii is around $350,000 but the majority of jobs won’t support the attendant mortgage payment. The disconnect means they may have…
With the recent market downturn, I bucked the trend. Instead of selling, I bought. Carl Richard’s napkin drawing from his book, The Behavior Gap, reminds us of our instincts – run the other way when things get bad. But with the discipline of a long-term investor, I chose to take Warren Buffett’s advice to “buy…
By: Laura Walton AFC® We typically think of saving for retirement as a spending issue. A spending issue usually translates into cutting back on the very things we enjoy – travel, eating out, shopping, etc. That’s hard to get excited about. But what if we framed it differently? We know that if you save $2400…