By: Laura Walton AFC® ‘Tis the season for charitable giving and, with tax filing just around the corner, you may be able to re-direct tax dollars owed to the State of Arizona to a charity or school of your choice. Arizona offers a dollar-for-dollar credit for certain programs: The Arizona school tax credits: Credit of…
By: Laura Walton AFC® I meet with a lot of young adults through our 3rd Decade program and I’ve noticed what they pay for auto insurance is all over the map. So I was relieved to see the recent story in the Arizona Daily Star that reported just that – the headline read “You could…
By: Laura Walton AFC® The promo intrigued me – a story about a having trouble making ends meet on $100,000 income – so I found it online. Bear in mind that the median household income is $59,000 – we should be able to make it on $100,000, right? NPR’s Lulu Garcia-Navarro reported on four conversations with just…
By: Laura Walton AFC® Ted has conceded to Warren and now Mark is taking a seat at the table. Here’s an update on the famous $1M bet. It all started at an event when a student asked Warren “…if you think [a low-cost S&P 500 index fund] can beat hedge funds, why doesn’t anyone take…
By: Laura Walton AFC® This is what I told my husband when he called on his way home at the end of the day one Friday. And then I started recounting them… I was walking back to my car from Johnny Gibson’s Downtown Market where I’d stopped to pick up a couple of items on…
By: Laura Walton AFC® Halloween seems to kick off the holiday season. This year, Halloween spending was big – maybe another sign of consumer confidence trending upwards. Here are the stats from the National Retail Federation: Projected spending: $9.1 billion (a record high) Americans planning to partake in Halloween festivities: 179 million Top adult costume: A witch…
By: Laura Walton AFC® For our 3rd Decade program, it’s all about the bass, in our case, the bottom line. Now that we’ve had a chance to track ‘before’ and ‘after’ net worth statements for our participants, we’re seeing “all the right junk in all the right places” to take a line from Meghan Trainor’s hit song.…
By: Laura Walton AFC® We don’t teach kids about thermodynamics by letting them play with a box of matches so why do we teach them about investing by encouraging them to play stock market games? There’s a new stock market game out. Stockpile is a startup designed to allow investors to buy fractional shares of stocks with…
By: Laura Walton AFC® This was Richard Thaler’s response to how he would spend the $1.1M awarded him for the Nobel Prize in Economics. You see, his focus has been on the irrational decisions we make about money. His point is that people are human. Economists have long thought that people would make rational choices…
By: Laura Walton AFC® The Foundation is in Phoenix this week meeting with ASU students in the Dorrance Scholarship program, kicking off our second 3rd Decade class in the Phoenix-Scottsdale-Tempe area and finishing up a series of financial education classes for the employees of a Phoenix law firm – whew! So, for this week’s blog, I want…