By: Laura Walton AFC® Treat yourself this weekend to some of the best originality Tucson has to offer! Cultivate is a pop-up market featuring local designers, makers, independent shops, and artists with an additional mission of cultivating community. Built on the very timely sentiment “that authentic relationships and face-to-face connections are essential for personal and creative growth,”…
Russ Wiles, The Republic | azcentral.com | Americans pay a price for procrastinating on financial matters, but many delay anyway. Missed financial opportunities abound, whether it’s in getting a late start in retirement planning, failing to draw up a will or simply…
By: Laura Walton AFC® But you can find out what you don’t know with just a few clicks. Nearly 25,000 people from all 50 states have completed the National Financial Literacy Test – a 30 question test designed to measure participants’ ability to earn, save and grow their money. The average score to date is…
By: Laura Walton AFC® Our spending patterns are habits and habits can be powerful. One way to break them is to go cold turkey. Below is an account of a married couple who have been through the 3rd Decade™ program and decided to double down on saving, investing and paying off student debt by instituting their…
By: Laura Walton AFC® A recent radio ad for Cash Call Mortgage exclaimed “Your house is your bank!” Have we learned nothing? Investing in stocks is inherently risky; the same goes for real estate. Values boom and bust and then we quickly forget. To help us remember, here’s a quote from the second quarter of…
By: Laura Walton AFC® Everett Dirksen, Senate Minority leader in the 60’s, is noted as saying, “A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon, you’re talking real money.” Take off a few zeros and the same is true for you and me. When I’m working with a client to create their net worth statement, they…
By: Laura Walton AFC® The saying’s origin is disputed. With a history of invasion, starvation and mass emigration, some say it mocks Ireland’s history of adversity. Or it may go back to California Gold Rush days when many fortunes were made by miners who happened to be Irish. It may have been a derogatory term…
By: Laura Walton AFC® Definition: To expose flaws in a current business model, highlight areas where improvement or changes are needed, and to help inspire adaptation of the business model for future growth…or what Bezos, Dimon and Buffett are bringing to the healthcare market. Representing Amazon, JP Morgan Chase and Berkshire Hathaway, these three individuals are…
I admire Warren Buffett as much for his manner of speech as for his investing prowess. Below I’ve pulled some commonsense quotes from his just released 2017 Berkshire Hathaway Annual letter – enjoy! Buffett’s view on debt, which could apply to any of us: “Our aversion to leverage (debt) has dampened our returns over the years but we…
By: Laura Walton AFC® Gender Lens Investing? Should I admit that I didn’t know it was a thing? Interest in Socially Responsible Investing (SRI), which, for example, might exclude tobacco companies from your portfolio, has been growing along with investing based on environmental, social and governance factors (ESG investing). Gender Lens Investing takes those ideas…