By: Laura Walton AFC® We tend to copy those around us either consciously or subconsciously. If you yawn, I yawn. I find myself crossing my arms when talking to someone whose arms are crossed. This instinct can even affect our decision making. If I don’t have enough information to make a decision on my own,…
By: Laura Walton AFC® has fallen 10% in the last week as measured by the Dow Jones Industrial Average. The news is better this morning; the market opened up 300+ points. This is what we should expect from the market – volatility – but volatility can be hard to watch when it affects your investments.…
By: Laura Walton AFC® James Montier, a respected global economist, took a break from the world of finance to look at happiness. He condensed the results of his study of studies into a list of ten ways to improve happiness… They are, in no particular order… 1) Don’t equate happiness with money. People adapt to income…
By: Laura Walton AFC® Why do successful people and organizations sometimes fail and what does that have to do with financial success? Greg McKeown, author of Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less, discussed what drives us from success to failure in his Harvard Business Review blog. His concepts apply equally to our financial lives and suggest ways to stay…
By: Laura Walton AFC® to arrest you. You owe back taxes. You can avoid arrest by paying what you owe immediately. How soon can you get to a bank?” This is the gist of phone calls received recently by several Tucsonans. We all know that scam artists exist and even thrive but when you get…
The more classes we teach, the more questions we get on when and how to best use Roth IRAs. Questions also include the recently instituted Roth 401(k) that many businesses have started offering in the last two years. The purpose of this week’s blog will be to try and simplify not only what these Roth…
By: Laura Walton AFC® Fair warning. I’ve been listening to Freakonomics podcasts. This morning, on my way to work, Steven Levitt, University of Chicago economist, and Stephen Dubner, New York Times journalist, talked with a guest about conducting pre-mortems – discussing what might go wrong before it does rather than what went wrong after the…
By: Robert Swift I just got back from a week in western New York/Ontario where I got to see two beautiful sights…..my daughter, Jessica, who married a hockey playing Canadian and now lives about an hour south of Toronto……and Niagara Falls. Those two sights make the flight to Buffalo very much worth it. But, as…
By: Laura Walton AFC® How long does it take to re-program your brain? To change a way of thinking?? Destin Sandin of Smarter Every Day re-built his bike to test himself. Instead of turning the handle bars to the right to go right, he has to turn them to the left to go right. Any…
Nine justices that is…justices of the U.S. Supreme Court. The Supreme Court justices don’t often rule unanimously but this week they did. They said that employers can be sued if they fail in their “continuing duty to monitor” mutual funds in 401k accounts for unnecessarily high fees. That’s a big win for employees participating in…