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…
By: Laura Walton AFC® Hyperbole – synonyms: exaggeration, overstatement, magnification, embroidery, embellishment, excess, overkill. There’s been a lot of hyperbole in the financial news the last few days – below are some examples I culled from news stories: a big whoosh lower massive selling the Dow plummeted two huge sell-offs in a row stop the…
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…
By: Laura Walton AFC® In a recent Freakonomics episode, four heavy hitters chatted about active versus passive investing. Sound dry? Not at all! Below I’ve shared some of the best of the podcast but I heartily recommend listening to these super-heroes of the everyday investor. First, let me introduce you to the speakers: Kenneth French,…
By: Laura Walton AFC® Congrats to my friend Heather who just completed, this very morning, 30 consecutive days of walking Tumamoc Hill at 5:30AM. She says, “Other than the physical byproduct of having stronger legs and lungs, I feel a sense of accomplishment and it’s been a good reminder that I truly can do anything I…
By: Laura Walton AFC® Just returned from Flagstaff where we launched the 3rd Decade program – we’re statewide – Tucson, Phoenix and now Flagstaff! It’s a bit of a drive, four hours, a portion of which my family has made for decades. Only thing is, the 100 miles they routinely drove took them14+ hours. I’m from…
By: Laura Walton AFC® We say we want to improve our financial situation and that we know what to do, yet we struggle. This is what social scientists call the Intention/Action Gap. Dan Ariely, the behavioral economics expert and professor at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, is trying to bridge the Intention/Action Gap by “hacking…
The following article ran in the Sunday, April 16th, edition of the Arizona Republic and was further distributed by USA Today. The online version can be found here. We’ve had response from all over the country and quickly filled our first Phoenix class with another to follow this fall.
By: Laura Walton AFC® When something in our lives is scarce, we tend to focus on it. That focus can be both good and bad. I frequently catch Shankar Vedantam’s excerpt from his website, Hidden Brain, on NRP. A recent piece on scarcity attracted my attention. In economic terms, scarcity concentrates demand on fewer resources which,…
By: Laura Walton AFC® I had planned to blog about median home prices versus median incomes in the 20 Best Value Towns listed in the February issue of Sunset Magazines (Prescott was ranked #4 by the way) but I got sidetracked into something much more timely. Did you know Tucson ranked #6 out of 20…