We always advise clients that the financial plans we sit down and create with them are documents that guide and help us understand the strengths and weaknesses of your financial situation. Analyzing them and keeping them going throughout retirement is essential. One of the key areas where most people have not adequately prepared for is caregiving.

If you had to guess which government spent the most on space programs, and you guessed the United States, you’d be absolutely correct. In 2020, the United States spent 47 billion dollars, with China coming in at a distant second, at 8 billion.

Goals. When it comes to the end of the year, we start with all sorts of goal-based ideas for what we want to do. New Years Resolutions abound and usually they are based in some self-improvement desire. We want to improve our health, we want to improve our social life, we want to improve our organization to better our lives. Some important things that we often forget to organize, or tend to put off, are our financial goals. Having a step-by-step process can make it easier to get those financial goals lined up and give us a good sense of what needs to get done to realize those goals.

Not all sectors are made equally. That’s one of the first aspects of investing in the real world that’s different from the investing world. Conceptually, for instance, you can understand investing as different sets of strategies, for instance, high yield, growth, dividend etc. Realistically, a company can be a manufacturing company at any stage, high yield, growth, and given time, can even become a dividend aristocrat.

One man’s junk is another man’s treasure. Thomas Edison’s quote is fascinating to me because one of the most interesting statistics I’ve seen about investing history is that there was a point in the early 2000s when Amazon, the biggest giant in retail today, was down 90%…

You’ve probably seen those commercials about people who own gold and try to convince you to invest in gold as well. Why is that? And why hold gold? Gold’s uses are limited, other than jewelry and some machinery, and yet it seems to be a commodity that garners a tremendous amount of attention from investors.

You may have caught my segment on Today y Mañana, a local Charlottesville podcast we are hosting through the iLoveCville network every Thursday at 10:15 am (You can check it out here). If you did not manage to tune in (you should!), our topic of discussion was Long-Term Care Insurance in our domestic market of Charlottesville, Virginia from a financial planning standpoint.