Before we talk about bonds, Schwab has received reports matching up with one of my posts from earlier this summer about how fraudsters are leveraging AI to make it easier to rip you off. The idea is you’re contacted by someone purporting to be a Schwab employee who needs to verify suspicious transactions within your accounts. They have some information about you gleaned from the internet and maybe an authentic-looking website. You’re asked to confirm login credenti…

I spent most of last week at a conference in Denver so, if you’ll indulge me, I’ll share some of the details with you. This conference was the Insider’s Forum that has for years been hosted by a long-time thought leader in the planning industry. One of the draws for this conference is how different it is from others I’ve attended. More typical conferences seem full of actively managed mutual fund providers and insurance companies touting their product enhancements…

It’s good to be back after my summer blog break. I’ve otherwise been hard at work and there were at least a couple of times when I thought I’d have to break my break, so to speak, because there was so much going on. Along those lines, let’s review some of the developments over the past several weeks, talk about expectations and what, if anything, to do about them. The stock and bond markets encountered some headwinds in recent weeks. The main issues impacting bot…

Before I begin, this will be my last post for a few weeks. I’ll still be working on everything else, just not writing this blog so that I have some extra time with family and friends during what remains of summer. I’ve probably mentioned this several times in the past but part of what I do for clients is, in a sense, dominated by what I don’t do. I remember the advice of a colleague when I was just starting out – the first rule, he said, was don’t blow anybody up…

I don’t know about you but the list of things I understand and can control seems to be getting shorter and more pronounced. One thing I know, from the details to the nuanced big picture, is financial planning.    Perhaps ironically, financial planning (and investment management) is mostly about controlling what we can control and hedging against the things we can’t. And one of the obvious and important variables we can’t control is our life expectancy. W…

It felt like the start of another busy week as I wrote this yesterday morning. Aren’t they all busy? We have new tariffs on trading partners, renewed war in the Middle East impacting oil prices again, and we have a Fed interest rate decision on Wednesday. Here are some updates along these lines. First, regarding new tariffs… Tariffs are taxes and the main questions are the average dollar amount of the levies and who ultimately pays them. Our average tariff rate…