Good morning and Happy Tuesday. I hope you enjoyed the Labor Day holiday, our unofficial end of summer. It also marks the end of the summer market doldrums (although this one was pretty busy) and the start of what’s typically a volatile period for stocks. Volatile but also positive. While September can be rough, the final three months of the year are usually favorable. Whatever the reasons, and there are many, these next several months will certainly be interesting…

What a few weeks we’ve had. Summertime has usually been a quiet time for stock and bond markets but that hasn’t been the case in recent memory. Just this month we’ve had a major shot of volatility, a rapid snapback, and then last week the Fed telegraphed as clearly as it could that it’s time to reduce interest rates. Add those events to all the election cycle news and it’s been a busy summer indeed. Let’s take a few minutes to assess the situation with everything t…

Pay now or pay later, that’s the main question when we think about taxes on our retirement accounts and it’s one with lasting consequences. A client recently sent me an article about converting traditional IRAs to Roth IRAs in the context of government debt. Let’s touch on that while discussing some of the basic considerations for people who feel they need to play catchup when it comes to Roth accounts. The history of individual retirement accounts coincides with…

The second quarter (Q2) of 2024 continued this year’s A Tale of Two Markets: AI Versus Everyone Else. Large indexes like the S&P 500 performed well but this was driven primarily by a handful of large companies. Otherwise, market breadth was mixed with performance growing worse as company size grew smaller. Bonds also continued their tale of woe while experiencing a couple of positive glimmers during the quarter. Here’s a roundup of how major markets perfo…

Your beneficiary designations matter and are easily overlooked, sometimes for years. You list them on your retirement accounts and life insurance contracts, and maybe on your bank and brokerage accounts. If you skip this step, perhaps assuming you’ll handle it later, the default option is often your “estate”, meaning your accounts have to go through probate. We’ve discussed this in prior posts over the years but this concept is worthy of repetition. The paperwork…

Over the past several weeks we covered a handful of year-end considerations with the last being partly related to generating cash. In that post I mentioned how money market funds and bank CDs were great places to store cash. Let’s dig into that a bit this week. This is especially important because the short-term interest rate environment that drives this space is changing. I tend to lapse into jargon when discussing these topics and some of that is unavoidable. My…