Can You Afford A Pet? We adopted some cats a couple of years ago. As of this month, they are three years old, which apparently in cat years is 28 in human years. Little did we know the expenses coming for one cat, who is named Shadow, because he is all black like a shadow, …
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529 Plan So, you were a #ResponsibleAdult and you planned for your child’s future with a 529 plan. They were attending school and you withdrew funds to pay for their tuition and room and board. Then, the universe threw you a curve ball, causing your child’s university to put all classes online and/or require students …
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Preparing for College Funding Part II: In my last post, I started to explain the different ways that parents (or whomever) can prepare for college funding. This post covers 4 additional ways. Again, here is a handy dandy chart: Like Traditional IRAs, contribution limits apply to Roth IRAs. In addition, with a Roth IRA, your …
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College Funding Part I: May is “529” month (get it- 5/29? It’s a complete dad joke). I will be talking about college funding. Do you have a child or grandchild that will someday attend college? Great, now go back in time and start saving a lot of money about 5 years before they were born, …
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Tax Time Should we take a standard deduction or itemize? Normally, we would have our taxes filed by now, but this year we have an extension. But I am not thinking about taxes, I am thinking about summer, which I am going to tie into taxes on today’s blog. We typically rent a place up …
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DIY Investing I recently heard a great analogy that aligns well with the topic of DIY investing—consider the process of changing your car’s oil. While you could learn to do it yourself and save some money, it can be messy and mistakes can happen, as my husband discovered years ago when oil dripped on his …
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Hidden Costs Last year, Charles Schwab announced that they were reducing trading fees to zero, and Ameritrade, E*TRADE and Fidelity shortly followed. Hooray, free trades! But hold on are there hidden costs in no cost trading? For consumers of these companies, however, there really is no free lunch. It is important to look to see …
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There are a lot of F words, especially in the world of finance. Fiduciary, Finance, Financial Advisor, etc. But none of those are my favorite F word. My favorite is “Female Financial Planner”. Ha, you thought I was going to pick a different F word, didn’t you? I also like “french fries.” It can be …
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ESG OR SRI Sometimes you hear the phrase, “put your money where your mouth is,” meaning, use your dollars towards things you really are passionate about. If this matters to you, then you might be interested in ESG or SRI investing. ESG stands for Environment, Social, and Governance. SRI stands for Sustainable, Responsible, and Impact. …
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March is National Women’s History Month In honor of that, I’d love to tell you about some female financial pioneers… In addition to mentioning that we have several female financial advisors on our team! The wife of President John Adams, Abigail Adams, is credited with being the first female investor. Abigail managed her household’s finances …
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