Everyone knows you should start investing as young as possible. But not many people actually start investing at a young age. So how can we get this message into the minds and hearts of our children and grandchildren? My oldest is just 6, so I'll have to report back to you in about 15 years on whether our family has any success in this arena.

Am I concerned about rising inflation, absurdly low interest rates, money-printing on steroids across the developed world, a US political agenda favoring higher tax rates, relatively high stock valuations (compared to the past), and increasing political polarization in the US? Yes, I am concerned about those things. But those things don’t have anything to do with my family’s financial goals, so I won’t adjust my investment portfolio based on those concerns.

The last time I wrote about bitcoin on our blog was September 13, 2018. I was dunking on bitcoin back then, gloating about how smart we and our clients were for avoiding this asset during the late-2017 hype that drove bitcoin up to $19,835. That post hasn’t aged very well. And you know what, this post may not age well, either. Predictions are the toughest game in town. An impossible task. I won’t make any price predictions on bitcoin today, but I will share a bit of what I know.

There are a lot of ways to pay for college, and not all of them are good. Student loans are following college grads around for years after graduation, delaying wealth-building and the ability to achieve financial independence.

Mortgage rates are once again at their lowest point in US history. What is a homeowner to do? Still aim to own your home free-and-clear, or keep a mortgage at 2.5% for the next three decades?

Our financial legacies are built over the course of our entire lives. Naturally, we want to be sure that everything will be administered and transferred according to our wishes. But how do we know that will happen when we’re no longer here?

I was talking with a client recently about a home he owns in a major US city (not Minneapolis). I was curious about what the historical price appreciation has been in his market, so I pulled some data on his market. The data on his city fascinated me. I then began wondering how other US cities’ real estate has performed over recent periods.

The topic of risk management is oftentimes misunderstood and misused in the world of financial planning. Risk management, or insurance planning, simply addresses the following question: is there a potential catastrophic financial risk in your life? If the answer is yes, insure that risk. A catastrophic risk would be one that causes substantial, long-lasting financial harm to your financial plan.

Via Sam Ro at Axios: pre-COVID, the US already had a record number of job openings, at over 7.5 million. Today, we are another 22% higher in job openings -- at 9.2 million. The upside of this labor market is the underlying reality that our economy is growing. Wages are going up (but so is inflation).

Tax planning is one of the most misunderstood areas of financial planning. From the complexity of how income taxes, Social Security taxes, and various investment taxes are calculated, to the fact that the tax code changes in some capacity almost every year, it’s no wonder that people are confused when it comes to this subject.

Retirement planning means different things to different people. We all have different ideas of what life should look like after closing the chapter of our careers. However, even with countless unique perspectives, there is one statement that has applied to every person I have ever worked with: “At some point I do not want to HAVE to work or HAVE to save money.”

A few years ago, I watched my then 6-year-old skip gracefully out the front door, across our porch, and finally into our chicken coop. She glided through that door with a twirl—naturally—and emerged a few minutes later with her basket crowded with the freshest eggs imaginable. Her return trip began with the same leap into a skip, but a slight misstep on the porch forced her off-balance for barely a moment…. but it was enough for those precious eggs to spill from the basket onto the porch.