The Colby family van (affectionately called “the Party Bus”) was recently totaled in a car accident. Thankfully, there were no major injuries to the passengers, but it was a complete wreck of an excellent motor carriage that had faithfully transported my family 130,000+ miles over the past eight years. Once the shock of the accident had worn off, I began the disheartening task of finding a replacement.

My family and I are currently going through old bins that have been collecting dust in storage for years. As one can imagine, it's a long process that brings with it many difficult determinations about what to keep (always too much), and what to toss (never enough).

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?

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.

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.

We talk often about how having a grasp of your month-to-month spending plan is paramount to your retirement planning success. What we mean is this: a key component to creating a rock-solid financial legacy is understanding how much wealth is needed month-to-month to provide the lifestyle you want when you are no longer earning income.

Over the coming weeks, we will be reviewing what we consider to be the seven major areas of personal finance. Many of you have seen our Pyramid of Financial Planning below, as we use it often to demonstrate how the various pieces of wealth management are inter-related.

A look at The Wealth Group's GOOD news from 2020.

This past weekend, my family and I did some post-summer/pre-fall outside work. We were digging through a bed of rocks that surrounds our house, which meant tearing through the lining underneath and burrowing 4-6 inches deep. My 13-year-old paused for a moment and asked, "Isn't there an easier way to do this?"