Spring: the season of growth and revival. After a long, cold winter, nothing feels better than cleaning up and getting organized. It’s the perfect juncture, nestled between the beginning of the year and summertime, to make changes to your current routine and establish new habits that are a better fit for your future by not only refreshing your home, but revamping your finances as well.
Marriage and Social Security Retirement Benefits
Since Social Security benefits are often a substantial part of your cash flow during retirement, it’s important to understand how they can be impacted by marriage and divorce. Every relationship and financial situation is different, so it’s wise to be prepared to make well-informed decisions about your benefits.
Psychology and Investing
In a previous blog, The Psychology of Investing, we discussed how the concepts of loss aversion, recency bias, and selective memory can impact an investment strategy and tolerance for risk. None of us are immune to these potential psychological traps, so it’s important to be aware of the underlying feelings motivating our investment decisions. It’s a challenging but necessary exercise to separate our rational, analytical mind from our emotional response to the highs and lows of market fluctuations (and any other life circumstances we may be navigating at the time). In many ways, investing isn’t only about how the market behaves, but how we react to watching our wealth rise and fall as well. With this in mind, let’s further examine how our conscious and unconscious perceptions are intertwined with the choices we make for our investment portfolios.
Managing Finances for a Loved One in Cognitive Decline
Knowing a loved one is going through cognitive decline is a difficult situation on its own made even more challenging when you consider how it will affect their finances. Problems related to money management, from unpaid bills and abnormal spending to confusion over their accounts and missing money, are often one of the first indicators that something is amiss. Fortunately, if your loved one is heading towards a dementia diagnosis of some kind or has already received one, there are steps you can take to protect their financial assets and ensure they’re properly taken care of when they’re no longer able to care for themselves.
High Earners and Health Savings Accounts
High earners are often looking for ways to strategically save on taxes while boosting their financial outlook. Health savings accounts (HSAs) are a great option for accomplishing this because they provide an uncommon three-point tax benefit: contributions reduce your taxable income, investments within the account grow tax-free, and, as long as you spend the funds on qualified medical expenses, the withdrawals are tax-free too. Additionally, HSAs have fewer restrictions and more benefits than flexible savings accounts (FSAs).
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