Thoughts On Money [TOM]

I love good questions. The type of questions that stop you in your tracks and really make you think. Not a cornering question nor combative one, but an inquisitive one that is birthed from the inquirer’s true curiosity. For me, this is how I learn – pulling on a particular topic thread to get a deeper understanding of the nuance. Sean Latimer is my most frequent co-host on the Thoughts On Money Po...

Today I’d like to discuss interest rates, which have been a hot topic in markets. I want us all to understand both the basics of interest rates and how interrelated interest rates are to the markets at large. To me, Rube Goldberg’s art expresses both the complexity and chain reaction nature of interest rates, as well as the simple results/outcomes they produce. A home purchaser might see their mor...

In the language of computers, you have a binary system made up entirely of zeros and ones. It took me a long time to realize that the language of financial planning is not binary. For a perfectionist, it is very hard to break out of the mode of complete optimization and maximization. As I’ve matured as a planner, I’ve learned how incredibly important the qualitative factors, the psychology, and th...

Last week I talked about one of our family traditions growing up – watching Jeopardy together. One of our other favorite pass times was and is, playing cribbage. Whenever we’d have friends over we’d teach them how to play so they could join in the fun. Cribbage isn’t go-fish, but it also isn’t bridge. All that to say, you could easily teach the basics of the game in 10 minutes. We always started w...

Today we will pick up part two of Hodgepodge and Potpourri. As you may recall from part one, watching Jeopardy was a family tradition growing up at my house.  Nostalgia has led me to borrow these popular Jeopardy categories - Hodgepodge and Potpourri - as an excuse for me to riff on a few unrelated finance topics that have caught my interest recently.  So, let’s jump right into it and pick up wher...

I grew up watching Jeopardy with my family; it was a family tradition. I remember being amazed by how many answers my parents knew. Every so often, I’d sneak in with the right answer on a sports trivia category. This time together would eventually morph into family Trivial Pursuit (the board game) nights, where I’d team up with mom or dad versus one of my siblings. I remember as a young adult bein...

A recession is coming!!  Yikes! When?  Not sure.  How severe?  Couldn’t tell ya.  How long will it last?  Your guess is as good as mine.  When you have an event that is inevitable, but the severity and timing are impossible to know, what do you do? You prepare, you don’t prognosticate.  Think about it, we prepare for all sorts of things Mother Nature throws our way and preparing for a recession is...

Timing is… Everything. That’s right. Timing is EVERYTHING. When I proposed to my wife – perfect location, the right words, and… perfect timing. One of our favorite dinners to cook at home is barbecued tri-tip. The key to a great tri-tip? Timing. The right temp, knowing when to flip, how long to let it cook, and the amount of time to let it rest. Again, timing is everything. Getting that perfect st...

A lot of my friends are real estate investors. They love it; they have a true passion for investing in real estate. Some flip homes for short-term profits and others are buy-and-hold long-term investors. Personally, I think sometimes this zeal and/or passion can distract one from realizing why they invest in real estate. In the past, when I’ve inquired, I would get answers like: “I love real prope...

When it comes to financial markets, many of us have these same particular dates seared into our brains: The Great Depression 1929. Black Monday, October 19, 1987. The Dot-Com Bubble of the late ‘90’s. The Financial Crisis of 2008. These are all memorable dates of when the stock market misbehaved. It wasn’t the entirety of the financial markets that took a beating during these events, but rather ju...

I'll be upfront with you. I had reservations about tackling today's topic here on Thoughts On Money [TOM]. Why, you might ask? Because my goal in this communication is to translate complex financial topics into something palatable, understandable, and relatable. AND these topics - the Federal Reserve, interest rates, and the yield curve - are intimidating topics for me to try to translate. They al...

There are different ways people deal with stress – some healthy, some not. Me? I like to organize. Yup, as weird as that sounds, when I’m stressed, sometimes organizing the junk drawer is my only source of relief. Something about just putting everything in its place gives me a little peace. A few years back, we installed some ceiling racks in the garage. Putting everything in storage bins and tuck...

In keeping with the theme of the famed March Madness Tournament, today we are going to talk basketball, the evolution of the investment advice industry, and why you should seek out your own Dream Team. So, without further ado… Links mentioned in this episode: http://thoughtsonmoney.com http://thebahnsengroup.com

I want you to imagine that I have never heard of a casino. I have no idea what a casino is, and it is your job to explain it to me. So, you start by explaining that a casino is a business, a business made up of a collection of games, games of chance. These games pit the customer up against the casino and wagers are placed, a type of organized gambling. If you left the description there, you would...

There's a question we’ve been getting multiple times a day recently:  I am concerned with everything going on in the world right now; don’t you think we should adjust my portfolio accordingly? I first want to say this is (1) a good question and (2) absolutely a valid question.  In life, when we feel threatened it is our natural instinct to react – to feel inclined to do something. Join us for toda...

I knew I wanted to be a financial advisor, but I just couldn’t figure out a way to get my foot in the door. There were not any job postings stating, “Looking for Financial Advisor, No Experience Required.” It was that chicken-or-egg problem, I needed the job to get the experience, and I needed the experience to get the job. So, I settled. I broadened my search from the specific role [financial adv...

As we get older, we acquire quite a robust library of life lessons. My life lessons tend to be accompanied by a vivid memory of when I first acquired each particular lesson/truth. For today's topic, I'd like to recall a memory from January 2020.   I was sitting in my office in Newport Beach, conducting a review meeting with a client that had been with our firm for less than a year. The meeting was...

To Sell, or Not To Sell, That is the Question...   I met with a few friends this week. It was a bit of an advice gathering, a meeting of the minds of sorts. They've owned a property for some time and were contemplating a sale. One of the primary objectives was just to relieve themselves of all of the general maintenance and the burden of being a landlord. The fact pattern made a lot of sense – the...

Recruit Paul Revere. We need to make sure everyone knows. What’s all the fuss about? Well, one particular asset class – a popular one at that – had one of its worst years in 2021, and no one is talking about it. How in the world is this flying under the radar? Why are we not sounding the alarm? A bit dramatic? Of course, but hear me out. Links mentioned in this episode: http://thoughtsonmoney.com...

Trevor and Deiya dive deep into the value and dangers of debt Links mentioned in this episode: http://thoughtsonmoney.com http://thebahnsengroup.com

It was the Summer of 2018 when Thoughts On Money was born. Brian Tong, Director of Strategy & Communications at The Bahnsen Group, was willing to entertain an idea I had for writing a weekly note on financial planning, what came to be affectionately known as “TOM.” Some three years later, and Brian (along with Glen Hall) has edited, published, and recorded about 150+ of these little TOM notes....

In finance, inflation is this "not-enough" villain that's always hiding in the shadows. We are good at figuring out how much stuff we can buy today; that mental math is easy. BUT this idea that our money loses its potency over time makes it very hard for us to figure out what we can afford tomorrow.  We are all looking for practical ways to combat the fact that a dollar is a dollar today, just as...

Great Service There’s this old adage in customer service that says, “under-promise and over-deliver.” Why? Because so much of happiness, or contentment, is derived from outcomes – how things turn out – being better than what one may have expected. Imagine the opposite; how does it feel when someone overpromises and under-delivers? Frustrating, disappointing, annoying, arghh! And the list goes on....

Today on Thoughts On Money, I bring you another podcast interview with one of my colleagues at The Bahnsen Group, Kimberlee Davis. Kimberlee is a Managing Director, a Partner, The Fiscal Feminist, a Private Wealth Advisor, and she carries a myriad of other titles, roles, and accomplishments, both professionally and personally. What you don’t see on her business card or resume, though, is that Kimb...

For the month of October, my church is reading through Proverbs together. Conveniently, October has 31 days, and the book of Proverbs has 31 chapters. The marching orders are to read one chapter a day and to extract one nugget of wisdom to meditate on. Yesterday was day 13 (October 13th), and this verse jumped out to me, Proverbs 13:11: Wealth gained hastily will dwindle, but whoever gathers littl...