An Estate Planning Checklist for Your Head and Heart Your estate plan isn’t just about distributing your assets; it’s also about ensuring your loved ones are taken care of, your wishes are honored, and potential complications are avoided. In this comprehensive guide, I’ll walk you through an essential estate planning checklist to help you make…
How to Read Your Oregon PERS Statement – A Step-by-Step Guide The Oregon Public Employee Retirement System (Oregon PERS) is the retirement program for all Oregon’s public service employees. Unlike other states, which have individual pension programs for various professions (one for nurses, one for teachers, one for police/fire, etc.), Oregon has just one pension…
Over the last decade, I’ve noticed a theme when working with my client families. While the question may not come out exactly this way, the essence usually distills to, “How should we allocate our hard-earned dollars?” One of the key concepts in financial management is cash flow – the inflow and outflow of money in…
Highlights After a choppy start to the second quarter, stocks gained meaningfully in June. This marks the third straight quarter of positive returns for stocks, both in the US and internationally. Reversing the trend from last quarter, the US stock market led, followed by developed international, with emerging markets trailing. While fixed-income markets pulled back…
The concept of retirement is undergoing a metamorphosis. Demographic, societal, and workplace trends have all converged to offer a stage of life that is much more fluid and flexible than what most of us previously imagined. In fact, retirement has become a matter of personal definition. If you prefer to listen to this post, click…
In our video “First Step Cash Management: Simplify and Automate Your Finances” you’ll learn about a cash flow plan called First Step, which aims to help individuals align their spending, saving, and investing with their values and goals. Why First Step Cash Management We start by emphasizing the importance of knowing where our money goes…
The Oregon Small Business Development Center (Oregon SBDC) recently recognized Collective Wealth Planning in its success story series. Read a bit about the practice, our humble beginnings, and the ways Oregon SBDC helped the firm thrive from the start: Today we’re thrilled to introduce Oregon SBDC client Brenna Baucum, owner of Collective Wealth Planning in…
If you think money can’t buy happiness, you’re not spending it right. At least, that is the conclusion of researchers Elizabeth Dunn (University of British Columbia) and Michael Norton (Harvard), two rising stars in the world of behavioral science, authors of Happy Money: The Science of Happier Spending. In the book, Dunn and Norton provide an…
Victim of Fraud – What to Do Last year, a dear friend of mine became a victim of fraud. She came across an investment opportunity with a small business promising great returns for initial investors. She wired $100,000, only to find weeks later that the company didn’t exist. When sharing this story with me, she…
Second to income replacement, healthcare coverage is one of the more important planning opportunities to consider as you transition to retirement. Whether you’re working or already retired, this post is designed to give you a high-level overview of Medicare, what Original Medicare covers (and what it doesn’t), and your options around supplemental policies. What is…