Sharing my latest thoughts on money and life, with an eye to empowering more women to financial confidence. I'VE BEEN PONDERING My email inbox is feeling slightly less jolly this year. It's filled with subject lines like: "Don't let scammers ruin your holidays." "Don't let grinches steal your cheer." "Protect your inner circle from rising scams." "Be aware of payment fraud attempts." And these aren't from professional or industry newsletters. They're from my power company, car insurance...
about 2 months ago • 2 min read
Sharing my latest thoughts on money and life, with an eye to empowering more women to financial confidence. I'VE BEEN PONDERING This is Jeff White, my father. Here's a less staged picture of him, in what I think of as his natural habitat. Our relationship became more than just parent-child when I joined his business back in 1997, when Bill and I moved back to the Philadelphia area to start a family. Working with a parent is definitely... interesting. (If you've ever worked with a parent,...
3 months ago • 2 min read
Sharing my latest thoughts on money and life, with an eye to empowering more women to financial confidence. I'VE BEEN PONDERING As you might imagine, my email inbox has been deluged with summaries of the One Big Beautiful (??) Bill Act. While there are a LOT of provisions in the new law that do all kinds of things🙄, the biggest financial planning impact is likely around taxes. It has taken away the tax uncertainty we were facing (see TAX TIME below), and, whether you find it good or bad, at...
6 months ago • 5 min read
Sharing my latest thoughts on money and life, with an eye to empowering more women to financial confidence. I'VE BEEN PONDERING Did you know that while the human brain is designed to reason, a recent book posits that we were actually built to reason not alone, but with one another? Meghaan Lurtz, PhD explored this in a fascinating article on Substack. She says, "when we try to make decisions in a vacuum, we struggle. In solitary echo chambers, we do even worse." This totally fits with what I...
8 months ago • 3 min read
Sharing my latest thoughts on money and life, with an eye to empowering more women to financial confidence. I'VE BEEN PONDERING Reminder: What the stock and bond markets are doing NOW does not tell us what they will do. Read that again. Markets are forward-looking: an investor buys a stock or bond based on what they think the value will be to them in the future. However, they can only act on the information they have today -- basically their own version of reading the tea leaves. Professor...
9 months ago • 3 min read
Sharing my latest thoughts on money and life, with an eye to empowering more women to financial confidence. I'VE BEEN PONDERING Today I decided to put my thoughts about investing in video format for you. Click on the image below to play. (It's about 7 minutes long.) Below is the image I created from Jason Zweig's Wall Street Journal column that I reference in the video, and here's an unlocked link to the article itself. **Remember that speaking with your financial planner is one of the items...
10 months ago • 1 min read
Sharing my latest thoughts on money and life, with an eye to empowering more women to financial confidence. I'VE BEEN PONDERING Apropos of nothing (!!), I share the recording of the Wellness Webinar we held for clients in January, where my coach Lindsay shares brain and body science about stress, and teaches us a very practical stress management tool to take back a bit of control in what can feel like an unending storm. The stock market has started to react to the uncertainty about our...
11 months ago • 2 min read
Sharing my latest thoughts on money and life with an eye to empowering more women to financial confidence. I'VE BEEN PONDERING One of my favorite personal finance books of recent years, and a blockbuster best seller, is The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel. It’s amazingly insightful about being a human dealing with this thing called money, and also very approachable because (a) there’s very little math in it (!!), and (b) it’s a series of brief essays as opposed to a dense academic tome....
12 months ago • 2 min read
I'M WITH YOU People are feeling all kinds of things since November 6th. Me too, believe me. Bill and I were on a 6-day empty-nester getaway to Paris the week of the election. It felt surreal to be so far away from home, yet have every taxi driver and waiter ask us what we thought. I whiplashed between deep concern for what might come, and sheer wonder at the beauty and history (and delicious food!) around us. On the plane home, I paid for bad internet and read as much as I could to get up to...
about 1 year ago • 3 min read