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...
3 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...
4 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...
5 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....
6 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...
8 months ago • 3 min read
I'VE BEEN PONDERING “It would seem those who are best at systematically saving aren’t so good at systematically spending.” You know who you are. Or maybe you don’t! Let me help: you worked hard to save your entire adult life. You were always conscious of your cash flow and conscientious about making sure you lived within your means. You value having money and assets so that you’ll be OK in the future. Now you’re a bit older. You’ve left your primary career behind, or you’re close to doing so....
12 months ago • 2 min read
I'VE BEEN PONDERING Perhaps it's being in middle age, but I feel I am having more and more conversations with friends and clients about death. These are actual conversations I've had in the past week: the shock of a friend dying young, the reality that one spouse is likely to die before the other, the tragedy of unnecessary violent deaths, and the gift of being with a parent as their time comes to an end. Of course there are also money aspects. It doesn't seem right that death should be a...
about 1 year ago • 2 min read
“THE ACQUISITION OF MEMORIES” They say that a checkbook and a calendar never lie. If that's true, and I believe it is, then we should occasionally ask ourselves an important question: If an impartial observer tallied up how you spend your time and money, what would they say is important to you? While I'm certainly hopeful they'd say that you spend your time and money in complete alignment with what's most important to you, I'm guessing most of us would feel that we could do a bit better. I...
over 1 year ago • 3 min read
I'VE BEEN PONDERING With the stock market hovering around all-time highs again (see 2023 returns below), it's natural to wonder what's next. Will the market continue to climb, or will we experience yet another decline? If we follow the constant doom and gloom headlines, we're likely to believe that it will be the latter. Of course, the truth is that nobody knows, which of course offers no comfort whatsoever. But negative headlines are a dime a dozen no matter where the market stands at any...
over 1 year ago • 3 min read