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Retirement can sneak up on you.

In our client meetings, the term “wealth” is often tossed around somewhat loosely. We talk about building wealth, managing wealth, enhancing wealth, and preserving wealth as if the concepts are universally understood. But what exactly is wealth? It’s such a vague term that every person has a slightly different meaning.

Understanding how your savings can work for you is an important part of creating your financial future. If you’re curious about personal finance and want to learn more, here are some common questions we hear from new clients.

As a young parent looking to the future, you may be faced with a daunting choice: do you save earnestly to secure your retirement, or save to fund your children’s education? 

If anything good has come from the last few years of uncertainty and volatility, it’s that many of us are becoming more financially literate. We’re more aware of our finances and are better at prioritizing our expenditures. We’re also more aware of how important it is to save for the future, while still enjoying the present moment.

It’s believed that retirement planning as we currently know it didn’t really exist until a few decades ago. Up to that point, people worked until 65 and then sailed into retirement on a pension plan.

At the end of 2019, President Trump signed a federal spending package that included the Setting Every Community Up for Retirement Enhancement (SECURE) Act. A provision in this legislation effectively eliminated the "stretch IRA," an estate-planning strategy that allowed an IRA to continue benefiting from tax-deferred growth, potentially for decades.

When people decide that they need to eat healthier or lose weight, they know that they have to change their behavior. That’s easier said than done for most, which is why programs like Nutrisystem and Weight Watchers are so popular; because they provide a system for automatically controlling portions and nutrition.

All investors – be they conservative, moderate or aggressive – need to understand that the level of returns they expect to generate is directly related to the amount of risk they are willing to assume – the higher the return, the higher the amount of risk one needs to take.

We all have different philosophies when it comes to investing our money. Some of us prefer to manage our investments ourselves, while others may want advice from a professional. Regardless of how you manage your money, we’re all human. Which is to say, we all have biases that can affect the way we invest.