The Tax Alpha Opportunity: Advanced Strategies for Tax-Savvy Investing
It’s a familiar story: a teenager excitedly counts the hours from his first job, eagerly anticipating his first fat paycheck, only to feel his spirits come crushing down when he sees how much Uncle Sam has taken out. Fast forward forty years, and many Americans revisit that very same disappointment when they discover the taxes […]
What Is Direct Indexing?
In 1924, mutual funds made it possible for everyday investors to buy a basket of stocks in one shot. In 1976, index mutual funds took it a step further by letting you buy “the market” at low cost. In 1993, ETFs added intraday trading and even better tax efficiency. The latest step in that evolution […]
Why Stocks and Bonds Might Not Be Enough: The Case for Alternative Investments
Remember when retirement planning involved little more than clipping bond coupons and counting on a pension? Grandpa’s biggest market‐risk decision was whether to hold his savings in 8 % CDs or 9 % CDs. Then, in the 1970s, the 401(k) was born, and with it came a seismic shift in how Americans approached retirement. As […]
Why Portfolio Diversification is So Important
Let’s go back to the spring of 2000. Everyone was chasing dot-com stocks, and the sky seemed the limit. People were convinced they’d retire at 35 thanks to their tech portfolios. So many investors were all-in on a couple of flashy Internet companies. For a while, account balances soared. But then the bubble burst, and […]
Tax-Smart Investing: Matching the Right Assets and Accounts
In 1999, tech investor Peter Thiel put less than $2,000 into a Roth IRA. Fast forward ~20 years, and that Roth IRA ballooned to $5 billion (yes, with a “b”) tax-free. How? Thiel used his Roth IRA to buy dirt-cheap startup shares (think early Facebook), and all the growth happened inside the Roth wrapper. Because […]
The Power of Starting Early: How Compound Growth Can Transform Your Investments
Albert Einstein allegedly called compound interest the “eighth wonder of the world” – “He who understands it earns it; he who doesn’t pays it.” Well, I don’t know if we can’t verify he actually said that, but the quote really resonates because it highlights how powerful compounding can be over time. Because here’s the thing: […]
Where to Start when Starting out Investing
The Lessons We Need to Learn Before Investing The investing life cycle, as I like to call it, seems to start in the same place for everyone. That is our first interaction with money and what to do with it: spend it or save it. Traditionally, when we were all young and reached some type […]