The Consulate Journal is our written blog, dedicated to educating our audience on a wide range of topics. Sometimes we’ll be sharing our financial planning philosophies, and other times sharing our views of money and its place in our lives. Most often, we’ll be sharing specific and actionable financial planning strategies that we use with our clients.
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The New World of Charitable Giving
There are many cool ways to get the greatest bang for your charitable giving buck, and this article will explore two techniques that are simple, relatively new, and effective. First is the Qualified Charitable Distribution (QCD) from an IRA. Unfortunately,…
Read MoreInvestor Poison
If you are an investor and you want to make good investments, make sure you know how to deal with Investor Poison. Investor Poison is the media that throws story after story at you to elicit a response from you. Why would they do that?…
Read MoreEquifax Data Breach Settlement – What do you need to do?
Equifax Data Breach Settlement What do you need to do? 147 million American’s data was stolen from Equifax in 2017. The data maintained by a credit bureau is immense and put all people affected by this breach at serious…
Read MoreWhat to Do With an Existing 401(k) Balance
On a weekly basis, we answer many personal finance questions, either for our clients or for radio listeners. The most common question asked is what to do with an existing 401(k) balance that was accrued when working for a former…
Read MoreThe 5-Year Roth IRA Rule
Most people know that Roth individual retirement accounts (IRAs) have a “5-year rule,” that is, you must have owned your Roth IRA for at least 5 years and be over the age of 59.5 years to withdraw earnings tax-free during…
Read MoreA Voters Must Read to Tax History
There is an old saying that is worth remembering when it comes to income taxes: “Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” As increasingly more politicians demand that the rich pay their “fair share,” it would…
Read MoreInertia: The Number 1 Enemy of Personal Finance
To an investor, the main obstacles to wise investing are greed and fear. How often do people buy stock simply because they think that they are going to make a significant amount of money? Greed can make the most rational of investors…
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