Do Annuities Deserve All the Criticism?
Don Sowa always said, there are no inherently bad financial products, just good products used badly. This statement rings especially true with annuities, and the bad wrap they’ve earned largely reflects a misunderstanding of how the product was meant to be used. Donna and Nathan discuss the differe…
Black Friday 1869
Each year on Black Friday American shoppers spend billions of dollars on goods, but what you may not know is that the original Black Friday was anything but a boon for the economy. On this edition of our MoneyTalk Moment in Financial History, Nathan covers the events of Black Friday 1869, the histo…
Repurposing Your 529 Funds
You might think that with the high cost of education today, having too much college savings would be the least of your concerns. But there are many circumstances in which 529 balances remain unused, particularly today when more and more children are opting to forgo college for alternative paths. Do…
A Bad Time for HELOCs
The HELOC is one of the most popular types of home equity loan due to its flexibility, but many who are carrying old balances on their variable rate HELOCs are struggling with unmanageable payments due to our high interest rate environment. Donna and Nathan discuss options for managing variable rat…
Seeking Alternatives
For the past few years we've been adjusting to an unreliable bond market, where alternative approaches to portfolio diversification have become increasingly common. Nathan discusses various categories of liquid alternative investments and how they function differently to achieve portfolio diversifi…
The Final Approach to Retirement
Will I have enough to retire? What will my retirement expenses look like? When planning for retirement, knowing the the right questions to ask is critical to defining and achieving your goals, and with new options like in-service rollovers available, that list of questions is just getting longer. D…
Why Titling Matters
When Shakespeare wrote, "What's in a Name?", he clearly wasn't talking about financial accounts, because the way we title our accounts has great bearing over who controls them, the limits of that control, and their tax treatment. Nathan and Steve take us through some scenarios that highlight the im…
The RMD Conundrum
Since the passing of the SECURE Act 2.0, the IRS age trigger for required minimum distributions has been raised to 73, but having a little extra time to grow your assets doesn’t necessarily mean there will be more money left when you pass. Donna and Nathan discuss RMD planning, and how to use the r…
Timing Medicare & Social Security
Medicare and Social Security are the two government entitlement programs that just about all of us will have to deal with, and when that time comes, we want you to be prepared with the information you’ll need to make the right decision. Donna discusses how to decide when it’s appropriate to file fo…
How to Retire Happy
When we plan for retirement, we tend to spend the majority of our time thinking about money, but research shows that there is much more to a happy retirement than dollars and cents. Nathan interviews Morningstar columnist Christine Benz, author of “How to Retire: 20 Lessons for a Happy, Successful …