Overdue House Update

Almost one year ago, we purchased our long-term family home. It was a major milestone and the accomplishment of my biggest personal goal. I wrote at the time that I believed the endowment effect impacted the seller and how we negotiated a fairer price. I also disclosed how we used a HELOC and a 401k…

Should You Self Insure Your Home?

On a recent episode of the Animal Spirits podcast, my colleagues, Michael and Ben, had an interesting conversation about homeowners insurance rates in Florida. The average homeowners insurance premium in the state is over $9,000/year. Ben asked Michael if there’s a certain level of premium where it makes sense to forgo insurance coverage. As I…

7 Signs Your Advisor is Doing Real Financial Planning

Many financial advisors claim to be financial planners. But a closer look reveals most are giving financial planning lip service at best. Rough drafts of financial projections, constructed with incomplete information and estimates, are a far cry from comprehensive plans. Not to mention that financial planning is a constant and ongoing process, not a one-time…

Consider Firing Your Male Broker, Five Years Later

It’s hard to believe that five years ago, my op-ed, Consider Firing Your Male Broker, was published in the New York Times. I still receive media attention for it from time to time. Last month, I was a guest on NPR’s The Indicator podcast to discuss a new paper about women and investing. While the…

Garbage In, Garbage Out

My Christmas gift this year was an Oura ring. Oura is a health-tracking device you wear all day and night. It measures your sleep patterns, heart rate, activity, heart rate variability, recovery, and a host of other data points. I’ve been curious about health data for about a year. At every physical exam, I am…

Gender Biography Gap

I finished two books over the holidays. Both were about men. Wealthy (or temporarily wealthy), powerful men in the business world. One was Walter Isaacson’s biography of Elon Musk. The other was Michael Lewis’s study of FTX founder and convicted fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried titled Going Infinite. Both were moderately interesting. Lewis has a turn of…

Dear Young Advisor

Next month marks my 20th anniversary working in this profession. I suppose I’m feeling a little nostalgic looking back. This post may be more of a letter to my younger self than to young advisors. Perhaps some of this advice is useful. It certainly would have been for me if I’d been a little less…

Epic Week

The events of this week, at least in the slice of the world I inhabit, have been nothing short of epic. Charlie Munger died, four weeks shy of his 100th birthday. Best known as Warren Buffett’s pithy sidekick at Berkshire Hathaway shareholder meetings, Charlie is on the shortlist of the greatest investors of all time….

Same As Ever: The Perfect Complement to The Psychology of Money

When Morgan Housel published The Psychology of Money, I wrote that it would be the finance book of the year. I grossly underestimated it. Psychology of Money has sold over 4 million copies. It has become my standard gift to graduates and young people searching to learn about money and investing. Now, that gift will…

Should You Be Worried About the US Debt?

The size of the U.S. national debt is getting a lot of attention lately, and for good reason. Deficit spending through the COVID pandemic was enormous, pushing the total outstanding debt to a staggering $31 Trillion, with a T. A better way to measure the size of the debt is as a percentage of our…