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…
Changes in Attitude
Growing up, one of my friends was obsessed with Jimmy Buffett’s silly song, Cheeseburger in Paradise. On the way to school, we played it on the car radio, clapping and belting out “I like mine with lettuce and tomato, Heinz 57 and french fried potato”. Buffett’s laid-back tropical rock tunes have been a constant backdrop…
Church of Apple
In first grade, my elementary school opened a new campus. It had a computer lab stocked with Apple MacIntosh computers. For one hour each week, we learned coding language on an application called Logo Writer. If we were lucky, the teacher would let us play Oregon Trail when our assignments were complete. I remember the…
