Have you ever stopped to consider the role that status plays in your life? Of course, status is evident in our work relationships; supervisor, manager, and president are titles that make it easier to know our place in the hierarchy. But I wonder if you’ve considered how status impacts your financial planning. Is it possible that subconscious pursuits of status …

Retirement can be an amazing time in a person’s life (or so I’m told). Waking up each day with the opportunity to live out your agenda rather than someone else’s is a wonderful type of freedom that everyone should someday have the chance to experience. But like anything in life, there are risks that have the potential to disrupt the …

Beware: I’m going to get existential for a moment. I’ll be quick about it. Beginning in 2007 and through 2009, I found myself having a particular conversation about money with a lot of people. What started as a discussion of the happenings in the markets and economy became a journey into the historical role of gold and The Fed. In …

When I decided to pursue a business career after college, I did so not really knowing what it meant to actually ‘pursue business’. Like most people, I had a vague sense that marketing was involved somehow and that some math must be a part of the deal, but I really didn’t know much more than that. So when I was …

It’s coming, can you feel it? The next recession is getting closer and closer, there’s no doubt. How do I know this? Simply put, recessions happen and we haven’t had one in quite some time, so it’s a safe prediction to make that the passing of each day moves us closer to the next. Are you ready? Before we get …

I often suggest that good financial planning means we die with money left over. Conversely, that must mean that bad financial planning means we run out of money before we die. Of course, omitted from this binary look at the topic is the possibility that you’ll spend your last dollar as your last breath exists your body. Wouldn’t that be …

If you worked one less day per week at your paid job, what would you do with your time?  This can be a fun exercise, but it can also feel like asking you what you’d do if you won the lottery. You imagine all of the wonderful things you’d buy and become caught up in that fantasy only to snap …

The Boston Marathon is an event where otherwise normal people travel great distances, at great expense, to punish themselves physically, mentally, and emotionally for 26.2 uninterrupted miles, sometimes in the rain. The very nature of a marathon race really does beg the question, “Why?” In fact, I asked a marathon runner this question years ago, “Why would you choose to …

There have been a number of recent studies completed to determine what makes us happy. In several studies, it was concluded that quality relationships are most important in determining levels of happiness. Other studies looked at the effect of money on happiness. In fact, research by the Nobel laureate psychologist and economist Daniel Kahneman showed that money increases happiness until about …