Congratulations to our leaders Dylan Potter, CFP® and Craig Cairns for being honored by the Rochester Business Journal and to Brian Lester for being promoted to Chief Investment Officer!
Dylan Potter, CFP®, VP and Wealth Manger, delves into the reasons why you should steer clear of personal finance advice from billionaires and focus on your own financial plan. These insights are rooted in the principles of self-control, understanding your own risk tolerance, and avoiding undue influence from high-profile investors.
When determining your eligibility for a variety of deductions, credits, and retirement plans, you will often come across terms such as AGI, taxable income, and MAGI. Let’s explore what each of these terms mean, how to compute them, and why they matter.
I don’t know about you, dear reader, but lately it seems the volume of spam I have been receiving has ballooned wildly. Spam certainly was not born with the advent of the internet and has been a reality of the connected world even before most households had an AOL installation disc arrive in the mail. Remember chain letters? However, just this year I have noticed more and more phishing emails are getting through the spam blocker on both personal and professional inboxes.
While known risks like recessions are widely discussed, the most consequential risks may be those not currently on our radar. Dylan Potter, Vice President and Wealth Manager at Howe & Rusling, shares a story from his time as a U.S. Army Ranger detailing how the most perilous risks often go unnoticed and how this applies to your portfolio.
Whether it’s reading neurosurgeon Sanjay Gupta’s Keep Sharp, or listening to Dr. Peter Attia (author of Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity) on Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard, a favorite podcast of mine, or simply contemplating the many conversations I have with the older people and clients in my life on a daily basis, I have been devouring everything I can on this complex and interesting topic.
With earnings season winding down and this week’s relatively light economic calendar, the talk of the week has been around Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell’s speech at Jackson Hole which is underway as of the publishing of this article. One of these days, speeches by Federal Reserve Open Market Committee (FOMC) members and monetary policy decisions may once again be humdrum affairs which don’t compel regular newsletter updates, but that time has not yet come.
In ancient Rome, the generals who returned from victorious military campaigns were celebrated with grand parades, known as triumphs. After arriving home, the Roman general would also be given a slave, known as an Auriga, by the Roman Senate. Each Auriga was charged with a simple task: as the victory parade progressed through the streets of Rome, every so often, whisper in the general’s ear, “Memento Homo.”
Is it the best of times or the worst of times in the economy? It seems to depend on what data you review. On the negative side of the scale, the Conference Board’s Leading Economic Index is deeply negative, and the US Treasury yield curve is deeply inverted. We have not seen such stark indicators without a resulting recession in the last 50 years. On the other side of the scale, the S&P 500 and Nasdaq indices are up double digits year-to-date while the unemployment rate is still historically low and inflation, as measured by the year-over-year Consumer Price Index (CPI), is falling and has been for a year since peaking in June 2022. In fact, due to falling inflation, the year-over-year measure of US real (inflation-adjusted) average hourly earnings is positive after two years in the negative. Is it possible that the negative indicators are wrong this time?
Two first-time Wimbledon champions were crowned last week, the oldest tennis tournament in the world (1877!). Carlos Alcaraz defeated seven-time Wimbledon champion Novak Djokovic, and Marketa Vondrousova became the first unseeded woman to ever win.
