“When is the best time to buy a house?” “When is the best time to have kids?” “When is the best time to pivot your career?” “When is the best time to get back into the market?” I love a good timing question and my favorites are questions like these. Questions that involve decisions, the quality of which will be... Read More
In Our Bear Market Playbook, we included rebalancing as part of the game plan when markets drop. Often overlooked as obvious and boring, it's effective and, therefore, not to be neglected. Most of the time, rebalancing is a risk management strategy as stocks get sold to fund other portfolio diversifiers. But during a market downturn, like Q1 2020, there is... Read More
Dimensional Fund Advisors (DFA), an asset manager we utilize in our client portfolios, produced a webinar for clients that focused on putting the recent market volatility in perspective. While DFA’s performance track record speaks for itself, what sets them apart in the industry is their ability to assimilate complex historical data into intuitive themes that allow investors to achieve superior... Read More
This post isn’t meant to minimize the human impact that the Coronavirus has on those affected but simply to share perspective on the impact of the outbreak to the markets and a well-diversified investment portfolio. With the coronavirus pandemic now impacting the entire globe, markets across the world are reacting. As of Tuesday’s close, the S&P 500 index is off 26% from... Read More
This post isn’t meant to minimize the human impact that the Coronavirus has on those affected but simply share perspective on the impact of the outbreak to the markets and a well-diversified investment portfolio. With Coronavirus fears dominating the headlines this week and pushing the markets into correction territory (defined as down 10% or more) it’s worth reviewing some... Read More
Previously, we’ve posted about the importance of giving health care costs and the plan decisions on the open market appropriate context when considering your ability to retire. Today, we want to discuss what may previously have been deemed a “too expensive” option: COBRA - because at least at Intel, it may no longer be the most expensive. Selecting an option for health insurance in retirement or during a gap in employment is always a concern for our... Read More
In this post, we provide actionable items that you can do to help reduce your tax bill in any season of life, as well as actions to take in the three phases of your financial life – working, at retirement, and in retirement. As humans, it’s in our DNA to crave action in moments of uncertainty. It’s the fight or flight... Read More
In a decade of working with Intel employees to help them understand their employer benefits and make smart financial decisions, we’ve analyzed nearly all the elements of Intel’s benefit package and documented most of it on our blog along the way. This post is meant to be a summary of all the tools, resources, and topics we’ve covered over the... Read More
The new year kicks off a lot of exciting changes to the Intel benefits plan. We’ve written about changes to the 401k, Employee Stock Purchase Plan, and SERPLUS (to name a few). What we haven’t touched on yet is the change to Intel’s HSA provider. As a reminder, an HSA is a Health Savings Account and is offered to employees... Read More
Checklists are a great tool for year-end tax planning so I’m writing to share two that we regularly use. Whether you’re a corporate employee, a business owner, or you are retired, it is likely that there are tax optimization opportunities to consider implementing before the end of the year. It is also likely that the optimization that is best for... Read More
