Keen On Retirement

Coulda. Shoulda. Woulda. Three words we never want to hear from our Keen Wealth clients who are well into their retirements. And, I’m happy to say, three words we don’t hear very often! But we do work with retirees who tell us that there are things they wish they’d done differently. What’s interesting is that the major retirement regrets that clients share don’t really have to do with how their financial planning played out. Instead, these folks regret decisions they did, and didn’t, make that impacted how they lived in retirement.

If you’ve started to receive 2018 tax info from your financial institutions and can already feel a sense of dread building, let me try to put a more positive spin on this process. At Keen Wealth, we like to remind clients that, to some extent, taxes are a problem of prosperity. Sticking with disciplined savings and investment strategies, even during volatility, could help generate wealth and security for your family in the long run. Taxes are just part of the price tag that comes with achieving that dream retirement scenario.

On today’s show, we discuss how charitable giving factors into your year-end tax planning preparation. A little forethought and some guidance from a financial professional can help you maximize your generosity – which could make a big difference in another person’s life this holiday season. According to experts, giving could give your own health and happiness a big boost as we head into the new year.

I suspect that a month or two from now, your inbox and social media feeds will be full of year-end tax-planning checklists and advice articles. But one of our mantras at Keen Wealth is, “get out ahead of issues as early as we can.” So on today’s show, we help our listeners get a jump on year-end tax planning. If you put off addressing these important items, you’re not just wasting time. You could be losing money.

Nothing quite that widespread or dramatic has rocked the internet so far this year, but that doesn’t mean we can all start relaxing about cybersecurity. In fact, some of the scams that are making the rounds right now mix online and offline tricks to try to capture your most important information. I received one in my own home mailbox recently!

More often than not, the milestones we look back on in the financial services industry are negative in nature: Black Monday in 1987, the dot com bubble burst around 2000, the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008, The Great Recession of 2007 – 2009, the Flash Crash of 2010. Even as we remember how these events made life incredibly difficult for a lot of folks in the moment, the economic lessons we learn tend to trend positive: time and time again, our resilient economy continues its long-term upward trajectory.