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It’s always fun to see reactions from people I meet when I tell them what I do for my work.  The title “financial planner or financial advisor” means different things to different people.  A common response I hear is a question regarding a short-term investment idea they heard from a financial pundit (usually on TV).  The details are different, but the category

Young families with an eye to the future are faced with a daunting choice – to save earnestly for a secure retirement or to save for their children’s education. Can you do both?

You may have heard statistics or evidence that multitasking can actually make people less efficient. Actually, in many cases that’s true. Generally speaking, multitasking decreases the level of knowledge and understanding in a given task; and, sometimes it can lead to doing many things but not really accomplishing anything.

In the world of financial planning, it’s easy to think that the output of our work is a document called a financial plan that outlines where an individual or family is today, where they would like to be in the future, and what steps need to be taken to get there.  While that is part of what we do, the real meat of what we do is the ongoing adjustments that are made to the plan.

This chart gives some great insights into long-term investing.  The two numbers listed on each bar are the highest and lowest returns for stocks, bonds, and a 50/50 blend of stocks and bonds over rolling periods of time between 1950 and 2014.  Rather than focusing on average returns, this chart shows the extremes.  The largest 1-year gain in stocks was 51% while the largest 1-yea