Where should you go on your next vacation trip?  Your satisfaction and enjoyment level may depend on who you are, according to psychologist Joshua Jackson, associate professor at Washington University in St. Louis.  He identifies five core personality types—extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism and openness. And then he identifies a great potential vacation destination for people with each personality trait.

Read More “Fit Travel To Personality”

If you believe that the trend is your friend, then perhaps the U.S. stock market is in for an excellent fourth quarter. U.S. equity markets suffered small losses in the first quarter, followed by decent single-digit gains in the second quarter.  Now that the third quarter is in the books, a somewhat larger gain has put stocks in solid positive territory for the year.

Read More “2018 Third Quarter Market Report”

You’ve probably heard the saying “Hindsight is 20/20.” Well, this is especially true when it comes to retirement. Many people are entering retirement and discovering several things they wish they’d done differently. Luckily, you can avoid problems in your own retirement by learning from the mistakes of the millions of people who have gone before you. Here are the top four regrets in retirement.

Read More “The Top 4 Regrets In Retirement”

No one likes to think about the day when they will no longer be able to take care of themselves, but the truth is that 63% of today’s 65-year-olds will require long-term care at some point. (1) When you are healthy and thriving, it’s easy to focus solely on building your savings to provide for your basic retirement expenses and forget about the potential need for long-term care as you age. But no matter what your health looks like today, it’s important to have a plan to pay for long-term care costs. Do you know what your long-term care options are? What strategy is the best fit for you?

Read More “What Is Your Long-Term Care Plan?”

As a new retiree, you are reaping the rewards of your decades of hard work and basking in your new season of life. It would be easy to think that all your years of financial planning, saving, reviewing, and strategizing are over, but that’s not the case! At Colleen Weber CPA, LLC, we specialize in serving people who are newly retired. After working with hundreds of people to prepare for and achieve their ideal retirement, we’ve discovered that, while all have unique concerns and needs, many face the same five financial planning challenges.

Read More “The Top Five Financial Planning Challenges Of New Retirees”

We’re halfway through 2018, and after a booming 2017, our economy has seen its fair share of ups and downs, market volatility, trade uncertainty, and record unemployment numbers. However, as most individual Americans see it, things are looking up. Here’s a bird’s-eye view of our economy as we reach the mid-year mark of 2018. Read More “Our Mid-Year 2018 Economic Update”

Over the course of my 15 years in this industry, I’ve seen my fair share of successes, hurdles, and mistakes. While working with clients, when we talk a lot about what success looks like, it’s just as important to know the potential potholes and how to avoid making the mistakes others have made.

While there’s a long list of mistakes I’ve seen, I believe there are five crucial mistakes I believe are important to avoid making. Read More “The 5 Biggest Financial Mistakes I See”

By Colleen Weber, CFP®, CPA

Regardless of whether you are an avid reader of Market Watch or just tune in to the nightly news every now and then, you know that 2017 was a banner year for stocks. In fact, both the Dow Jones and the S&P 500 celebrated the launch of 2018 by reaching record highs¹ and until the beginning of February 2018, we were experiencing the second-longest bull market since 1929. Read More “Is Your Retirement Plan Ready for a Market Downturn in 2018?”

How to Argue

These days, it seems like everybody is arguing about everything, and with perhaps a bit more… energy than in years past.  And it turns out that most of us are going about our arguments all wrong.

Author Daniel Pink has pointed out that most of the arguments going on today involve two people articulating their points in an attempt to convince the other person, while hardly listening to the arguments being made by the other person.  Both sides are assuming that the other person is ignorant of the facts, and try to provide the facts they think are missing—to a person who believes he or she has superior facts, and therefore is not likely to be convinced.

Read More “How to Argue”

The Luck Factor

Why are some people wealthier or more successful than others?  The default explanation has always been that the wealthier among us are more diligent and/or smarter or more talented than the less-wealthy, so that the cream eventually rises to the top.

The problem with this explanation is that the statistical variation in wealth is far greater than could be explained by all the observed variances in work, talent or intelligence.

Read More “The Luck Factor”