This week on Take 5, Ryan Detrick, Chief Market Strategist at Carson Group, and Sonu Varghese, VP, Global Macro Strategist at Carson Group, discuss the state of the U.S. consumer. Talking points include: Retail sales and restaurant activity remain robust, supported by strong balance sheets …
Your Health Savings Account (HSA) is a cornerstone of your benefits planning. The money is triple tax-advantaged – contributions, growth and withdrawals for qualified expenses are not taxed. This account is like nothing else, and you need to take full advantage of it.
The so-called “Peanut Butter Manifesto” written by a Yahoo! Executive in 2006 gave us a term that hasn’t worn thin yet. The “Peanut Butter Approach” is a derisive term used in business to describe spreading anything – money, energy, time – too far and too thin to be effective or useful.
But when the SECURE Act goes into effect – expected on Jan. 1, 2020 – beneficiaries will have to fully distribute taxable accounts within 10 years of the account holder’s death. That could push your loved ones into a higher tax bracket.
Estate planning and end of life planning are about taking control of your situation. Death and long-term care later in life might be hard to fathom right now, but we can’t put off planning out of fear of the unknown or because it’s unpleasant. Don’t wait for life to happen to you, though.
Return on Investment (ROI) is a term you learn about 5 minutes into your first class in business school. Maybe the business model is elegant and the organization is streamlined, but that all begs the question: what is the ROI? How much will we make?
There’s more to this central question – rent/lease versus buy – than simply the numbers in your bank account. What you don’t spend in cash, you may spend in time and energy; what you save in this market you may pay for a year from now when the market is depressed.
