An investor reading the news this morning was likely dismayed to find reports like this from Reuters: “Wall Street fell sharply on Thursday, with the S&P 500 and the Dow Industrials suffering their worst daily percentage drops in about six weeks.”

If you were given a day off work to sit down with all of those financial questions and to-do lists you’ve been putting off, would you take it? This week’s New York Times Money section features a bank that offers its employees a day off to take care of their “financial wellness.”

According to the latest survey, about 31% of Americans say they have at least six months’ worth of expenses saved up. It’s not as many of you as we’d like, but it is a significant improvement on the 22% who answered the same way in 2015.

I am fairly certain there are new job positions open in Washington D.C. for legislation-namers.

Financial planning isn't really about the projections...

You might not have noticed the seismic shift in your world last week, but something big happened that could make the last 40 years or so of your life a lot less stressful. After years of battling, arguing, and dithering, a new law went into effect that prohibits your financial advisor from trying to sell you on all sorts of expensive nonsense in your retirement account.

Last summer I wrote a few posts to help you dip your toes into the shallow waters of investment jargon. You might (or might not) find the jargon useful, but there is a lot to be said for not feeling like you are in over your head when discussing your own investments. So today, I've dragged out a slightly fusty standby—Earnings Per Share...

Anyone who has tried following the stock markets for even a relatively short period of time will have discovered two things:

1. There is always a new, unexpected force wreaking havoc with stock or bond prices; and
2. After a while, it all begins to look eerily familiar.

In his post this morning, investment professional Ben Carlson writes, "Investors with a truly diversified portfolio are always going to hate something that they own." I love this sentence. It's absolutely true —and not by chance. Diversifying a portfolio means actually planning to have some crappy investment in place at all times.

As I write this, my partner is on his way to a meeting with one of our clients with a bottle of vintage champagne in hand. We don't bring champagne to every client meeting (though, it would be an interesting marketing ploy). But these clients have been working with us a number of years and have just recently topped $1 million...