Articles by Oakleigh Wealth
Making Work Optional
This seemingly complicated question can be boiled down to a simple, but powerful metric: your Total term score.
This single number estimates the number of years a person could live on his or her current assets if they did not grow. This includes your cash, investments, business value, and real estate equity. While this key metric is not terribly difficult to calculate, it is powerful in its simplicity and its nuances can lead to very interesting discussions.
A Transparent Look at “Fee-Only” Financial Advising
There are so many different types of “financial advisors” in the marketplace, there’s no wonder that many folks lump them all together into one. Tell someone you’re a financial advisor at a party and they’ll either ask you for your latest stock tip, or they’ll quietly shift their wallet to their front pocket so they can keep an eye on it! In my experience, sadly, the latter is probably the more rational response!
When can I afford to Retire? Part 3: Expenses
Making the transition from building your savings to spending it down can be a jarring one, but arming yourself with knowledge about your actual expenses can give you the confidence to make the transition, which may even be feasible sooner than you think.
Can I Afford to Retire? Part 2: Income
Once you’ve given some thought to what your ideal retirement looks like (see part 1), answering the question “When can I afford to retire?” becomes an exercise in comparing expected future expenses with expected future income over the rest of your life and your spouse’s life. In this second part, we’ll look at the income side of the equation and ask, “where is the money going to come from?”
Can I Afford to Retire (and when)?
“When can I afford to retire?” is the question that drives more individuals into the office of a financial planner than any other. The sooner you start asking it, the better. Too often, the more tangible and immediate concerns of career and family life enable us to put off thinking about retirement, except in the abstract. It seems so far off in the future that it can be difficult to wrap your head around, (that is, until it’s right around the corner!).
In part one of this three-part series, we’ll take a step back and question what will retirement mean for me?
What’s with the name Oakleigh?
When I was 11, my family moved into a neighborhood called Oakleigh Forest, a modest, multi-generational, suburban community near Annapolis, MD made up of hard-working professionals, public servants, and small business owners. It also happened to be the same neighborhood where my father had grown up, and where my newly retired grandparents still resided in that same house down the street.
Term Life Insurance is Probably All You’ll Ever Need
There’s no shortage of life insurance options available, and certainly no shortage of agents eager to sell you any number of policies, but the reality is that basic term life insurance is probably the only type of policy that you really need (and it also happens to be the least complicated and least expensive).
Asset Location, Location, Location…
Say you want to plant a vegetable garden, and you’ve already picked out the right mix of plants that are suited to your particular climate. The next step is to figure out where to put them in the garden given considerations like soil quality, shading, and which plants do well together. Just like certain vegetables do best in certain spots in the garden, different investments grow best in certain accounts. The goal of asset location is to maximize the after-tax value of your wealth after you’ve selected the right mix of investments for your time horizon and risk tolerance, (a process known as asset allocation).
The Backdoor Roth (and the Risks Involved)
Roth IRA accounts are one of the most tax efficient retirement savings vehicles. But if your income is over the phase-out limits, you will not be able to contribute directly to your Roth IRA. Enter the so-called “backdoor Roth,” a loophole which allows you to add to your Roth IRA when your income is otherwise over the limit. BUT… it doesn’t come without risk.
Retirement Savings Waterfall
With so many different types of savings and investment accounts available, it can be hard to know where to put the money you’re diligently saving. This savings waterfall will help you capture various tax incentives, which when compounded over many years, can add up to make a significant difference. The basic idea is that you fill up each bucket before going to the next, and if the bucket doesn’t apply to you, move on to the next.
Invest or pay off debt?
No one likes the feeling of being indebted, whether it’s actual debt (student loans, mortgages, credit card…), or more generally in the sense of feeling an obligation to return some favor. And as this opening observation demonstrates, the decision of whether to pay down debt is often as much one of emotion as it is cold financial math. Therefore, answering the question of whether I should pay down my mortgage early or try to invest the savings in the market requires looking at both the math and the emotion of debt.