Articles by Oakleigh Wealth
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!
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).
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.