Susan's Scoop When Should You Donate? A 2025–2026 Tax Timing Hack I hope everyone who celebrates is enjoying a cozy and restful Thanksgiving! My older son is home from school for the first time in three months, and I’m so grateful to have our family feeling “complete” again. I’m also celebrating a big professional milestone - I passed my final Enrolled Agent certification exam, which means I can now support clients with more advanced tax strategy and represent them directly in front of the...
8 days ago • 2 min read
Caitlin's Corner Tax Jargon, Clarified Every year around this time, it feels like the air gets thick with tax terms. They float around in headlines, in HR emails, in conversations we didn’t ask to be part of: "Brackets! Deductions! Credits! Limits…" If hearing all of that makes your eyes glaze over, you’re in good company. I remember when these terms made me want to bury my head in the sand. It so often felt like the tax language itself was weaponized, like- the sheer amount of jargon and...
15 days ago • 7 min read
Susan's Scoop What I'm Learning as our Health Insurance Costs TRIPLE 😳 It’s open season for health insurance right now in the U.S., and it’s been… a ride. Both politically and personally. Caitlin and I have been deep in the weeds comparing ACA plans in our respective states (Colorado and Texas) to find something that fits our families. The cost for my family’s current plan has more than tripled (!!!), so we’ll be switching plans - but even the “cheaper” ones are still more than double what...
22 days ago • 4 min read
Caitlin's Corner Why Your Financial Future Needs Your Friends Hello from North Carolina 👋, where I'm savoring snuggles with my brand new niece and trying to be as much help as I can to her mama. Gosh, I love babies- but raising them is no joke. To all you parents going through it right now, you're amazing! 👊🏻 I especially admire my sister-in-law, who never shies away from expressing her values, has conviction for what she wants, and graces everyone around her with genuinely positive energy....
29 days ago • 5 min read
Susan's Scoop Are you letting your finances drive themselves? Last week, I sat in on one of my son’s classes, and they were discussing the trolley problem - that well-known ethical dilemma where you have to decide whether to let a runaway trolley continue on its path and hit five people, or deliberately pull a lever to switch tracks and hit just one. The conversation got even more interesting when they applied it to self-driving cars. For instance, if a large object falls off the truck in...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
Caitlin's Corner If It's So Passive, Why All the Drama? I’ve always believed that real estate can be one of the most powerful paths to financial freedom. But the part that most people don’t talk about is that it’s not usually passive. A few weeks ago, Ryan and I got word that a resident in one of our Denver properties had been arrested. Not long after, neighbors began reporting strangers coming and going from that same unit, at all hours of the night. There were loud arguments, sketchy...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
Susan's Scoop The Great Investment Dilemma: When to Hold, When to Let Go I’ve been facing a decision lately that many investors (and homeowners) can probably relate to: Should I sell my property at a loss or keep holding on? Our short-term rental cabin sits just outside Pigeon Forge, in the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee. We bought it during the pandemic-era boom when vacation rentals were selling like hotcakes and vacation rentals were the fad of the moment. Since then, the market has cooled,...
about 2 months ago • 3 min read
Caitlin's Corner Are We 'Helicopter Financing'? Last month I was tossing and turning after learning about an experience my daughter was having on her flag football team. I had shown up to help out at her practices and, for the first time, I saw how she was being treated by her all-male teammates. These are third and fourth grade boys- kids I know to be kind on their own. But together, they banded against her: picking on, criticizing, and effectively shutting her out. It was one of those...
about 2 months ago • 3 min read
Susan's Scoop A Hedge Against Risky Bets Caitlin and I generally encourage setting up a buy-and-hold portfolio of diversified low-cost index funds. And yes, sometimes this can often seem ‘boring’. So what do you do if you want the excitement of investing a small amount of your money in riskier stocks, such as start-ups, but don’t have the risk tolerance to lose it all? This is where stop losses come in. A stop loss is an automatic sell order you can set on a stock through your brokerage. You...
2 months ago • 2 min read