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...
13 days ago • 2 min read
Caitlin's Corner The Peach Problem: Why Your "Diversified" Portfolio Might Be Riper for Risk Than You Think Over the weekend, I participated in my town's fall equinox festival- a celebration centered around giving thanks to the fall harvest. Since I no longer have a garden, my family's "harvest" comes from the farmer's market, grocery store, and occasional orchard trips. Our recent orchard adventure sparked a realization about what's happening in the US stock market that every investor should...
20 days ago • 3 min read
Susan's Scoop Falling Vaccine Rates Could Collapse our Economy 💉 Back when I was in high school, I dreamed of becoming an epidemiologist and chasing down Ebola in Africa, Hantavirus in the Southwest US, and Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease in the UK. I had big plans to attend Emory University and train at the CDC just steps away, but although I was accepted, there was no way I could afford the tuition. Alas, I had to go to a much smaller school with a bigger scholarship, but with no Public Health...
27 days ago • 3 min read
Caitlin's Corner When Hundreds of Millions $ Is Not Enough I'll be honest- I only recently warmed up to the idea that billionaires are bad. And even that is tough for me to type, because I don't believe that billionaires are inherently bad, but here's what I 100% believe: it is bad for someone to have billions of dollars. It used to be easy to see what billionaires wanted: the biggest yachts, rarest art, and sprawling estates etched with architectural excess. This is relatable, to some...
about 1 month ago • 5 min read
Susan's Scoop My $400,000 Mistake Something that we all have in common is that our financial lives consist of a combination of good decisions, bad decisions, and luck. And fundamentally our ideal outcome is to have the ‘good decisions’ and ‘good luck’ outweigh the ‘bad decisions’ and ‘bad luck’. In my workshops I often talk about how we need to set up our entire financial portfolio from the position of the House at a casino – there will be individual winners and losers in our investments, but...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
Caitlin's Corner Our Lack of Mobility is Stagnating Our Economy, and Our Personal Growth I’ve made some big moves in my life, and not just geographically. Each time, I’ve had to make the hard choice of leaving behind a “perfectly fine” housing situation, with a mortgage payment that made financial sense on paper, in order to step into something bigger. In 2013, my husband and I left behind a 2.6% mortgage rate for a new home with a 4.1% rate. In 2024, we left a nearly paid-off home and...
about 2 months ago • 3 min read
Susan's Scoop Healthcare, UGH. I feel like that title generally sums up the healthcare system here in the United States, which is painfully broken. Somehow the US spends almost twice as much per person on healthcare annually compared to other wealthy nations, yet we have very little to show for it. I took both of my kids to the dentist this week for their regular cleanings (no fillings, no x-rays) and it was almost $400. We don’t have dental insurance, so as a ‘self-pay’ client we have to...
about 2 months ago • 3 min read
Caitlin's Corner Why the “Trump Account” Isn’t the Gift It Looks Like I may be ineligible for one of the new parent 'perks' of the OBBBA bill, but I'm not exactly kicking myself for missing out. As part of the new OBBBA bill, the “Trump Account” promises a free $1,000 investment account for every baby born between 2025 and 2028. Win-win, right? ...But here's why I think this small gesture completely misses the mark, especially as new parents are navigating the daunting challenge of raising...
2 months ago • 3 min read
Susan's Scoop The ‘Worth Less’ Strategy That Leaves You Worth More Today I’m going to let you in on a financial secret of the Ultra Wealthy: Discounting. A few weeks back I wrote about the 3 different types of Roth IRA conversions, but there actually is a 4th much less common type – the Discounted Roth IRA Conversion. But before we get into the details of it, I thought it would be fun to dive into the concept of discounting in general, because according to recent surveys, almost all of us...
2 months ago • 3 min read