Hi, everyone! Welcome into our February monthly newsletter. We send these educational monthly newsletters out once a month in hopes that the content and education in the newsletters is beneficial to you. So thanks for taking the time to actually read the newsletter and view and listen to this video.

Some of the key things we’ve been talking to our clients about lately… Number one is that the stock market is at all-time historic highs! It sounds like people are saying this over and over and they are, but the market continues to climb and the market continues to reach all-time never-been-hit-before stock market highs. You know the saying, “buy low and sell high.” This is a fantastic time to take a look at your portfolio, look at how much growth you’ve gotten over the last few years, and look at ways to reduce risk to get more defensive in your portfolio, so you just don’t have a focus on growth. We need to incorporate growth and income positions and strategies into your plan for anyone retiring within five or ten years, or less. Especially if you’re, you know, a year, a couple years away, or already in retirement, you have left the accumulation phase and entered the income phase, and our portfolios need to represent that.

The second thing we’ve been talking to our clients a lot about lately are Roth conversions. If you believe, like we do, that federal income taxes will likely be higher down the road than today then what sense does it make to wait 10 or 15 years to pay our taxes at that point rather than today? Taxes in our opinions are really fair right now. You know most people are in the 12-22and 24 percent brackets. That means you’re keeping 80 to 90 cents of every dollar that you make and earn. You have the option right now to either choose to purposely pay tax now or hope that taxes are lower down the road. Hope is not a great retirement strategy. So this is something that we need to really consider seriously are Roth conversions.

The third thing we’ve been talking to people about lately is this whole mindset shift when it comes to accumulation for retirement versus de-cumulation. If you haven’t already, you have to have this mindset shift and this shift in your retirement planning where you shift from solely growth focused investments and strategies to also income focus, investments and strategies, a combination between growth and income. That’s a type of planning that we help our clients with.

Give us a call or email with your questions and we’d be happy to put together a plan that is tailored to your situation!