Before your lease ends, compare the buyout price in your contract against what the car sells for today. If the car is worth more, keeping it beats handing it back and the gap is yours. If it is worth less, return it and walk away. Source

I’m excited to share that I’ve joined one of the fastest-growing, most forward-thinking independent financial planning firms in Upstate NY. Not just as an advisor, but as a partner, as an owner.  I’m happy to share that I’ve joined Rialto Wealth. I’m incredibly excited about the change. Rialto’s philosophy aligns perfectly with what I share with you every week. A focus on detailed, long-term retirement planning. Keeping investing simple and low-cost. Fiduciary and fee-only. Not only serving our clients, but educating them.  …but I’m anxious about the change, too. With two girls under two years old at home, this isn’t the simple path, per se. I’m making this big change, in large part, because my wife Kelly believes in me. She is not a mere “rockstar” or “hero,” but much more than that. Thank you, Kell!   Our elder daughter loving on Sadie. Why the Change?! Why the change, though? I have a few important reasons. Clients need to trust their advisor. Staying independent is important to me. Especially since that’s the commitment I’ve made to my clients for many years. Rialto Wealth has no shareholders, no private equity ownership. We are 100% employee-owned. There’s no incentive to push proprietary products, no far-away owners pressuring us on quotas. Financial planners can bring a lot of expertise to their clients – but that comes after a deliberate choice: putting service above sales. Complex investments sound sexy, I know. But did cigarettes (at least, for many decades). Not coincidentally, both have similar results: higher long-term costs and worse long-term outcomes. While some advisors push fancy, complex products on unsuspecting clients, the fact remains that simplicity beats complexity. I’d much rather follow Jason Zweig’s second way of making a living: “Tell the truth to those who want the truth.” (I’ll let you look up the first way.) I’m excited to keep my client count smaller, to focus more energy on each client. While working with hundreds of clients might increase profit margins, I’m fine with sacrificing some profit margin to better serve clients.  Rialto’s philosophy emphasizes our clients and our employees. Good things will follow. Who Makes a “Good” Client? Rialto isn’t a perfect fit for every potential client. Our ideal clients see their world this way: Retirement is the big, audacious goal. It might mean you’re retired. It might mean you hope to retire in 2 or 5 or 10 years. But retirement is the big goal you’re planning for. Investing and planning – both are vital. Retirement brings many interesting conversations about withdrawal strategies, income and tax planning, Social Security, healthcare and Medicare, IRMAA, and RMDs. If you have these questions, we’re a good fit. Our clients want an ongoing, year-over-year relationship. They are not looking for a one-time thought partner.  Our ideal clients buy into a low-cost, academically rigorous investment philosophy. If you want your advisor to beat the

Are you wanting to keep track of your budget but don’t know where to start? A budget Excel template is a great option to easily track your budget without getting bogged down in all the details of some of the more complicated tools. Whether you are saving for your next vacation or getting a handle on your monthly expenses, using a budget template is a smart way to reach your goals. What Makes a Good Budget Template? […]

Frugal living isn’t just something that happens at the store or when you’re crunching the budget numbers. It really is a way of life. Rather than getting uptight or frustrated I like to look at our frugal adventures as just that– an adventure! There are wins, bumps, and funny things that happen along the way. That’s what this “Frugal Feats, Flops, and Funnies” series is all about– the adventures and misadventures of living the frugal […]

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed into law last July, brought some notable changes to the fine print of … Read more

I want to be really intentional with our grocery budget in September. We have a lot going on financially, so I want to keep our grocery spending to a minimum this month. Planning out a menu is a great way to minimize spending because you can control the cost of the meals you choose, you can prioritize meals that use ingredients that you already have, and you don’t waste food. All of that is easier […]

It may still be warm outside and Christmas might feel a long way off, but if you want to make the holidays a little easier on your budget, now is actually the perfect time to start. And I’m not talking about buying Christmas gifts in the summer or putting yourself on a strict no-spend challenge. I’m talking about taking a good look at the things to stop buying before the holidays so you can free up some […]

Whenever someone asks how much it costs to homeschool, I never quite know how to answer. Because technically? You could homeschool for very little. There are free resources online, libraries full of books, used curriculum sales, hand-me-down materials, and approximately 47 pencils hiding somewhere in my house at any given moment. For years, we’ve used the free curriculum from The Good and The Beautiful (highly recommend it). But that’s not really how I think about […]