Our clients often ask us about real estate, and what we think about buying or selling a primary residence, a vacation home, or an investment property. This is hardly surprising—for many of our clients, their family home is by far their largest asset. What’s more, most of our clients live in either the Seattle or San Francisco areas, both of which have experienced extraordinary real estate appreciation in recent…
Congress and the President recently passed the biggest tax reform in over 30 years. The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 aims to make the United States corporate tax rate more competitive and therefore increase corporate investment domestically. The bill also provides for individual tax breaks beginning in 2018, that will expire at the end of 2025. What Does This Mean For My Portfolio? Corporations will now be taxed…
For decades, it has been conventional wisdom in American business that the one proper objective of corporate managers is to increase the company’s share price. That is the principal behind stock options, which tie compensation to share price. Other considerations, such as worker satisfaction, civic engagement, or environmental impact, have been perceived as irrelevant, except to the extent that they bear on profitability, and thus on share price. The…
Every now and again, we get questions from clients that we think we should share. In this post, we respond to the question in the subject line: why is the dollar in a free fall against the euro and the pound? To be sure, the US dollar is currently not in a “free-fall”. However, it is fair to ask what is behind last years drop in value of the US…
Many people are aware of the benefits of a Roth IRA: you put your after-tax money into it, after 20 or 30 years when you retire, you pull all of the money out tax-free. This can be a big benefit when you consider the effect of compounding returns over time. There are other benefits such as that you may be in a lower tax bracket when you pay taxes…
Last month, we wrote about the sometimes misleading terminology used to describe relative currency values: the “strong” and “weak” dollar. Another example of labels that can mislead us about economic issues is one that has been in the news of late: the so-called “trade deficit.” The United States runs a trade deficit with another country when it imports more from that country than it exports to it. The opposite…
Who is eligible for benefits? Social Security is a significant payroll tax as well as an important source of retirement income for many US and non-US citizens, alike. Workers pay into Social Security while they are working and receive the benefits when they retire. The size of Social Security benefits depends on your earnings history as well as when you begin to take benefits. But what if you are…
Economics is a numerical discipline. Economists count things, measure their value, calculate ratios between those values, and project how the counts and values will change over time. But to communicate economic ideas, we rely largely on language. And for the most part, language is very useful for this purpose, because language is a powerful tool. Sometimes, however, language’s very power can overwhelm the concepts it is supposed to communicate,…
(Credit for this post goes to Rehberg Law Group. More information about Rehberg Law Group can be found at the bottom of this page.) “How can I clear up the confusion surrounding Medicare for myself or my parent(s)?” If that is your concern and with open enrollment right around the corner, retirees will be inundated with advertisements regarding their insurance options. This information can be conflicting and confusing. For many…
If you are concerned about the Equifax credit breach, this site is extremely useful: https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/0497-credit-freeze-faqs
