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Life insurance can be an extremely important, even essential, part of your financial plan. One of its most attractive aspects for many individuals and families is the death benefit of the policy—the money that the insurance company pays out in the event of the insured’s death. 

The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 created a new way for affluent investors to do well by doing good: Qualified Opportunity Funds (QOFs). These funds, which invest in identified “opportunity zones”—distressed or underprivileged communities that have been targeted for economic development—offer some major tax advantages for suitable investors.

For most of us these days, hardly an hour goes by without interacting in some way with Google, Facebook, or one of the other “Big Data” companies. Their search engines place a world of information at our fingertips, even if we must exercise careful judgment about its accuracy.

During the summer of 2018, I had the privilege of achieving a long-anticipated goal: walking the Camino de Santiago—the Way of Saint James—in Spain. One of the many interesting things about the Camino is that, despite the name, it isn’t really a single road.

It seems as though every time there’s a new headline—whether it comes from Washington, DC, Beijing, London, or somewhere else—the stock market goes through gyrations. Especially these days, with the possible impeachment of President Trump claiming most of the news cycle in the U.S., we see frequent reactions in the financial markets.

What it is and why it matters

Elite wealth planning often plays a key role in the lives of today’s highly successful individuals and families—as well as those who are on the path toward great financial success.

Looking at a chart of stock market returns for the twenty years from 2000 to 2019 could easily bring to mind the opening line of Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” But this period, marked by both lackluster performance and a record-breaking bull market, holds some important lessons for investors.

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We are all familiar with cycles. In elementary school, we learned the cycle of water: how it forms clouds, falls as rain, runs to the sea, and evaporates to form more clouds. We have all experienced the cycle of the seasons and even the cycle of human life. As the Bible says—and as the Byrds sang in the 1960s—“To everything there is a season.”

For clients approaching retirement, the recent world trade headlines have been pretty unnerving. Every time the U.S. and China exchange threats or the “T” word—tariffs—is in the news, the resulting gyrations on Wall Street produce churning stomachs.

Previously on our blog, we’ve discussed the pros and cons of refinancing, and everything we said then still applies: 1) make sure the interest rate is enough lower that you can save real money; 2) evaluate how long you plan to stay in your home to be sure that refinancing mak