Here in Lexington, Kentucky, we may be in the dog days of August, but it just feels a little different this year, doesn’t it? I can almost sense the coming fall air as folks around me are preparing to go back to school and talking about University of Kentucky football. The Family Financial Partners team is making its way back to the office, and clients are starting to answer our phone calls as they settle into a normal schedule.
When people get married, it sets a lot of things into motion. Many are moving in together for the first time — choosing a home, combining furniture, and splitting up household chores. It’s an exciting time, but also one that comes with the stress of shaking up old routines and learning new ones.
It’s no secret that money is one of the most common causes of marital disagreements, so figuring out how to manage your finances as a married couple is a crucial step in setting yourself up for a successful marriage.
This has been a really interesting year watching the discussion of artificial intelligence advance due to the rise of ChatGPT and similar machine-learning tools that have permeated daily life and business. In order to learn more about the subject, I recently invited Brad Watkins, a self-described “technology evangelist” to our podcast, “In My Day.” Ryan and I had a fascinating hour-long discussion with him where he broke down what AI really is and how it’s going to affect our lives moving forward. I thought that, for this month’s newsletter, you’d like to read an excerpt from that conversation.
As young investors, everybody wants to advise us on what to do with our money. Bloggers, social media personalities, and TV talking heads claim their method will get us on the path to wealth and early retirement. We see it so much that some of us start feeling guilty, like every dime that doesn’t go toward our retirement, investment portfolio, or mortgage is a dime that’s setting us back from our goal of financial freedom.
I love summer because we have all these opportunities for how we can allocate our newly found free time, but I find when I talk with clients that summer can also be a stressful season. There’s always the pressure to plan that big vacation that we can forget to budget for it and end up paying for that vacation for the next six months. In my case, I’ve got three kids doing camps and getting braces and moving into dorm rooms — there isn’t much money left for the “what Dave wants to do” fund!
So much of gardening is the hard work and growth that takes place underneath the soil — feeding and nurturing our plants so they can build strong roots that will sustain them long after our work is done, allowing us to sit back and enjoy the fruits of our labor. Nobody ever comments on the roots, on the quality of the soil, or on the weeding we did that gave them room to grow. All they see is the beauty that lives above the dirt — the finished product.
Building, maintaining, and sticking to a budget can be a tough task for many of us with regular, full-time jobs. But it gets a lot more difficult if you don’t have a regular income, like those in sales-based jobs, seasonal workers, or folks who work in the gig economy. If you fall into one of these categories — as more and more young earners do — it’s especially important to budget wisely to have a plan for those months when the checks don’t come in quite as high as usual.
As everyone is thinking about financial perspectives and priorities during the first weeks of the new year, we encourage client couples and families to ask themselves a few lifestyle and values questions that will help them determine their approach to money – and help us in going over their budgets and goals. No two clients are alike, and lifestyle goals are as varied as the people we work with.
Most of the time when people come into our conference room or call us up, they want help with how to do something. Whether it’s saving money, budgeting, making major purchases or signing up for insurance, they want to know how.
The catalogs, the catalogs! My mailbox has suddenly in the last few days been invaded by the seasonal army of festive holiday magazines, all suggesting that if I only spend $199 (each!) for those themed placemats, my dining room table will be shown off in all its glory just like the one in the picture. The only problem is, what the marketing people at that company don’t know, is that my dining room table has knife and fork marks all over it, and probably a few drops of blood from the kids! So we’ll probably be looking for a full-size table cloth instead.
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