With the end of the year approaching, a topic that may be on your mind is charitable giving. But how exactly should you approach it? For many people, charitable giving tends to be driven by the charities themselves. As solicitations arrive, people decide on a case-by-case basis whether or not to [...]
Maintaining wealth
Recently, Wall Street Journal personal finance columnist Jason Zweig made this observation: Getting rich isn’t the hard part, he said. “Staying rich is the hard part.” On the surface, staying rich might actually seem like the easy part. After all, you simply need to build a balanced portfolio [...]
Tax-smart investing
If there’s one story that seems to have captured the public’s imagination this summer, it’s the revelation that venture capitalist Peter Thiel has managed to accumulate more than $5 billion in his Roth IRA—where it will be entirely tax-free to him. In its reporting, ProPublica, the news outlet [...]
A less taxing retirement
Type the words “safe withdrawal rate” into Google, and it’ll return more than a million results. I’m not surprised by this. People debate about practically everything in personal finance, but the debate around this question is particularly intense. For at least twenty-five years, the conventional [...]
Alvan Bobrow
Let me tell you about Alvan Bobrow. His tale—and specifically his lawsuit—are important for every investor to understand. That’s because the legal loophole he sought to exploit is now a pothole for everyone else. The first thing to know about Bobrow is that he is a tax attorney, and back in 2008, [...]
