In the first year of my career I probably printed a thousand colored pages worth of financial plans. These plans had a table of contents, charts, graphs, lengthy explanations and lots of wordy details.  Each was at a minimum 50 pages long, hole punched and delivered to the client in a nice leather bound binder.  When presenting them, we were …

Who doesn’t like a free lunch? Wait, what I mean is who doesn’t like a “free” lunch? Years and years ago when I was running the business in a different office, every Wednesday for lunch, we would have wholesalers from different financial product companies come in to “teach” us about their product and its applicability to our client’s financial needs. …

Over 10 years ago my brother and I went to Costa Rica to visit my sister who was studying there.  I wasn’t thirty feet into the airport before I saw and heard the expression “Pura Vida.” It translates to “simple life” or “pure life” and the longer we were there, the more it became clear that it was not just …

We are barreling towards the end of our first tax season under the laws of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.  Many married couples and individuals are finding it hard to itemize their taxes for 2018 (and likely each year moving forward) and thus taking the standard deduction when filing their return.  This is wildly important for the fact that …

Like most parents with young children, our bedtime routine is about four and a half hours long. When our oldest was three, she started putting her request in, after we read five or six books mind you, to hear a story too.  I was stumped.  So I came up with a new character named Smiggy Figgy, who lived in a …

I love sharing my ideas with my sister because she always tends to be on the opposite end of my thought spectrum.  An argument ensues, where she inevitably thinks she is the winner and since she is the youngest, the rest of the family usually takes her side!  🙂 A few weeks ago I shared with her that my new …

About a year ago my wife woke up and groggily asked me, “What are you watching?” Her words might have been more colorful, but it was a while ago and I’m fuzzy on those details.  I do however, remember vividly, that I had found the original tv show MacGyver on Amazon and I was watching the very first episode of …

I came up with this title while I was sitting in Starbucks with my laptop open.  I wanted to look like one of those super creatives types.  An author just needing a quiet corner in a coffee house to finish their latest novel.  I don’t think I pulled it off, but it was fun to pretend for the five minutes …

My wife and I were so excited to tell our 4 year old son that we had signed him up for soccer and tee ball in the spring!  We used our high pitched excited parent voices, “Bud, did you know you are going to do soccer AND baseball in the spring?” His immediate reply, “I want to be the mascot.”  …

I used to love hearing that phrase.   “Oh, yeah, your roof is leaking, I got a guy for that.” “Oh, yeah, you need a pick up truck to get that home, I got a guy for that.” I couldn’t wait for the day when I could start building my own rolodex of “guy for that” names!  More often today …