It’s not very often that I see an estate plan that treats children unequally. When I do, it is usually because a parent is estranged from one child and leaves him or her nothing. In estate planning, “equal” isn’t necessarily the same as “fair.” Recently, a client I’ll...
“What is true about money?” A flippant answer to this question might be something like, “That I ought to have more of it.” Going a little deeper, however, we can come up with a list of characteristics, truisms if you will, to describe what money is and is not. Some of...
How would you feel to learn your financial planner came close to bankruptcy five times in his life? Maybe I should have considered that question before I told the world about my business mistakes in an interview with Morey Stettner that was published July 18, 2022, in...
Last week we explored one type of money belief, an unconscious vow of poverty that can lead to self-sabotage and harmful behaviors around money. But what about those, like members of some religious orders, who consciously make vows of poverty? Does that also lead to...
If you’ve ever lived in real poverty, struggling to meet your basic needs for food, shelter, and clothing, it’s almost certainly not a “lifestyle choice” you would voluntarily opt to return to. If you were to ask people who are living in poverty whether they would...
What is financial wellbeing? A researcher based in Berlin recently asked me that question. I had a bit of a struggle answering, in part because I write and talk a lot about what financial wellbeing is not. One straightforward definition of what financial well-being is...
