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I saw the lowest mortgage rates I’ve seen in a long time this week.  With rates this low, it’s time to check to see how much you could reduce your monthly mortgage payment or speed up your pay-off date. 

How do you know if it's time to refinance?

It's worth exploring refinancing if:

Most people have some preferences about how they would like their life’s work and accumulations distributed or cared for, but many have avoided facing the sobering task of putting their preferences on paper. Whether you are updating an existing plan or creating a new estate plan, one roadblock to moving forward can be the process of finding an estate attorney. 

Several times last week I was asked to evaluate big decisions.  Home purchases, selling a practice, buying a practice, hiring/firing and whether it’s time to invest, to name a few.

While you are working, you add money to your investments to build a nest egg.  In retirement, it’s time to start taking that money back out.  The income goal in retirement is to mimic the paycheck you were receiving while you worked.  This new “paycheck” often comes from several sources, including Social Security and/or pension payments, and perhaps rental incom

When MFP builds financial plans, we usually create a model that assumes clients maintain their current standard of living throughout their life.  Our models adjust for: kids moving out, loans paying off, post-retirement projects, big purchases, and/or travel.

Recently, our lives have been consumed with helping clients navigate PPP, EIDL, FMLA and PUA – the various government programs available for small businesses affected by Covid-19.

Donor Advised Funds have received a lot of attention lately.  A quick primer: They let you make a tax-deductible contribution into designated investment accounts which can grow until you make distributions to charities of your choice.

When investments are down, one financial strategy is to convert your traditional IRA to a Roth while the value is reduced so you pay taxes on the decreased value. If and when the market rebounds, that rebound will be in the Roth’s tax-free environment.

If you do a quick Google search to find out how much you can contribute to your 401k, you’ll usually find that the most you can defer from your salary is $19,500*. In reality, the maximum that can go into a 401k is $57,000*.

*If you’re over 50, add $6,500 to both of these numbers.

The last few weeks have seemed like months as many of our clients’ dental practices closed or moved to emergency-only schedules due to Covid-19.  Heart-wrenching decisions about staff have kept practice-owners awake, and learning about all the new and changing information about loans, advances, tax credits, unemployment and family-leave rules have felt like new full-time jobs for man