Blog

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

We are excited to announce Sharon Weaver’s paper “Scaffolding or Enabling? Implications of Extended Parental Financial Support into Adulthood” has been published by the Journal of Financial Therapy.

It almost seems like yesterday that you graduated from dental school.  You spent the next few decades growing your practice and investing in a retirement portfolio, knowing one day your hard-earned money would support you through your retirement.

Yesterday, in our daily (Zoom) staff meeting*, Gigi mentioned a quote about crisis and change from a book she’s been reading on the topic -- Jared Diamond’s “Upheaval – Turning Points for Nations in Crisis”.  I asked her to send a quote and got so much more. 

Balance in retirement is important – not just finding a balance between spending too much money and being afraid to spend, but also how to spend time. How much alone time do you prefer? How much would you like to engage with friends, family, or former colleagues? What is the right blend of relaxing and being active for you? 

If you find the thought of taking retirement distributions stressful, you’re not alone.  Time after time our clients at Mission Financial Planning are surprised to find themselves struggling to dip into their retirement savings.