The stock market is booming this year, and at the time of writing the S&P 500 is up a healthy 16% YTD. Along with it, most portfolio balances are reaching new highs. This has put a lot of otherwise smart investors in a very good mood.
Euphoric might be a good word for it…
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Summer always speeds by faster than I’d like. It’s a “blink and you’ll miss it” kind of moment here in the Pacific Northwest. Owing largely to our very short summers…
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Compounding. In a word, it’s the “secret sauce” that makes wonderful things like retirement possible. If you want to have enough money to retire someday, you really WANT to compound your money. And there’s no better investment to compound money than common stocks.
Sure, you could stash your savings in a bank account, but at today’s interest rates you won’t be compounding more than a few pennies per month…
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There are few things in this life that give more more personal satisfaction than admitting I was wrong. On one hand, being able to admit I was wrong implies my brain still has a certain amount of mental flexibility and open-mindedness. Frankly, that’s pretty darn rare these days.
How often do you hear people doing a complete about-face when it comes to strongly held personal beliefs?
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July is a month of abundance. Mother nature provides an abundance of sunshine that produces wonderful fresh food, and families get to spend an abundance of time together on vacation.
The Tako family enjoyed the abundance of life in July on both fronts…
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Has it really been two weeks since I last posted here? Time flies when you’re having fun I guess! With the kids are out of school, and summer well underway, we’ve been on vacation for the past two weeks!
Our most recent adventure took us to Arizona, where we soaked up loads of the southwestern sunshine and plenty of mesquite grilled tacos…
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With most of the population in Washington state getting vaccinated by the end of May, things have finally started to open back up again. The pandemic is subsiding here, and it seems like life is (slowly) returning to normal.
As you might expect, our travel adventures resumed in May as well. We took full advantage of the fine May weather, and went camping on Washington’s coast, near a small town called Ocean Shores…
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Ahh spring!! Spring really starts to hit the Pacific Northwest when April rolls around. Things finally start to green-up again. It’s also the time of year when our weather starts to turn towards “dryer” and “slightly warmer”.
This is typically when I emerge from my winter hibernation, and start spending a lot more time outside…
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Have you noticed? The cost of a trip to the grocery store or hardware store has risen in recent months. This has the news media doing plenty of fear mongering about inflation.
To be fair, prices of commodities like corn, soybeans, lumber, and iron ore have all more than doubled over the last year. This is an undisputed fact, and certainly concerning…
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