How To Set Money Goals That Actually Work

What if I told you that you could make ONE decision now that would help make allllll your financial decisions for the next 12 months so much simpler?  Would you be interested? (Duh. Of course you would!)  I call this decision your Chief Initiative, and it is basically a values and goals statement that can…

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How to set better money goals

As everything winds down for the holiday season and people start thinking of their New Year’s resolutions, I want to shift your thinking about how you go about setting goals and resolutions. Because resolutions…they sort of suck. Studies show that fewer than 8% of people who set New Year’s resolutions actually achieve them. But there…

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Five Elements of Financial Success

Many people might think that financial success is all about the money…I mean, yes, it is? In that, it matters how much you can keep. And the more you keep, the more you can leverage that savings. But aside from investing strategy, there is so, soooooo much more to being financially successful. You might be…

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Effective Year-End Financial Planning Strategies

As everyone scrambles to check off their to-do list for the year and shift into the holiday, I asked my planners what they think are effective year-end financial strategies? Here’s what they said: Joann Nieciecki: “Honestly, amid the holiday chaos and winter break with kids, my finances are the last thing on my mind. Instead…

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Don’t let people give you money fear

The other day I asked a health professional one simple question. ONE QUESTION. And he proceeded to talk for the next 15 minutes about all of the ways people should be more afraid of this specific thing I asked about, how basically we were all screwed. Apparently, he was very passionate about this topic. When…

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Is Codependency Messing Up Your Money?

Although I didn’t realize it then, when I was younger, I used gift-giving to gain love, approval, control, and admiration. People seem to think that the less control you exert over your environment, the less control you have over your money, but I found exactly the opposite. The less codependent I became, the less money…

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ESG & SRI Investing

Environmental Social Governance Investing (ESG) and Socially Responsible Investing (SRI) are fraught with misunderstanding. When I was first coming up as a planner, your only options were extremely expensive mutual funds. Now, you can invest in a relatively low-cost portfolio, but I still see confusion about oversight and to what extent these funds meet the…

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Money and Survival Mode

Do you count the days until payday, and then watch all the money drain from your bank account to pay the bills the minute it arrives? Are you in a constant state of financial cha-cha; one step forward, but two steps back? If this sounds familiar, you’re in survival mode. It’s the place that anyone…

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Money and Power

Money and power are two of the biggest causes of conflict and drama in our lives. Lots of people right now are in survival mode, but when you are no longer worried about just survival, you tend to think about money within the context of status, ego, personal fulfillment, and power. Power isn’t bad necessarily,…

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