You don't need to be Gen X to be a memeber of the sandwich generation, but it's likely the case, based on age & Gen X's tendency to have kids later in life.

The stresses that come along with it are real. There's no way to fully avoid the stress that comes with raising kids while trying to take care of aging parents, and managing a career at the same time, but planning for it, and even just thinking through options, can help.

@alphaarchitect "we don’t want active managers to disappear."

Close to an answer without a question for me.

My totally anecdotal & experience based opinion: there will always be opportunities for active management to deliver alpha. Consistantly delivering, however, is fairly impossible. @alphaarchitect It makes for a singularly frustrating & difficult situation for investors, if the goal is to, "outperform."

Without deep knowledge of specific situations & managers, choosing one who might deliver that alpha is a fool's errand.

In defense of financial advisory fees

Since I post about the benefits of low fee index funds, flat advisory fees & the illogical nature of percentage based AUM fees, many folks assume I'm all about just making advisory fees lower. Nope.

Friday 🧵1/15 Financial advisors & other professionals, like doctors & lawyers, deserve to be paid for their work, and the higher the quality of the work, the greater the applicable experience, the higher the justifiable fee. 2/15

I’ve shared some recommendations recently on how to select a financial advisor which have been quite popular. (Links to previous tweets follow this thread.) 1/11 Some of the most important questions are the ones you ask yourself before even contacting the first advisor candidate. The advice-only side of my business gave me a new one that no one should miss:

Will I follow through?

2/11

As a financial advisor & sort of a known entity in terms of investing among friends, I get asked about investments a lot. One of the questions often surround alternative investments. Today I was asked about BDCs, or Business Development Companies. What do I think? I'll leave aside specific issues that arrive with BDCs in general, and publicly issued BDCs, and tell you about how most funds & alternative investments work:

If you are a professional investor who handles other people’s money and you think your job is only to maximize returns, you are in the wrong business. Are we still doing this, @Twitter? Yes? Time for a thread on @SBF_FTX , #FTX, & due diligence. This is not a crypto 🧵1/23 @Twitter @SBF_FTX Money managers all disclose the possibility of loss. Those that invest in high risk assets might even highlight the fact that you could lose it all. But let’s be serious for a minute. 2/23

“Take your time.” My father used to say that to me a lot growing up. It’s taken me over 50 years to understand how much is embedded in those three words, and the many ways our lives can benefit from them. 1/11 Patience may be a virtue, but if so, we are not born virtuous. We are born with the same, “programming,” that we needed to survive in the wild. Food now, who knows the next time we'll see it again? 2/11

This market is perfect for inspiring, “I should’ve known,” guilt, for financial advisors as well as individual investors. A down market that appears to be driven solely by one, “predictable,” thing, in this case, the Fed, is a siren song for guilt. Don’t take the bait. Breathe. Ask how many, “but this time it’s different,” moments there are? e.g., how many times from Greenspan to Powell, has the Fed acted to support equites?

I’m going to pick on one Registered Investment Advisor, or RIA, which acts mainly as an investment manager. The name is withheld not to protect any innocence, but because they are far from the only RIA operating like this. 1/16 🧵 One of my portfolio review clients is paying a 1% AUM fee to a big name firm to manage his retirement portfolio. This firm, in turn, farmed out the portfolio management to an, “independent RIA,” who charges another .3% for the privilege. 2/16

Boomers' heads buried in the sand, if not participating.
Millennials still surprised.
Gen Z actually shocked.

Gen X? We Knew this was coming. We learned everything from 80s hair metal. Nothing shocks us. Maybe disappoints. Almost half a decade.
@queensryche #GenXFTW #GenX Jan 6?
For a price I'd do about anything
Except pull the trigger
For that I'd need a pretty good cause
Then I heard of Dr. X
The man with the cure
Just watch the television
Yeah, you'll see there's something going on

September’s a big birthday month in our house, and it made me think of something missing from so much financial advice distributed by social media gurus peddling concepts like FIRE, when they clearly haven’t even considered their own retirements: Family #familymatters 1/9 Concepts & schemes including popular ideas like geo-arbitrage, or moving from high cost of living areas (HCOL) to lower (LCOL), sometimes including attempts to avoid taxes, like Reason’s latest suggestion to move to Puerto Rico, ignore the F word. reason.com/2022/08/03/the… 2/9

Financial advisor Friday confessional: My dad died four years ago in September, I’m the executor, and I still haven’t closed the estate. Why? And what can you do to avoid the same thing happening to you? 1/10 I know there’s an element of, the shoemaker’s son going barefoot here, but there’s more to it than that. oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/o… 2/10

Confession time: I’m over 50, a financial planner & advisor, and I don’t know when I’m going to be able to retire, or exactly what retirement is going to look like. How can this be, you ask? Because life happens. Spoiler alert: none of us know the future. 1/15 How can a person who did everything, “right,” for 4 decades not be prepared for retirement by their 50s? I did everything by the book until my 40th birthday. Did well in school, went to a good college, job on Wall St., business school, better jobs on Wall St. Smooth sailing. 2/15

The media is obsessed with the, “Great Resignation.” FinTwit is obsessed with entrepreneurship & side hustles. Owning your own business can be the right option for you, but there are things they don’t talk about. 🧵 1/10 At the peak, I had 18-24 employees on payroll. I was a small operator without a business line of credit, so cash management was always a worry. Lack of funding, or working capital, is the main reason small businesses fail. 2/10

Time for another thread on the word Fiduciary, mainly what it represents in financial services and advisory for me. Trigger warning: I’m going to talk about fees. 🧵 1/n RIAs, or Registered Investment Advisors, are firms whose representatives/advisors are required to act in a fiduciary capacity, meaning always acting in their clients’ best interest. Simple, right? 2/n

If I never see another tweet about how, "rich people don't get rich from stocks, they get rich by owning their own businesses," etc., it will be too soon. But we know I will. Why am I so down on promotion of entrepreneurship? #thread Entrepreneurship is great, but it's also hard, and not everyone is cut out for it. People who promote the hell out of it on twitter, Instagram, etc., are doing it to promote their own businesses or side gigs. That's ok, but...