Wealth Balance Update July 2026

25 Years Ago

In 2001, I was working in a small accounting firm crunching tax returns and assisting with audits and I was not enjoying it at all. This was my first job out of college and I had quickly learned that I didn’t want to do what my degree and training had prepared me to do. The work was mind-numbingly dull! One Monday, near the end of my first year, I typed up my two week notice and walked into the owner’s office prepared to hand it to him.

I found him sitting in his office looking lost.

The firm I was working for had a side-business where two advisors offered investment management services for clients of the accounting firm. The CPA I worked for owned this business, but was hands off, trusting those advisors to take good care of his accounting clients. Up to this point, they had done a good job.

2001 was a tough year for anyone in the investment business. The dot.com bubble was in the middle of a 3 year implosion that eventually wiped out trillions of dollars of market capital, and in the middle of 2001 it didn’t look like it would ever stop falling. The two advisors the CPA had entrusted with his clients packed their bags on a Friday night and never came back. He and I found ourselves in the investment business the following Monday, the very day I walked into his office with my letter in hand. He asked me if I wanted to help him figure this out, and we started learning that business with our feet on fire. We met with every client, dug into investment decisions that had been made, and learned about share classes, fees, investment theories, and financial planning. And we did this in the middle of the dot.com madness.

It was the most fun I had ever had.

I read non-stop. I deconstructed and rebuilt portfolios. I began a lifetime obsession with financial planning tools. Most importantly, I found something I loved to do. It wasn’t the investments and it wasn’t the planning, though those were a lot more fun than taxes and audits! It was the interactions with people I fell in love with.

My favorite part of my job has been the same since day one. I get to meet with people like you. I get to learn about what you have built with your lives and about the things you value. And if I do my job well, I get to help you capitalize on what you’ve built.

This is the first of what I plan to be a monthly update. I still read voraciously, so I plan to include some reading for you that I think you will find enlightening, and I plan to include a planning topic each month as well as a review of how my portfolios are performing.

Thank you for reading!

What I am Reading

This month I am including an interesting opinion article on Social Security and one on aging alone. Both are from the Wall Street Journal.

Note: the Wall Street Journal links will present you with a pop-up asking you to subscribe, but there is a small arrow on the right side of the pop-up you can click to remove it and read the article for free.

• [The Social Security Trust Fund Deception, WSJ] – [Link]

  • My takeaway: There is a lot of noise about the looming Social Security crisis. So much of this noise is political spin that it is important to understand exactly what is happening so you can ignore the shouting and better understand the solutions that the politicians will be fighting over for the next several years. This article does a good job of explaining the main issue, but note that it is an opinion piece and does take the author’s political stance.

• [More Americans Are Aging Alone, WSJ] – [Link]

  • My takeaway: This article highlights one woman’s journey, but the themes are not limited to people aging alone. It highlights the importance of making plans early around worst-case scenarios. Trying to make those decisions in the middle of a major health or life change makes the decisions much more difficult.

Planning Topic of the Month: Your Data is Out There

The topic this month came to me from my father.

My father received a letter we are all too familiar with at this point:

“Your personal data was stolen from our servers, we are deeply sorry, please accept this complimentary year of credit monitoring.”

My personal experience from following through with a credit monitoring offer was with Experian. I don’t remember what business was hacked that happened to have all of my personally-identifying-information, but they offered a free subscription to an Experian credit monitoring product and I accepted; mostly out of curiosity.

The end result has been onslaught of emails from Experian about every tiny change in my credit score and ongoing offers to upgrade my service with Experian for a fee.

My opinion - these services are not worth much. The companies that get hacked are not paying these services top-dollar to take care of you, and these services are jumping in to “help” in order to put you into their own marketing funnel.

What can you do? Change your passwords. Freeze your credit.

Changing your banking passwords on a regular basis is a great habit to form, and if you are using one of your more commonly used passwords for your banking, investment, or credit card accounts, stop reading now and go change them. I am guilty of reusing passwords just like everyone else, but when money is involved, those passwords are unique.

Credit monitoring services sound good on paper, but if you freeze your credit, then there is little for them to monitor. The process takes a little time, but the tradeoff is great - no new accounts can be opened in your name while your credit is frozen. If you want to open a new line of credit or apply for a loan, you have to unfreeze your credit first. To get started, go here: usa.gov/credit-freeze

Portfolio & Market Updates

The Big Picture: June was a volatile month for both stocks and bonds.

On the stock side, concerns about an AI bubble after months of high-flying gains pulled the markets violently down in the early part of the month, followed by a relief rally around the notion that the Iran war looks to be coming to a conclusion. Oh, and there was that little SpaceX IPO. I expect volatility to continue; the valuations of many AI stocks are simply too high for investors to calmly sit and wait for the earnings to show up. Any headwind (like communities pushing back on AI data center buildouts to companies getting nervous about the money they are spending using AI) has the potential to send these stocks down sharply and quickly. The long-term outlook for AI is still strong. AI is another major technological shift, and it will change how the world works, but it will be years before we truly see who will be good at monetizing it. The dot.com bubble is a great example here, though not a parallel, I am not claiming we are in a bubble like that one yet! Amazon’s stock dropped 90% from it’s peak in the dot.com collapse. Today it is one of the most valuable companies that have ever existed. It took it a decade to take over the world. I expect similar stories will unfold with AI over the coming years.

Bonds have also been volatile. The bond market entered this year with expectations of potential rate cuts, fueled by the belief that inflation was coming under control and the assumption that Trump’s expected appointment for the Fed Chair would have a mandate to lower rates. But inflation has not come under control, fueled in part by the war with Iran, and more Fed Governors have signaled an expectation that rates may actually need to go up. A firm end to the war with Iran and a full opening of the Strait of Hormuz have the potential to alleviate the inflation concerns.

Key Takeaways for Your Portfolio:

• Asset Allocation: Persistently high stock valuations add risk to equity portfolios. They may very well continue to be high for years, but the risk of them reverting back to normal valuation levels increases the longer they stay high. If you are approaching retirement or are in the early stages of retirement, the biggest concern is sequence-of-return risk. While long-term investments in stocks have historically outperformed bonds over reasonable periods of time, taking withdrawals from the portfolio to fund your retirement expenses during market downturns can drastically impact that math. This does not mean you need to get out of stocks, but I would not take more risk than you need to meet your goals.

• Fixed Income & Equities: Even with all the volatility this month, stocks are still up comfortably for the year, and bonds are relatively flat.

• Our Focus: We continue to manage portfolios with a strict adherence to risk targets built directly around our clients’ Retirement Ratio.