Fantasy football has been around for a long time now. I’ve been playing with friends since 2004, but there are leagues that go back even longer. If you’ve never played, it’s basically a way for you to try your luck as an NFL general manager and to build your own team of players. There is a draft where each team picks players in order to fill out a roster. Each week you put your best players in the starting lineup and you earn points based on how those players perform in their actual game that week.

It’s amazing what a difference a year can make. In our 2017 year-end market commentary we reflected on a year with positive returns and very low volatility across nearly every investment class. Now we look back on 2018, which saw negative returns in just about every asset class along with a significant increase in volatility.

December is always a busy time of year for us, even when we aren't anticipating a major tax reform bill like last year. We are working through a number of year-end planning items for our clients from tax projections to tax loss harvesting to required minimum distributions. As I work through these things for our clients I had a number of thoughts come to mind that I wanted to share.

The end of the year presents a unique opportunity to look at your overall personal financial situation. With factors like tax reform, life changes or just working towards your goals, now is an especially important time to review things. Taking what we now know about the new tax law and weaving together all of the other areas of your personal finances is one of the key ways we provide value to you as your trusted adviser. Below are some things we’d like to help you think through before the year ends.

October 15th marked the official end of the 2017 tax filing season (for extended returns) and now we have turned our attention to 2018 tax returns. We recognize how painful the tax filing process can be and how much work you have to do to gather information for us to prepare your returns. This is why we are always looking for ways to make this process easier for you.

Last year was unusual. The US stock market posted positive returns every single month and other stock markets around the world also posted strong returns. This year has been more “normal” as we’ve seen some months with strong returns and some with losses. Some asset classes, like international stocks, are now down significantly on the year. Unfortunately, these losses feel worse than the gains we previously experienced, a concept called loss aversion first identified by the brilliant Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman.