The third quarter was yet another strong one in the markets, particularly for U.S. stocks. The S&P 500 returned close to 8% on the quarter and is now up over 10% for the year. Small cap stocks didn’t fare quite as well this quarter with the Russell 2000 index finishing up 3.5%, but they are up 11.5% year to date. International stocks bounced back a little bit with a positive 1% return and are only down about 1% on the year now, as measured by the MSCI EAFE index. Emerging Markets stocks continued to trail all other stock categories with a 1% decline and they are down over 7% on the year.

We recently went through a major software transition that allows us to present investment performance reporting to our clients on a daily basis, as opposed to quarterly as we had done in the past. The reason for the upgrade wasn’t so that clients could check their portfolio every day, in fact this is a behavior that we try hard to discourage among our clients. However, we found that quarterly performance reports put too much focus on a specific time period with a set ending date every 3 months.

How you are going to spend your time in retirement is just as important a question as how you are going to pay for it. What will the role of “work” be going forward? Work should be defined as engagement that brings value to others and meaning to you. It is important to have enough purpose in your life to wake up in the morning and enough money to sleep at night.

In case you weren’t already aware of how unsecure email can be, hopefully the well publicized and controversial hacks surrounding the 2016 election opened your eyes. We have been preaching to clients for years not to share confidential or identifying information in e-mails and have encouraged you to use our secure portal instead.

I just had the opportunity to spend two weeks in Tanzania and Zanzibar. As some of you may know, Ellen and I typically take a vacation with each of our kids and their families each summer. Our family is all very close and everyone is local, but this gives us a chance to spend dedicated time with each of them. We planned the Africa trip with our youngest daughter, Jessie, who also tacked on a 10 day fitness/safari retreat she was leading in Uganda after our trip. Here are some of the lessons I learned (or reinforced) in east Africa.

Summertime usually offers a reprieve from taxes for most of the country. We are a few months removed from the April tax filing deadline and a few months away from the October extended filing deadline. We aren’t worried about year-end tax planning like we will be in December and we aren’t assessing the impact of new tax laws like we seem to be every January. In short, we don’t usually anticipate major tax news to hit in the summer. Unfortunately, the never ending news stream appears to have affected the tax world just as it has every other aspect of our lives. There have been several developments in taxes this summer that we think you should be aware of, which we’ll outline below.