Author: Lyle Benson; The end of the year presents an excellent opportunity to step back and take a holistic look at your overall financial situation. While most year-end planning focuses on tax projections and potential changes to tax laws, there are many other areas of your finances you should be thinking about right now. Weaving together income and estate tax planning with retirement planning, risk management, investments and cash flow is an important aspect of the work we do for our clients. In this letter we’ll look at each of these various aspects of financial planning and address some of the questions you should be considering in the coming months.

Author: Chris Benson; Let’s go back to November 8, 2016, the day of the U.S. presidential election. Regardless of your party affiliation or who you supported in the general election, you were probably ready to put politics in the rearview mirror. Now imagine I had told you at the time every major news item that would happen over the next 11 months, from natural disasters to North Korean missile tests to Russian investigations and everything in between. Then I asked you to draw a chart of your prediction for the US stock market, as measured by the S&P 500, over those next 11 months.

Author: Chris Benson; You might remember back in April, the Trump administration released its first take on a tax reform plan. As I said at the time, that plan was essentially a bullet point list on a single sheet of paper and was completely devoid of details. Six months later they have now released a "framework" for tax reform that still lacks details but which now spans a whopping NINE pages!

Author: Chris Benson; By now you've likely heard about the massive breach of confidential information that occurred at the credit reporting agency Equifax. Millions of individuals' personal information, including social security numbers, addresses, and in some cases even drivers licenses, were exposed. While we have seen a number of security breaches in recent years, this is likely the largest and the most disturbing, given the information the credit reporting agencies have.

Author: Chris Benson; This Sunday, I'm heading to Hershey, PA to see the Zac Brown Band perform for the 4th time. Before I first saw them at Preakness in 2010, I had no interest in country music, but that changed after seeing them perform. They put on an incredible show and their songs are chock full of great lyrics and some good life advice. I thought I'd put together a list of my favorite lyrics from some of their best songs, maybe some of them will hit home for you too.

Author: Chris Benson; Early this year, I read an article about the total solar eclipse that would cross the continental United States on August 21st. I'd never given much thought to eclipses and have nothing more than a passing interest in astronomy, but the rarity of the event piqued my interest and I started to read more.