Real estate investors often tout the benefits of investing in real estate.However, the biggest value that real estate offers over traditional public equity (i.e. stock market) investing is the use of leverage.So if I’m getting rental income of about 5% of the value of my investment and appreciation rate of 3% then I have a total return of 8% (prior…

States like California and New York offer people a wide range of opposing lifestyle choices that make people more than willing to pay the exorbitant cost of housing in either place.If you want exciting nightlife options, a vibrant social scene, and to be in the middle of cultural/career relativism, then New York City is the place to be.If you want…

So in our last post we covered the difference between income taxes and estate taxes and how moving assets outside the estate to save on estate taxes exposes clients to income taxes that they otherwise wouldn’t have to pay due to loss of step-up in basis.So what’s worse?Paying estate taxes on your net worth above $30M?Or your beneficiaries having to…

A lot of people don’t start thinking about the estate tax until they are over the current $30M limit for 2026.The problem with this is that by waiting so late their beneficiaries will end up losing tens of millions of dollars to the estate tax that they didn’t have to if they would have just started their planning earlier.

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A couple years ago a story came out about how Peter Thiel was discovered to have turned a $2,000 contribution to a Roth IRA in 1999 into $5 billion in a Roth IRA as of 2021.Now this story drew a lot of attention (even from Congress) to figure out how he was able to amass this amount of money…

So in my last post I highlighted the value of an IUL wrapper that reduces the drag of both volatility and taxes in constructing a portfolio—namely that it can provide higher risk-adjusted returns over the long-term for people in high tax brackets.And the longer you plan on investing, the more value the wrapper has.

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We often think growth is linear.You see it plastered across everything from motivational speeches (“If you just improve 1% a day….”) to personal finance memes (If the S&P500 does 10% every year, then that means in 30 years….).And I get it.It’s tough to distill complex concepts into easily digestible content.I say this as someone who consistently does Monte Carlo simulations…