Conservatory Chat

Let’s talk about opportunities in a downturn.

While we can’t predict a market downturn in advance, we certainly can be prepared for one. With the market recently in the doldrums, now may be a good time to review the opportunities we can exploit when others rush for the door.  

The first one to come to mind is tax-loss harvesting; that is, selling positions that have gone down below one’s cost, booking a loss for tax purposes, and then buying a similar (though not identical) investment that is probably also on sale due to the bearish conditions. The investor retains an almost equivalent market exposure but now has a loss to offset gains or income (up to $3,000 of income) on next year’s tax return.

Another opportunity is a Roth conversion. That means paying taxes on the value of the shares or cash moving from the IRA into a Roth today so that you won’t have to ever pay taxes on that money again. You’ve probably read that if you expect to be in the same or lower tax bracket in the future than you are today, then a Roth doesn’t make tax sense. But if you can make the conversion at lower valuations, then the tax bill is lower today than it would be if the money was taken out after the market recovers. Also, some of us believe that tax rates have nowhere to go but up.

People who are making annual gifts to their children or heirs can get some leverage in a market downturn.  Each of us can transfer $17,000 this year to others without paying a gift tax. If you were to transfer investments that are temporarily undervalued, then that $17,000 in depressed ETFs could be a more valuable gift when the market recovers.

Finally, when something goes on sale, it’s often a buying opportunity. For some reason, this is how people think when retail or online stores offer discounted prices, but when stocks go on sale, most investors think sell rather than buy. However, buying at depressed prices is always a good strategy, long-term, for savvy investors.

Of course, if your portfolio is being professionally managed, all these opportunities are presumably being explored without you having to give them a thought.

Disclosure Notice: The Wealth Conservatory® is a Registered Trade Mark of Comprehensive Planning Associates, Inc. - a Registered Investment Advisor with offices in New Hampshire, California, and Missouri. The Conservatory is not licensed to and does not engage in the practice of rendering legal or tax advice. Any discussion of either is for informational purposes only and you are strongly encouraged to seek appropriate counsel prior to taking action. The Conservatory and its representatives are in compliance with the current registration and notice filing requirements imposed upon SEC Registered Investment Advisors by those states in which the Conservatory maintains clients. The information contained herein should not be construed as personalized financial or investment advice unless the recipient has an executed and active client or member engagement with the Conservatory. The Wealth Conservatory® is a Registered Trademark of Comprehensive Planning Associates, Inc. Thank you. 

A dinner guest at my home last evening inquired as to whether I invested clients’ money in hedge funds. Their thinking was that institutions like large endowments invest in them, so that must be where the really big money is made.

I explained that large endowment funds invest only a tiny fraction of their money in things like hedge funds; and that the bulk of their money is invested in safe investments in stocks and bonds backed by strong and prosperous businesses.

Lots of times folks equate investing with making money – first and foremost. It’s easy to do. But making money should never be the first priority. I like to think of three pillars of investing, and I think of them in order of priority.

First and foremost: don’t lose money. That is not the same thing as watching your portfolio’s value rise and fall with the natural rhythm of the market. We can watch the value of our own homes rise and fall with the vagaries of supply and demand. But we still have a home in which to live. What we don’t want is to see our home burn to the ground – which is precisely the risk when it comes to hedge funds and similar high-risk investments. Investing and speculating are two very different animals.

Second, don’t take on unnecessary risk. To generate a rate of return that will adequately finance our long-term objectives we cannot completely avoid risk. But risk represents the potential for failing to meet those objectives. Exposure to stocks, for example, creates the potential to achieve objectives. On the flip side, it also creates the potential for failure. Take on enough exposure to the beneficial potential but avoid as much of the risk of failure as you can.

Finally, third try to maximize return at the level of risk that is appropriate for you. This is accomplished through diversification, opportunistic rebalancing, controlling taxes and expenses.  These activities do not impact risk so much as they do return. Two portfolios can contain the same level of risk without generating the same return. An un-diversified portfolio can have the same risk level as a well-diversified one. It just won’t generate as much return. Another way of looking at this is that a targeted rate of return will require more risk the less diversified and higher are the taxes and expenses.   

As with all things in life, it is important that we not lose track of our priorities to the allure of chasing maximum potential return. From the expression on my dinner guest’s face, I fear I may not have aided him in his digestion.

Disclosure Notice: The Wealth Conservatory® is a Registered Trade Mark of Comprehensive Planning Associates, Inc. - a Registered Investment Advisor with offices in New Hampshire, California, and Missouri. The Conservatory is not licensed to and does not engage in the practice of rendering legal or tax advice. Any discussion of either is for informational purposes only and you are strongly encouraged to seek appropriate counsel prior to taking action. The Conservatory and its representatives are in compliance with the current registration and notice filing requirements imposed upon SEC Registered Investment Advisors by those states in which the Conservatory maintains clients. The information contained herein should not be construed as personalized financial or investment advice unless the recipient has an executed and active client or member engagement with the Conservatory. The Wealth Conservatory® is a Registered Trademark of Comprehensive Planning Associates, Inc. Thank you. 

Did you miss the latest market gold rush? In the 1967 movie The Graduate, the one word was “plastics.” Today it’s two words: “artificial intelligence.”  

Where is this latest El Dorado of the equities market? Well, in the stock of firms like Upstart Holdings (up 393% this year alone), C3.ai (255%), Nvidia (220%), Palantir Technologies (177%), and Meta Platforms (170%). How could anyone have missed this?

Well, let’s take the example of the firm C3, which reports just $266 million of annual revenues on a market capitalization of $3 billion. The term “fool’s gold” might come to mind.

To be fair, there is no question that artificial intelligence technology is going to change our lives in a variety of interesting ways, most of which we don’t know about yet. There will come a time when AI is as ubiquitous and helpful as mobile phones or social media. The problem is that the current pioneers are not guaranteed to be the beneficiaries of this transformation.

We’ve been through this kind of tech mania once before, in the late 1990s, when anything with “.com” after its name soared in price regardless of earnings or potential. Firms were valued not on revenues or profits but on “eyeballs,” which turned out to be a weak metric for predicting future returns or relevancy. Some of the pioneers were later superseded by larger, better-capitalized companies that simply pounced on their turf and took away their market, improving the technology in the process. Remember Ashton-Tate (database technology), WordPerfect (word processing), VisiCalc and Lotus 1-2-3 (spreadsheets), or Netscape Navigator (the Mosaic browser technology)? Chances are you don’t, but all of them pioneered important advances in technology at the time, and investors who bet on them were (to put it kindly) not rewarded.

Betting on the winners of any new technology is nearly impossible; it was impossible back then and it is today. History suggests that the astonishing runups of the early AI firms will, probably sooner rather than later, disappoint. So don’t feel too bad if you missed this latest gold rush.  Most miners, you know, died disappointed and destitute.

Disclosure Notice: The Wealth Conservatory® is a Registered Trade Mark of Comprehensive Planning Associates, Inc. - a Registered Investment Advisor with offices in New Hampshire, California, and Missouri. The Conservatory is not licensed to and does not engage in the practice of rendering legal or tax advice. Any discussion of either is for informational purposes only and you are strongly encouraged to seek appropriate counsel prior to taking action. The Conservatory and its representatives are in compliance with the current registration and notice filing requirements imposed upon SEC Registered Investment Advisors by those states in which the Conservatory maintains clients. The information contained herein should not be construed as personalized financial or investment advice unless the recipient has an executed and active client or member engagement with the Conservatory. The Wealth Conservatory® is a Registered Trademark of Comprehensive Planning Associates, Inc. Thank you. 

The U.S. Federal Reserve Board once again last month raised the so-called Fed Funds Rate that our central bank charges lending institutions on overnight loans. Who cares?

What we hear in the press centers on speculation as to how the Fed economists and governors are thinking in terms of further rate hikes, and what the impact will be (or not be) on inflation and the prospects of a recession.    

But why should we non-economists care about this rate? Well, perhaps the most direct impact on us is the return we enjoy on short-term savings, vehicles, and cash. Not long ago, before the Fed decided to attack inflation, people were earning around half a percent a year on their money market funds and short-term bonds and CD’s. Today, it’s possible to shop for between one- and five-year maturities yielding five percent or more.  

Another reason to care about this rate is credit card debt. When the Fed raises this rate, credit card issuers raise their rates accordingly. We are up to interest rates on credit cards of 20 percent a year on carried balances. Auto and personal loan lenders also charge higher interest rates, and most of us have watched mortgage rates move higher in loose lockstep with the Fed.

The reason the U.S. central bank moves these rates up or down is directly tied to the behaviors they wish to influence among all of us. Right now, the Fed economists are using these rate hikes in an effort to encourage us to save and invest more, and to discourage us from spending and borrowing – basically trying to cool off the pace of the economy, and reduce the demand for goods and services that cause inflation to remain higher than they’d like.  

In this effort to influence public behavior, the Fed is not alone. The European Central Bank also raised its equivalent rate by a quarter of a percent, as did the Bank of Canada in July. Bottom line: this series of rate hikes has savers and investors rejoicing, while spenders and borrowers despair. How each of us cares about the Fed Funds Rate therefore, depends wholly upon which of these two camps we find ourselves most closely related to.

Disclosure Notice: The Wealth Conservatory® is a Registered Trade Mark of Comprehensive Planning Associates, Inc. - a Registered Investment Advisor with offices in New Hampshire, California, and Missouri. The Conservatory is not licensed to and does not engage in the practice of rendering legal or tax advice. Any discussion of either is for informational purposes only and you are strongly encouraged to seek appropriate counsel prior to taking action. The Conservatory and its representatives are in compliance with the current registration and notice filing requirements imposed upon SEC Registered Investment Advisors by those states in which the Conservatory maintains clients. The information contained herein should not be construed as personalized financial or investment advice unless the recipient has an executed and active client or member engagement with the Conservatory. The Wealth Conservatory® is a Registered Trademark of Comprehensive Planning Associates, Inc. Thank you. 

You may have heard of the 4% rule in retirement. Basically, it means that you should be able to safely take out and spend 4% of your retirement portfolio in the first year of retirement, then increase that dollar amount by the inflation rate for the next 30 years, and you should be able to count on that income no matter what the markets do.

Notice all the “shoulds” here. This “rule” was formulated by a financial planner named Bill Bengen back in the mid-1990s when he became curious about Money Magazine’s advice that retirees could take 10% out of their portfolios each year because, at that time, stocks had generated an average 10% return since the mid-1920s. Bengen pulled out his spreadsheet, assumed a $1 million retirement, and began taking out 10% each year starting in 1926. The portfolio ran out of money during the Great Depression. He iteratively tried a lot of other amounts and formulas and came up with the 4% amount inflated thereafter because that portfolio distribution not only survived the awful markets of the Great Depression, but also the stagflation era that included the 1974 and 1975 stock market downturns.

The reason you can’t sustain the same distribution as the markets is simple: you’re taking money out of the portfolio every year, and in bear markets (particularly severe ones) the portfolio amount is declining by the downturn plus your distribution. The next year you must pay out a larger percentage of the portfolio, which will generate less return going forward, and you can bet there will be another bear market in there somewhere. Because markets are erratic, you must reduce what you take out to account for the uncertainty.

The problem with the 4% “rule” is that if you don’t encounter a Great Depression or stagflation, and particularly if you get a nice sequence of market returns in the early years of retirement, following through on the safe withdrawal rate means you will end up with a huge pot at the end of retirement – and maybe some regrets that you didn’t spend some of it earlier.

There are other issues that make a “set it and forget it” policy less-than-ideal. One is that if much of your retirement income comes from Social Security and/or a pension, then you are much less reliant on the markets, and you can probably take out more from the portfolio side of your wealth. If all your income comes from an investment portfolio, then market movements become proportionately more impactful.

Also, the 4% “rule” doesn’t account for taxes. The most astute retirees have their retirement assets in different tax buckets: a Roth IRA (no taxes on distributions), a traditional IRA (full income tax rate on distributions), and a taxable account (taxed each year on distributions but generally only taxed on capital gains when stocks or ETFs are sold for income). Experienced financial planners can control the tax bite by taking a certain amount from each – and by keeping income below certa

Disclosure Notice: The Wealth Conservatory® is a Registered Trade Mark of Comprehensive Planning Associates, Inc. - a Registered Investment Advisor with offices in New Hampshire, California, and Missouri. The Conservatory is not licensed to and does not engage in the practice of rendering legal or tax advice. Any discussion of either is for informational purposes only and you are strongly encouraged to seek appropriate counsel prior to taking action. The Conservatory and its representatives are in compliance with the current registration and notice filing requirements imposed upon SEC Registered Investment Advisors by those states in which the Conservatory maintains clients. The information contained herein should not be construed as personalized financial or investment advice unless the recipient has an executed and active client or member engagement with the Conservatory. The Wealth Conservatory® is a Registered Trademark of Comprehensive Planning Associates, Inc. Thank you. 

The normal retirement planning models say that when we retire, we will spend the same amount of money out of our retirement portfolios each year on living expenses, travel, eating out, etc., with that total amount only rising each year as inflation makes all those things incrementally more expensive.

But is that actually true in the real world? A recent report by the RAND Corporation examined the spending patterns of older Americans who participated in the University of Michigan’s Health and Retirement Survey. RAND researchers found that for single retirees, real spending declined after age 65 at a rate of about 1.7% a year; for coupled retirement households, the decline was 2.4% a year.  

There are several possible explanations for this. One is that people might find their living expenses less affordable as they get older. But the researchers concluded that this was not a factor, because they found that the wealthiest group of survey participants showed the same spending declines as those with less wealth. In fact, they found that as retirees got older, across all wealth categories, they spent an increasing share of their budget on gifts and donations.

A better explanation, proposed but not proven in the research, is that younger retirees are more vigorous and more inclined to take trips and eat out in their 60s and early 70s than they are when they get older. They might also become less interested in luxury goods like new cars and clothing as they age.

The median retiree household age 65-69 spent $28,505 (single) or $53,990 (married) a year, while retirees in their 80s spent $26,094 and $38,885 respectively. But of course, there was considerable variation in this number; some retirees expect to spend more for a more lavish lifestyle than others. The study broke down expenditures by category and found that trips and leisure expenditures fell the farthest as people got older, while healthcare expenditures were surprisingly stable, especially for coupled households. In all age categories, housing was the biggest budget item (23-25% of the total budget), followed by food (16-19%), and utilities (12-17%).  

This healthcare statistic might surprise some people who had assumed that, later in life, people will have to allocate dramatically more to medical expenses than they did when they were younger and more vigorous. The study referenced an earlier study, which found that (for most individuals) the last year of life will typically engender a relatively affordable $6,800 in out-of-pocket payment for doctor and hospital visits. Indeed, the healthcare percentage of a household’s budget averaged just 14% for people over 80 (compared with 9.4% for the youngest retirees). A relatively small number of people, roughly 10% of the sample, accounts for 42% of the out-of-pocket healthcare spending in the later years of life.

Disclosure Notice: The Wealth Conservatory® is a Registered Trade Mark of Comprehensive Planning Associates, Inc. - a Registered Investment Advisor with offices in New Hampshire, California, and Missouri. The Conservatory is not licensed to and does not engage in the practice of rendering legal or tax advice. Any discussion of either is for informational purposes only and you are strongly encouraged to seek appropriate counsel prior to taking action. The Conservatory and its representatives are in compliance with the current registration and notice filing requirements imposed upon SEC Registered Investment Advisors by those states in which the Conservatory maintains clients. The information contained herein should not be construed as personalized financial or investment advice unless the recipient has an executed and active client or member engagement with the Conservatory. The Wealth Conservatory® is a Registered Trademark of Comprehensive Planning Associates, Inc. Thank you. 

Individuals with advanced economic degrees and economists that are employed (sometimes at astronomical salaries) at the big brokerage firms have inside data that tells them where the economy is going, right? After all, their views are routinely sought out and published by the major news outlets, so they must know something that we don’t know.

The interesting thing about these various predictions is that nobody ever goes back and assesses whether the predictions and forecasts were, with the benefit of hindsight, actually accurate or helpful. Until now!

A new report by researchers at Washington University in St. Louis, MO gathered up the consensus forecasts from three popular economic surveys, including from chief financial officers at large publicly traded firms and the economists at the Conference Board, and compared them with actual market events that occurred after the bold and confident forecasts.

What was the result? The authors found that in every case, the predictions were less accurate in predicting what would happen, short-term and long-term, in the market than what economists call a “random walk,” which can be compared to throwing darts (assuming you are not skilled at darts). The “gains” listed in the researcher’s final table ranged from -0.99% in one year to -18.19% over six months – not the kind of market returns to which most of us aspire.

This confirms a longstanding experiment that the Wall Street Journal conducted some years ago, where expert stock-pickers named which stocks they expected to outperform over the next three to six months and the Journal’s reporters threw darts to pick a comparison portfolio. Most of the time, the dart-throwers outperformed the expert stock-pickers.

So, one might ask, why do the news outlets seek out the predictions of economists and Wall Street analysts? The answer seems to be for entertainment value. Most of us like to think we know what’s going to happen, and having a person with an advanced degree and seven-figure salary, dressed in expensive business attire, telling us what is going to happen, provides a sense of comfort – and maybe a temporary salve to the anxiety that comes with the uncertainty that we all live with in the real world.

Disclosure Notice: The Wealth Conservatory® is a Registered Trade Mark of Comprehensive Planning Associates, Inc. - a Registered Investment Advisor with offices in New Hampshire, California, and Missouri. The Conservatory is not licensed to and does not engage in the practice of rendering legal or tax advice. Any discussion of either is for informational purposes only and you are strongly encouraged to seek appropriate counsel prior to taking action. The Conservatory and its representatives are in compliance with the current registration and notice filing requirements imposed upon SEC Registered Investment Advisors by those states in which the Conservatory maintains clients. The information contained herein should not be construed as personalized financial or investment advice unless the recipient has an executed and active client or member engagement with the Conservatory. The Wealth Conservatory® is a Registered Trademark of Comprehensive Planning Associates, Inc. Thank you. 

What if somebody could tell you the exact date when the next recession will begin, so you could get out of the market and wait it out? Wouldn’t that be great?

You can fantasize about this if you want. But it so happens that sitting on the sidelines during an economic recession is actually bad for your portfolio returns.

A study conducted by a mutual fund company called Dimensional Fund Advisors did something very simple: it looked at the start date of all recessions from January 1947 to December 2022, as announced by the National Bureau of Economic Research. Then it calculated the returns of the Standard & Poors 500 index for the ensuing one, three, and five years after the recessions were formally declared. Finally, it averaged those returns to show how investor portfolios, on average, fared during those times when the economy was in the tank.

The result was not encouraging to those who plan to move to the sidelines during recessions. On average, one-year market returns after the start of a recession came to a decently positive 6.4%. Three-year returns and five-year returns were even more so: 43.7% and 70.5% over those time periods.

Looking over the data, the researchers noticed that markets have, on average, tended to experience most of their bear market declines before recessions were announced, and began recovering soon afterwards. The markets tended to trend upwards during the recession, perhaps because investors anticipated that it would end soon and good times would restore corporate health.  

The bottom line is pretty clear: even if you knew the exact date and time that a recession would be announced (and you don’t), the future market movements would still be uncertain—and, on average, counterintuitive. Better to throw dice, or darts, or examine turtle shells to find out what’s coming in the future.

Disclosure Notice: The Wealth Conservatory® is a Registered Trade Mark of Comprehensive Planning Associates, Inc. - a Registered Investment Advisor with offices in New Hampshire, California, and Missouri. The Conservatory is not licensed to and does not engage in the practice of rendering legal or tax advice. Any discussion of either is for informational purposes only and you are strongly encouraged to seek appropriate counsel prior to taking action. The Conservatory and its representatives are in compliance with the current registration and notice filing requirements imposed upon SEC Registered Investment Advisors by those states in which the Conservatory maintains clients. The information contained herein should not be construed as personalized financial or investment advice unless the recipient has an executed and active client or member engagement with the Conservatory. The Wealth Conservatory® is a Registered Trademark of Comprehensive Planning Associates, Inc. Thank you. 

Here’s a surprising source of support to the stock market…

Pretty much every economic theory rests on the idea that prices are set by the balance between supply and demand. If there are more buyers than sellers, or more demand than supply, prices will go up because the buyers will be bidding against each other. If there are few buyers, prices will have to go down to attract more buyers back into the market.

Which raises an interesting question: who are the buyers in the stock market?

Most people don’t realize that one of the most reliable bulk purchases of equities are the issuing companies themselves. At least one study calculated that more dollars’ worth of stocks were purchased by the issuing companies than by pensions, mutual funds, or households over most of the past decade.

When a company buys back its own stock with excess cash, that stock is taken off the market – reducing supply. Some analysts think that corporate buybacks were a big part of why the S&P 500 gained 15% in price since the October low.

So why would a company purchase its own shares? Obviously, it drives up the company stock price, which serves shareholders. But of course, that money could alternatively have been invested in creating new factories, adding new services, or research and development into building a larger and more profitable company. Share buybacks are a way of tacitly admitting that you don’t really know where to spend that cash on hand to benefit the company itself.

Some analysts now believe that share buybacks are going to slow down for the remainder of this year. In aggregate, companies have experienced two successive quarters of declining profits, reducing the available cash to become a major purchaser. Cash balances have fallen an estimated 13% in the last 12 months – the sharpest decline on record. And as borrowing costs (due to higher interest rates) have gone up, cash is needed to avoid incurring expensive debt.

At the same time, there are rumblings of a recession on the horizon, which (if it happens) would allow companies to buy their own shares at cheaper prices – and prop up their share prices in a market downturn.

If companies cut back on their stock purchases, it would remove one of the biggest sources of demand in the gigantic auction house that is the U.S. stock market. It’s possible that bullish investors will step in to replace that demand. But most economic theory suggests that the balance between buyers and sellers, demand and supply, can be a delicate one. The good news from all this is that if prices were to fall dramatically, American corporations might step in to shore up their respective stock prices – and buy back their own shares at a relative bargain – precisely what you and I hope to do during that preferably fleeting market pull-back.

Disclosure Notice: The Wealth Conservatory® is a Registered Trade Mark of Comprehensive Planning Associates, Inc. - a Registered Investment Advisor with offices in New Hampshire, California, and Missouri. The Conservatory is not licensed to and does not engage in the practice of rendering legal or tax advice. Any discussion of either is for informational purposes only and you are strongly encouraged to seek appropriate counsel prior to taking action. The Conservatory and its representatives are in compliance with the current registration and notice filing requirements imposed upon SEC Registered Investment Advisors by those states in which the Conservatory maintains clients. The information contained herein should not be construed as personalized financial or investment advice unless the recipient has an executed and active client or member engagement with the Conservatory. The Wealth Conservatory® is a Registered Trademark of Comprehensive Planning Associates, Inc. Thank you. 

All year long I’ve been listening to pundits on financial networks incessantly predict imminent recession. Per usual, investors who listened and retreated to the sidelines learned once again that doing so put them at financial peril as the markets delivered yet another quarter of solid returns.

The broad U.S. stock market picked up gains of six and two-thirds percentage points in the second quarter and is now up well over sixteen percent in the first six months of the year. 

Over on the less-risky bond side of portfolios, the past year’s trend in dramatically rising rates seems to have moderated. Both the 30- and 10-year yields barely moved from where they were three months ago. At the shorter end, though, the yield curve has grown even more inverted; with the five-year well above four percent, the two-year just under five percent, and both the one-year and six-month pushing five and one-half percent.  

To understate the obvious, this is not a normal or healthy yield curve. Whenever shorter-term rates are paying bond investors more than their longer-term counterparts, it means many investors are feeling cautious about the future of the market. With statistical indicators being all over the place, our economic future has seldom been as cloudy as it is today. By one measure, the manufacturing sector has been in a recession for the past seven months. New export orders for goods have been falling globally at the fastest pace since the end of 2022. Adding to a list of downbeat news, U.S. corporations have reported lower profits for the past two quarters.  

That, however, is only half the story. The unemployment rate in the U.S. remains under 4% and the labor participation rate among workers aged 25 to 54 stands at a very strong 83.4% – the highest level since 2007. Consumer spending has remained brisk, with durable goods orders up 1.7% last month over the previous month. U.S. households are still flush with cash that was saved during the pandemic; and the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco has estimated that households still have sufficient savings to support current spending levels at least through the fourth quarter of this year. Not incidentally, the inflation rate keeps falling. Last year, alarm bells were sounding because June’s annualized rate hit 9.1%. Today’s rate is an annualized 4.0%.

There’s no reason to imagine that any of us can predict the future with any accuracy, except to point out that markets have, historically, trended upward and rewarded patient investors. It’s possible that a future recession will test our collective patience once again. But this is a test that will be easier to pass due to the gains that this year has provided us already – and we’ll be fortified by laddered bond portfolios which have locked in much of today’s attractive short-term yields-to-maturity for up to five years.

This week’s fireworks could celebrate not just our nation’s founding, but t

Disclosure Notice: The Wealth Conservatory® is a Registered Trade Mark of Comprehensive Planning Associates, Inc. - a Registered Investment Advisor with offices in New Hampshire, California, and Missouri. The Conservatory is not licensed to and does not engage in the practice of rendering legal or tax advice. Any discussion of either is for informational purposes only and you are strongly encouraged to seek appropriate counsel prior to taking action. The Conservatory and its representatives are in compliance with the current registration and notice filing requirements imposed upon SEC Registered Investment Advisors by those states in which the Conservatory maintains clients. The information contained herein should not be construed as personalized financial or investment advice unless the recipient has an executed and active client or member engagement with the Conservatory. The Wealth Conservatory® is a Registered Trademark of Comprehensive Planning Associates, Inc. Thank you.