Join Nick as he chats with the SRB summer intern, Cade Cambell, while Dave is on vacation.

Watch it on YouTube HERE

Cade is a senior at Michigan State studying finance and minoring in insurance and risk management with a second minor in financial planning and wealth management. He grew up in a little town in the middle of Wyoming called Riverton, in the heart of the Rocky Mountains.  Cade is a big outdoorsman who loves to hunt, fish, hike, and just about anything outside. He found himself at Michigan State through a scholarship program and he loves it out here.

Nick: So tell us a little bit about the wealth management program at Michigan State and how you got interested in pursuing that.

Cade: “The wealth management program is really cool. So Professor Steve started that program. I don’t know what it’s been four or five years now. I think and it’s and it’s really cool because it’s aligned with the CFP. So the certified financial planning standards for their education requirement. As you progress throughout the program if you pass all the classes it satisfies those education requirements. So it’s really a good way to get a jump start on a financial planning career. There are not a lot of schools that offer that.”

Check episodes with two of our past interns. Ashley Sajor now works for of full time.

https://srbadvisors.com/why-ashley-sajor-became-a-financial-planner/

https://srbadvisors.com/learning-about-financial-planning-with-our-intern-joel/

Shotwell Rutter Baer is proud to be an independent, fee-only registered investment advisory firm. This means that we are only compensated by our clients for our knowledge and guidance — not from commissions by selling financial products. Our only motivation is to help you achieve financial freedom and peace of mind. By structuring our business this way we believe that many of the conflicts of interest that plague the financial services industry are eliminated. We work for our clients, period.

Click here to learn about the Strategic Reliable Blueprint, our financial plan process for your future.

Call us at 517-321-4832 for financial and retirement investing advice.

Join Nick and Dave as they discuss Nick’s best and worst personal money decisions.

In case you missed our last episode where Dave discusses his personal financial best and worst, you can find it here: Ep 122: Dave’s Best and Worst Personal Money Moves

Watch on YouTube HERE

Nick graduated college in 2005, had a one-year-old daughter, and Michigan was already into the recession that hit the rest of the country. So jobs for finance majors in Michigan were not plentiful. He got hired about 3 months later as a financial planner and moved to Lansing.

What he didn’t know what that this job required passing some tests. And these tests cost money plus the materials to study. So here he was fresh out of college with a one-year-old, and he had to put his entire financial planning curriculum test stuff on a credit card and maxed it out. So he started a job in debt before he even got paid. Luckily, he passed the test in a couple of months, however, he was working on commission and had a big credit card payment, which he would never advise his clients to do.

When Nick started his own company he left the credit union he had worked at for 7 years with a  salary and consistent clients and started his own business. He made sure he had a bunch of money in the bank and was able to cover his bills if it didn’t go according to plan and if his income went down.

It did go down by about a quarter from the previous year, but he was ready for that. That was a lesson in terms of being ready for it but also taking risks is a good thing. Betting on yourself can pay off.

Listen to the entire episode for more stories from Nick’s life where he made different decisions about money and find out how they turned out.

Do you have a great, or not-so-great investment story that you’d like to share? We’d love to hear it.

Shotwell Rutter Baer is proud to be an independent, fee-only registered investment advisory firm. This means that we are only compensated by our clients for our knowledge and guidance — not from commissions by selling financial products. Our only motivation is to help you achieve financial freedom and peace of mind. By structuring our business this way we believe that many of the conflicts of interest that plague the financial services industry are eliminated. We work for our clients, period.

Click here to learn about the Strategic Reliable Blueprint, our financial plan process for your future.

Call us at 517-321-4832 for financial and retirement investing advice.

Join Dave and Nick as Dave reveals one of the best and worst money decisions he’s made over the years.

Don’t worry, you will hear from Nick soon, as he reveals his own trials with money as well.

People often assume that because we are financial planners and have lots of experience we never screwed up along the way. Our clients are often surprised when we tell them about mistakes we’ve made or things we almost did.

Watch on YouTube Here

One of the toughest things Dave went through earlier in his career was buying a new house before selling the old house. He and his wife thought it would only take a couple of months to sell the old house. However, it ended up taking about two years. So they had two mortgage payments for two years.

Dave is very happy with his retirement planning for his own future, but since that is an ongoing story and he hasn’t retired yet, he also talks about his children’s education funds. “I’m pretty proud of the fact that we started 529 plans for the kids when I was brand new in this business. It was one of the first things I did for myself that we were also doing for clients. My daughter was about 3 and my son was a newborn and we committed right then to putting money away for their education. It was at a time when things weren’t as nailed down in our own overall financial picture. There were other things that could  easily have been talked into other priorities but we started small and added to it.”

In the end, their 529 plans paid for their kids’ education in full.

Related: 529 College Savings Plan Basics

Dave and Nick go on to talk about more investment choices and compounding interests.

Do you have a great, or not-so-great investment story that you’d like to share? We’d love to hear it.

Shotwell Rutter Baer is proud to be an independent, fee-only registered investment advisory firm. This means that we are only compensated by our clients for our knowledge and guidance — not from commissions by selling financial products. Our only motivation is to help you achieve financial freedom and peace of mind. By structuring our business this way we believe that many of the conflicts of interest that plague the financial services industry are eliminated. We work for our clients, period.

Click here to learn about the Strategic Reliable Blueprint, our financial plan process for your future.

Call us at 517-321-4832 for financial and retirement investing advice.

Join Dave and Nick as they discuss the book, The Soul of Money by Lynne Twist. Lynne Twist is a global activist and founded The Soul of Money Institute and you can find many of her works on her website there, including her book.

This is a great read for people who want to examine their relationship with money and how it affects their lives. We’ve had a lot of conversations on this podcast before about behavioral economics and finance and how money really affects you.

Lynne’s overall take is that as humans, especially in the United States, we take the view of money in the form of scarcity. She outlines a couple of different myths of scarcity and one is there’s not enough. The second one is that “more is better” and the third one is “that’s just the way it is.”

Nick admits he has felt those things at different times throughout his life and throughout his career. “It’s an interesting way to think of capitalism and the world that we live in. There’s always this sense that there’s not enough and ultimately more is better. The problem with that is there’s never enough right? What is enough? What drives somebody like Jeff Bezos to continue to make more money? What drives some of these major corporations and these billionaires to continue to make more money? Interestingly enough I’ve been a little bit obsessed with this idea of “what’s enough” for a while.  Some of that came out of another book that we reviewed, The Psychology of Money.

Lynne’s solution is having what she calls a sufficiency mindset. This is how we can change our relationship with money. To put it in the proper context we can think of it in terms of money as a means to an end. It can help us get more of what we need.  Sometimes many of us already have more than we need, but our focus is on not having enough so it doesn’t allow us to appreciate what we have.

A big problem in today’s world is that we’re so focused on what’s next that we don’t stop and enjoy what we have right now. This is really challenging in financial planning because we’re always trying to help people focus on how to build enough for retirement. How do we do all these things so that you get to a place where you can do what you want? This approach is why it’s so important for us to structure our process around life planning, not just retirement planning.

Check out our life planning process here.

Shotwell Rutter Baer is proud to be an independent, fee-only registered investment advisory firm. This means that we are only compensated by our clients for our knowledge and guidance — not from commissions by selling financial products. Our only motivation is to help you achieve financial freedom and peace of mind. By structuring our business this way we believe that many of the conflicts of interest that plague the financial services industry are eliminated. We work for our clients, period.

Click here to learn about the Strategic Reliable Blueprint, our financial plan process for your future.

Call us at 517-321-4832 for financial and retirement investing advice.

Welcome back to another episode, and another MSU case study. Last time we discussed a married couple who are both MSU professors and have two teenage children. You can find that episode here: Ep 114: Retirement Planning Case Study for an MSU Employee.

This time, we are discussing the scenario of a young professor in his late twenties with his first full-time college teaching position.

Join us as we talk about the ins and outs of financial planning and setting up a solid retirement plan for someone in a similar situation.

Bob is 28 years old. He has just received his first teaching appointment at Michigan State University. He is single but expects to propose to his significant other soon. He has about $50,000 in student debt and is currently renting an apartment. He wants to pay off the debt but also wants to save for his wedding and a house. He also knows that he should start saving for his retirement. His parents didn’t save enough and told him all the time that he needs to start saving right away.

4. Set reasonable goals around wedding and house saving.

Shotwell Rutter Baer financial planners specialize in helping clients who are employed by MSU. We have extensive knowledge of the benefits packages offered by MSU and how to maximize their offerings. You can find more information on the MSU section of our website.

Shotwell Rutter Baer is proud to be an independent, fee-only registered investment advisory firm. This means that we are only compensated by our clients for our knowledge and guidance — not from commissions by selling financial products. Our only motivation is to help you achieve financial freedom and peace of mind. By structuring our business this way we believe that many of the conflicts of interest that plague the financial services industry are eliminated. We work for our clients, period.

Click here to learn about the Strategic Reliable Blueprint, our financial plan process for your future.

Call us at 517-321-4832 for financial and retirement investing advice.

Join Nick and Dave as they discuss some of their favorite resources for financial planning and why they like them. You can find links to the resources below.

Shotwell Rutter Baer is proud to be an independent, fee-only registered investment advisory firm. This means that we are only compensated by our clients for our knowledge and guidance — not from commissions by selling financial products. Our only motivation is to help you achieve financial freedom and peace of mind. By structuring our business this way we believe that many of the conflicts of interest that plague the financial services industry are eliminated. We work for our clients, period.

Click here to learn about the Strategic Reliable Blueprint, our financial plan process for your future.

Call us at 517-321-4832 for financial and retirement investing advice.

Twelve months ago, I bonds were the security to purchase.

As a refresher, I Bond rates get set at six-month intervals. Basically May to November and then November to the following May or April. A year ago at this time as inflation was raging, the treasury announced the rate on I bonds would be a 9.4% annualized rate of return, and of course that got everybody’s attention.

Join us as we discuss how the current interest rates and inflation is affecting I bonds and if they are a good investment or not.

We talked last year at this time in our episode What is an I Bond? We wanted to make sure people understood what that 9.4% stated return really meant.  First of all, it’s an annualized return and was only good for six months, not a whole year. So what you were really going to realize for your six months was 4.2%.

When the new rates were announced later in the year it was a 6.89% annualized return from November to April. t

The new rate has been announced at a 4.3% annualized return. That is for someone who purchases a brand new I Bond. So that bond is going to pay 4.3% for the next six months but it’s annualized. It’ll pay half that for the next six months and then it will change again.

Dropping to 4 point 3 sounds like a drastic change and it is in a way. But if you’re thinking long term, which we advise you do, these are really meant for folks that are parking money and cash for the long term not meant as a short-term cash holding that you’re going to flip into something else.

That whole nice big return was all a variable rate that changed now. Fast forward to this spring because interest rates are higher now.  The treasury sets a portion of that rate based on current interest rates and they set it at just shy of one. It doesn’t sound like much but it’s a 1 % guaranteed minimum that bond is going to pay you over its 30 years.  Whereas, last year the minimum rate was 0 effectively. So even though that variable rate is now lower because inflation is starting to come under control.

Holding the current bonds over the long haul may actually be a better choice depending on what interest rates to inflation does in the meantime.

Shotwell Rutter Baer is proud to be an independent, fee-only registered investment advisory firm. This means that we are only compensated by our clients for our knowledge and guidance — not from commissions by selling financial products. Our only motivation is to help you achieve financial freedom and peace of mind. By structuring our business this way we believe that many of the conflicts of interest that plague the financial services industry are eliminated. We work for our clients, period.

Click here to learn about the Strategic Reliable Blueprint, our financial plan process for your future.

Call us at 517-321-4832 for financial and retirement investing advice.

In today’s episode, we discuss what is your ideal retirement age. We take a look at retirement in the United States and how it’s shifting. Join us as we take a dive back to where it came from and how we got here. 

We borrowed a lot of this from an article in The New York Times last week titled What Age Should You Retire? What Health Experts Say

We take a look at some of the non-financial issues with changing retirement age.

About Shotwell Rutter Baer

Shotwell Rutter Baer is proud to be an independent, fee-only registered investment advisory firm. This means that we are only compensated by our clients for our knowledge and guidance — not from commissions by selling financial products. Our only motivation is to help you achieve financial freedom and peace of mind. By structuring our business this way we believe that many of the conflicts of interest that plague the financial services industry are eliminated. We work for our clients, period.

Click here to learn about the Strategic Reliable Blueprint, our financial plan process for your future.

Call us at 517-321-4832 for financial and retirement investing advice.

It’s human nature to forget about something until it becomes important to you. The main point of the article is that a lot of people are starting their social security draw at 62. They think that if they go ahead and start social security it will be harder to mess with their current payments.

Shotwell Rutter Baer is proud to be an independent, fee-only registered investment advisory firm. This means that we are only compensated by our clients for our knowledge and guidance — not from commissions by selling financial products. Our only motivation is to help you achieve financial freedom and peace of mind. By structuring our business this way we believe that many of the conflicts of interest that plague the financial services industry are eliminated. We work for our clients, period.

Click here to learn about the Strategic Reliable Blueprint, our financial plan process for your future.

Call us at 517-321-4832 for financial and retirement investing advice.

2nd Quarter 2023 Economic Update and Market Review

The first quarter of 2023 was largely positive for the markets, but not positive enough to make up for the frustrating previous 12 months. While inflation still appears to be slowing, there is plenty of uncertainty around interest rates and the Federal Reserve’s ability to slow the economy just enough but not too much.

As always, our partners at East Bay Investment Solutions have provided a balanced approach to the positive and negative signals out there right now:

Download the text of their full presentation here.

Watch a video of their quarterly presentation here: East Bay Webinar

Shotwell Rutter Baer is proud to be an independent, fee-only registered investment advisory firm. This means that we are only compensated by our clients for our knowledge and guidance — not from commissions by selling financial products. Our only motivation is to help you achieve financial freedom and peace of mind. By structuring our business this way we believe that many of the conflicts of interest that plague the financial services industry are eliminated. We work for our clients, period.

Click here to learn about the Strategic Reliable Blueprint, our financial plan process for your future.

Call us at 517-321-4832 for financial and retirement investing advice.