Financial Planning Articles

Happy New Year! All of us at Lucien, Stirling & Gray hope 2019 was generous to you in many, many ways, and that 2020 brings you health, prosperity and enough personal challenge and growth to make life interesting and fulfilling.

First, thank you. I feel incredibly fortunate to have been given the opportunity to serve all you clients of this firm who are, to a person, likeable, respectable and friendly. I feel equally blessed to be surrounded by a team of great colleagues who do everything possible to demonstrate just how honest, hard-working, fun-loving, self-effacing and professional they are in caring for your needs.

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Has there ever been a time when you wondered if some official thought it was more important to come up with a catchy acronym than it was to name a law sensibly in the first place? My apologies if I sound cynical, but I’ve been having those thoughts recently.

The Setting Every Community Up for Retirement Enhancement (SECURE) Act was passed and signed into law by President Trump at the end of December 2019. It enacts various reforms to retirement law that could affect your retirement plans and your estate planning.

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We hope you’ve had a wonderful Holiday Season so far, and we wish you the very best for a great New Year’s celebration and a healthy, happy and prosperous 2020! Since part of prosperity typically involves finances, what follows is a brief notice of various updates and changes to retirement plan contribution limits for 2020, and a short reminder of why it’s not necessarily good to file your taxes as quickly as possible.

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Warren Buffett once commented that, “the most important quality for an investor is temperament, not intellect.” Think about that for a moment. In other words, it’s not how smart you are or how quickly you process information that makes the biggest difference in the long run. What ultimately counts the most is how measured you are in your thoughts and how deliberate you are in your behavior.

Our behavior, what we discipline ourselves to do – and even more importantly, what we discipline ourselves not to do – when provoked by perfectly natural human tendencies to act out, is a far greater determinant of our long-term financial success than any other factor.

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As of October 31st, 2019 we will be leaving our long-time offices on Guadalupe St.

Please make note of our new address:
7800 N. Mopac Expressway, Suite 340
Austin, Texas 78759
(512)458-2517 | info@lsggroup.com

Our new offices are conveniently located and easy to find in Heritage Plaza located at the northwest corner of MoPac and Spicewood Springs Road. Please see the map below.

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For more than a century after Charles Darwin first introduced his theory of evolution, most scientists following in his footsteps mistakenly believed that evolution had always been a slow, steady process that occurred at the same barely noticeable pace over hundreds of millions of years.

Then, in the early 1970s, two paleontologists named Steven Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge introduced a new theory that turned that long-held understanding on its ear. Based on their study of the fossil record, Gould and Eldredge observed that species had indeed gone through extended periods of gradual change.

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Over the course of our years serving clients, it has been our honor to walk alongside people in some of the most difficult and complex situations they face, guiding them in financial decisions and being present to ease their concerns.

These situations bring with them the full range of human emotion, as you can imagine. Especially at big transition points, clients often come to us with mixtures of hope, worry, insecurity, and vulnerability. After all, personal finances are among the most sensitive and intimate subjects imaginable.

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Does anyone feel rich anymore? We meet with clients all the time who are wealthy by many standards. But they often say they do not live extravagantly and should not be considered rich.

A big factor in this phenomenon is that it is human nature to compare our lives “up” and not “down”. We are far more likely to point to someone who appears to have more of something than we do, and feel lacking in comparison, than we are to look at the many, many circumstances of people living with fewer resources and acknowledge just how wealthy we actually are. Rather than feeling grateful for the abundance in our lives, we’re left with a false, and nagging, sense of scarcity.

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Back in the old days, retirement wasn’t really a word, let alone an industry, or a lifestyle. You worked in agriculture and just gradually slowed down and then quit working and then you died. It sounds grim, but I like one idea from this.  It was usually GRADUAL.

Most often in modern America, the retirement process is abrupt. You work at least 40 hours a week and boom, you retire, or you are forced to quit, and then you are done working. Some of this is driven by pensions.

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One of the job hazards of having been a financial advisor for 16 years is that my boundaries about talking about money are not in line with the rest of society.  While I’m not that person who asks casual acquaintances how much they paid for their house (see also, Michael Scott in “The Office”), I have been known to ask my sister if she’s maxing out her 401(k), and to make sure my friends know

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With age comes opportunities! If you turn 50 any time during 2019 (even the last day of the year), you can now increase your 401(k) contribution to $25,000. You don’t have to wait until your birthday. Call your advisor today to help you adjust your paychecks early this year. See the following chart for official numbers and limits for those age 50+.

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During this Thanksgiving, talk to your family about your priceless wealth.  No, I am not talking about the money or investments. I’m talking about the stories and the history and the childhood memories that define the core of who you are.

Every person’s life is interesting.  As we get older the young people will be incredulous at the challenges we faced as children.  Believe me, the 1970s might as well be

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Out of all the discussions I have with clients, the question:  “Do you have a will?” brings up the most angst and the most excuses.

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Years ago, I heard a story. The original version is long lost to me now, so I apologize for not giving appropriate credit to the original author here, but its message captured my attention. Ever since, it has shaped my thoughts about the importance of principled leadership, a courageous long-term perspective, and fostering shared values to overcome the internal struggles with which we all contend. For reasons that are becoming more urgent to me by the day, I feel compelled to recreate it here:

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Over the years Lucien, Stirling & Gray has covered a wide variety of topics in our monthly enewsletter articles. Around the office you’ll often hear advisors say, “Didn’t we write about this once?” or, “I think we have a great article on that!” We thought it’d be great if we segmented our articles over the years into “classifications”, if you will. If you’ve been a long-time reader – thank you! We hope that it might be beneficial to revisit some of these. If you’ve only recently started receiving our enewsletter, you might find the references below helpful, depending on what life transitions you are either planning for or just completed. We’d love to know what other topics you would like us to cover. As always, thank you for reading!

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At Lucien, Stirling & Gray, we’ve always believed that personal wealth is comprised of so much more than just your money and investments. We’ve talked about it time and time again (click to read more about our philosophy around defining wealth, personal wealth, and social wealth). As advisors, we enjoy helping our clients find a sense of fulfillment by showing them how to utilize their financial resources in meaningful ways.  For some of our philanthropically-minded clients, charitable giving is an important part of the picture.

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“We thought if we lived like students for one more year, we could then go forward and have the life we wanted without the pressure of debt…” -Christin Vasquez

My wife, Christin, worked hard to pay off her $35,000 balance in law school student loans over the 13 months after passing the bar exam.  When I walked the stage in 2010, I was debt-free.  We are both millennials.

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Every so often, especially at various transition points, it is smart to look at the whole picture and ask:  are we being courageous in our business decisions? Are we looking at the broad perspective and doing what is best for clients and our team going forward?

In 2017, we celebrated our 25th anniversary, which provoked a lot of reflection.  At the end of the year, we made the difficult decision to close the broker dealer portion of our business.  For 25 years we had run two separate corporations.

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When my kids were teens we visited the LBJ ranch.  During the tour, the docent talked about the huge philosophical gulf that existed between young people and adults during the Vietnam War.  Later, my kids asked me more questions about the so-called “generation gap” and I was surprised they didn’t know more about this phenomenon that seemed so prevalent when I grew up.

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Some of the best money advice I’ve received was from a close friend after his 17-year marriage broke up. He said, “Don’t be cheap like me. Hire a babysitter. It is cheaper than a divorce.” Oh, the price of regret is so high. So how do we use money as a beneficial tool in marriage, instead of a source of conflict?

It is simple, but it isn’t easy. Try to think long term and work together.

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