Donald G. Thomas 

As we continue our series exploring threats to your financial wellness, we need to discuss two of the biggest issues for American personal finance: Ignorance and Impulse. Much of the American public is uneducated about personal finance and how best to navigate the space. There’s too little training in how to teach yourself and train against your base impulses to succeed, especially as young people go through high school courses focused on STEAM skills. We’re preparing our you

If you’ve overcome the challenges to building wealth and have put a plan in place to systematize your finances, you’re off to a great start. In addition to continuing these behaviors over time, you must guard your burgeoning wealth against threats from within and without. Undisciplined behavior can keep your financial wellness plan from taking hold while accruing too many debts of the wrong sort can slow down your momentum for years to come. Read More...

When it comes to saving for retirement, business owners & independent contractors get to have all the fun. For those folks, there are a myriad of ways we can structure one or more retirement plans and stuff them full of possibly hundreds of thousands of dollars per year. It’s a proverbial buffet of options. However, if you’re a high-income W-2 employee (meaning you receive a W-2 from your employer each year), your options for accelerated retirement planning are much more li

Over the past several decades, our American "Land of Opportunity" has been gradually morphed into the American "Land of Consumption". With blazing technological innovations, shorter product cycles, increased levels of standardized luxury and planned obsolescence, our country has become one of the easiest places in the world to satisfy whatever your heart desires. While this is great for businesses and certainly helps drive forward our economic growth, it has turned us into a

You’ve made it to our final segment of our series concerning the four challenges to building wealth. We’ve explored hurdles like financial institutions and ways to adopt their strategies, lost opportunity cost, and the velocity of money. Your biggest challenge to building wealth though? It’s you. No matter how savvy and dedicated you may be to growing your wealth, it won’t work if you are not approaching it in an organized and coordinated way. ...keep reading

As we continue our series exploring challenges to building wealth, we need to introduce the concept of velocity of money. In personal finance, the velocity of money refers to using your funds to build wealth more quickly by getting your money to do more than one thing at a time. Click through below to continue reading:

As we kick off our series exploring the four challenges to building wealth, we’re taking a deep dive into lost opportunity cost. The choices we make every day affect our lives in far-reaching ways, from our diet and fitness routine to financial discipline. When you decide to do something you aren’t just choosing that option over others – you’re choosing its future over the others. How are your choices affecting your life and your future? Click the link here to read the rest:

If you’ve set up automated deposits, selected an investment mix, and have a general awareness of your overall financial status, you’re doing well. This is especially true when you consider the huge number of Americans who have under $500 in savings and don’t track their spending. Unfortunately, there’s a lot more to growing your wealth than setting up these healthy behaviors. In fact, there are four distinct challenges to building your wealth and overall financial wellness.

Alright, who rocked the boat? So it looks like, for the time being at least, the smooth sailing in the market has come to an end. Now is a great opportunity for us to talk about how we can react to the current market environment. This is really important: How we react is directly responsible for how successful we'll be. So, should we hunker down or is it time to jump off the boat? Let's start with the facts. Truth: 1) The market will always correct 2) We'll always have som

With the dip in the broad market over the past couple of weeks, it feels like prescient timing for that age-old reminder about diversification. Or, as your dad put it, not having all your eggs in one basket. I’d like to go a step further here and talk about why diversification is not just for your portfolio. In fact, if all you ever diversify is your portfolio you'll miss the forest for the trees and end up exposed to both greater levels and more types of financial risk. Wh