“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” –Mark Twain

Happy spring! We hope that this note finds you and your families well. We’re here with positive news: After a great fourth quarter in 2023, we’re wrapping up a great first quarter in 2024.

Happy New Year “May we all come through safe and with Honour”. Winston Churchill

We hope our note finds you and your families doing well. We can’t believe we are already into 2024 and the new year is moving full speed ahead. The last 2 months of the year ended on a high note from a market performance standpoint, which after an up and down year was welcome news.

We hope our note finds you and your loved ones doing well. As we head toward the end of 2023, we wanted to provide a quick market update and clarify some year-end deadlines.

Heading into the final quarter of 2023, we are looking back on a year of growing pains, between moving offices and changing custodians. We want to thank you for your patience with us through this process. Regrouping and taking stock before the next step are a part of how we all approach life, and we are excited to be making this pit stop in our temporary office before welcoming you in mid-2024 to our permanent home, in a building we co-own.

Over the years, your support and trust have contributed significantly to the growth of our company. I’m thrilled to announce that we have purchased a building with some of our trusted partners, and we will soon be moving into a more spacious and productive office space in Raleigh Hills, just north of our current location.

Only a little more than a week remains until the transition of your accounts from TD Ameritrade to Schwab, which will occur over Labor Day weekend (September 2-4). I know you’ve been inundated with emails and mailings from us and from Schwab, so I wanted to cut through the noise with some fundamental facts. Feel free to print this and put it on your fridge or in a file to reference over the coming weeks.

We are a little less than two months away from the transition of accounts from TD Ameritrade to Schwab. If we manage accounts at TD Ameritrade for you, you should have received a letter in the mail recently from TD Ameritrade reminding you of this transition.

We are enjoying the first sunny period of the year here in Portland! In the vein of spring cleaning, here are some things we’re looking forward to getting off our desk.

“Schwabitrade” Cometh
For our clients with accounts at TD Ameritrade, you’ll soon be getting some notices regarding the merger with Schwab. Accounts will move to the Schwab side of things over the Labor Day weekend, but in advance you’re going to receive a few things—and don’t worry, we will stay in close contact with you during this process:

If you’ve already finished filing your 2022 tax return—congratulations! If you haven’t, commiserations and good luck. Because those wounds are still fresh, we wanted to take this opportunity to review some strategies around tax planning that we’ve implemented in recent years to try to help save you money, either now or down the line. Below we’ve listed some strategies that help working and retired clients alike, as well as those who are charitably minded, so read on to see what might fit you best. 

It’s been an uneasy couple of weeks for anyone with a bank account in the United States—so just about everyone. We wanted to reach out to calm some fears and let you know what actions may be advisable in the wake of the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank. We will address five things in this newsletter.

In the waning weeks of 2022, Congress passed some changes to retirement plans that have been called Secure 2.0. While we won’t go through each and every change, we wanted to briefly review some of these that may have the greatest impact on our clients. Though implementation has been delayed until 2024 for many provisions, giving folks a chance to update software and regulations to match, some changes have taken effect immediately.

As 2022 draws to a close, we want to wish you and your families a happy holiday season. This was an extremely tough year for the capital markets, and we are excited and cautiously optimistic about 2023. Thank you for your continued support and confidence during these tough times.

While history shows us that the best thing we can do during a down market is to sit tight and not make major changes to investments, it’s often easier said than done. As we’ve shared over the past several months, in response to this year’s difficult market performance so far, we’ve made tweaks within our models, primarily to tip toward funds that tend to prove more resilient in times like these. This is an action based around investments, but certain planning opportunities have opened up too. The Roth conversion process we’ll describe below isn’t the best fit for everyone, but if you feel like it fits you and are interested, feel free to reach out to us.

I know you've been receiving a lot of emails from us over the past couple of weeks, but with the situation in Ukraine growing more volatile, I wanted to reach out with further updates. We typically tweak our investment models on a quarterly basis, but we have made recent changes in response to the ongoing economic impacts of a war in Eastern Europe. In our view, the war itself as well as the sanctions enacted in response could continue to impact the broader European economy, global inflation, and energy prices.